Mab threw back her head, let out a cackle that chilled the blood of even the Winter Knight, and turned her whirling-color mad eyes to me. “Oh, my Knight,” Mab tittered. “Didst thouactuallythink thou couldst draw a bigger gun thanme?”
Then there was a sound like thunder, and a rift wide enough to drive a Volkswagen through tore open in the roof at the entrance to the summoning chamber, and a black-clad form streaked through the newly created opening, to land hard enough to send a series of spiderweb cracks spinning out through the crystalline floor between Demonreach and Mab.
It straightened slowly, a hunched, elderly, feminine figure that was nonetheless at least half a foot taller than me, shrouded in thick overlapping garments of tattered black. Thick white hair was pulled back into a close braid. She shrugged a shoulder and a heavy cleaver with a black handle hung heavily in her withered old hand.
She smiled.
Green light gleamed from iron teeth.
And in my Sight, I saw the edges of a hundred thousand tales of horror and dread. People, even children, devoured whole, popped into soup, baked alive in ovens, chopped and minced into pies. I saw the faces of countless folk gasping out their last breaths, freezing to death in the cold, lying helpless as they were devoured, still alive, by wolves and worse in the bleak and desolate places of the world. I saw the merciless resolve of nature’s darkest face, the hideous and passionless power of the avalanche, the horrible absolutism of dark, cold water rising to drown everything upon the shore with entire and final equity. I saw the wreckage of mortal remains upon countless battlefields, birds and insects and hungry things devouring the carrion. The stench of dead and rotting flesh rose through my nostrils directly into my thoughts, meat writhing with maggots and worms, and presiding over all of it a constant, calm, precise presence that forced me to turn my eyes away before they saw something even worse.
“Spirit,” rasped Mother Winter. Her voice was the sound of dead leaves in the wind, of scale rasping upon scale, of insectile chitin skittering along bleaching bone. “Stand not between the Queens of Winter and their promises.”
I felt my jaw drop open.
Hell’s bells.
Mab’s boss.
The Crone Queen of the Winter Court, here in the mortal world.
It hadn’t happened for centuries.
Crystals of ice began to spread over andthroughthe verdant stone of the summoning chamber, fracturing the green light into dozens and dozens of glacial shades. The temperature plummeted from the steady fifty degrees underground to deep-freeze levels in seconds. The ice spread to the roots wrapping around Mab’s calves, and with a gleefulkick of each leg, she shattered them like so much brittle frost—and continued toward the trapped Justine.
“Don’t!” I screamed.
Mab whirled toward me. “This is what thou didstaskfor, my Knight!” she snarled. “To defy the doom of choices made! A doom that cannot be undone without further choice!” She pointed the knife at Thomas. “His,” she spat, and then the knife stabbed at me. “And thine!”
I stared in horror as she turned back toward the column of ice.
And my brother made the weakest, softest sound of pain.
I turned back to Thomas. He still lay where he had fallen, but his eyes were open and focused upon the tableau. Tears filled them. His face was twisted with pain. With exhaustion.
Hell’s bells. I knew those eyes.
I knew what was behind them.
I’d stared down at them in glasses of booze and my shaving mirror for months.
His head started to fall.
Mab’s spectral eyes settled on a shade of cold blue ice, and she turned toward Justine, raising Medea’s bodkin.
Hell’s bells.
I clenched my teeth, focused upon my physical body—and lifted my eyes to lock gazes with my brother’s demon.
The pale thing trapped in the circle felt my eyes and met them with willing hunger as it drank and drank from the steady current of power I’d been feeding into it.
And everything stopped. Mab froze in place in the act of raising her knife. Mother Winter, her hand outstretched in a gesture of forbiddance at Demonreach, froze in place. The genius loci’s cloak rustled to a stop where it stood. Lara, pushing herself back toward her feet, locked into position, triceps flexed.
“Let’s talk,” I said quietly, from my energetic body’s lips.
Interesting,replied the Hunger.You make mouth noises and I hear the intent behind them.
“Yeah, I’m full of surprises,” I said. “We need to come to an understanding.”
