Erik had fallen for it, of course.Going along dumb and happy, too busy running patrols in an infested frontline city, hoodwinked and misled foryears.
Then they’d found a potential, and it had all unraveled.Had the traitor been waiting for the event, or had he been hunting different prey each night while his Elder and Younger were busy patrolling?How often had Liv eluded his grasp; had he sensed a prize temptingly out of reach?
How fucking long had Ignatius expected the mad, utterly repulsive situation to last?
It didn’t matter.Not now.“We have no time.”Erik had been hoping to get to the hole before anyone noticed he was moving; backup would follow so long as there was a chance aliraiwas still alive.“He won’t have struck without a plan, and a place to do his dirty work.”
“Probably deep, and the trail laid with traps.”Grigori didn’t quite hesitate, but he did ask again, as if he couldn’t quite credit what he was seeing.“Are youcertainyou can track him?”
“I can.”Erik plunged into the ragged, chewed oval opening, its bottom fringing as theshoggoth’s slime-trail ate at rock.Cleaning and closing it up was going to be a bitch.
If she’s alive, I’ll do it myself.And I’ll sing while I work.“I can,” he repeated.Theoneiroswas a heavy weight in his pocket, crying out with tongueless distress.“And when I find him, the god himself won’t recognize that traitor.”Not to mention whoever’s helping him—maybe Jake, maybe really a control liaison gone bad, maybe all the Mad God’s minions at once.
I will kill them all.
“Careful, Elder.”Grigori nodded at another knot of Fathers, who didn’t waste time questioning, simply began working their way through the crowd for the breach.“Theliraiis of primary importance.Not wounded pride.”
She’s probably already dead.He won’t want to waste time.But Erik couldn’t make himself say so.
Instead, he lengthened his stride, and as he hopped into the aperture, boots sinking into decaying sludge, another pulse of strong, soft, undeniable power roared through him.
“That’s right,” Sara said, crisply.“No dying allowed tonight, Father.Come on, fight.For me.Fightfor me.”
When a woman put it like that, there was nothing else a man could do.
Erik’s stride lengthened, Grigori at his shoulder.The last thing he heard was Dakshi’s raised voice.
“I don’t care, dammit!Mylirai’s down there, my Elder’s going to go get her, and I am too.”
“Little brothers,” Grigori muttered, but very quickly there was no more breath for commentary.
They were moving too fast.
Appealing to Vanity
“Sssta”ssstill,” one of the six-fingered strangling things said as Liv heaved from side to side.“Thisss won’t hurt, preciousss little thing.”Its voice, whistling and wrong, was forced through throat and teeth not even remotely close to human, and the reptilian sibilants proved it, lingering under each word.
Ignatius reappeared, looming over her.His pupils held those strange blue smears, different than the star-prickling shine on Jake’s or Erik’s eyes when they got excited.The pair of misshapen glowing dots, a bright diseased blue, made the rest of the grey-haired man’s face look like a mask.
Like someone—or something—else was peering through.The effect was nauseating, helped along by the sagging under his skin, flesh twitching or caving with no rhyme or reason.His hair was wildly disarranged and his mouth worked slowly at a cargo of dry air, thin lips shining with saliva.
And in his right hand, a short, vicious-looking, curved knife glinted, a mockery of the Sons’ crystalline blades.Its flat was smeared with something viscous, a slick black gleam halfway between used motor oil and hot, soft tar.
Liv froze, staring at the knife, and Ignatius’s lips stretched, rubbery and obscene.“That’s right,” he crooned.“Look at it, you little bitch.Not so high and mighty now, are we?”
She could barely think, could barelybreathe.Not only was the city above screaming in a million different flavors of crowd-noise, but the entire massive stone cathedral was full of half-seen shapes and skittering whispers, tall moon-pale blue-eyed things with multiple arms and others with twitching, waving tentacles, gaunt dark humanoid shapes with tumorous excrescences crawling on their torsos, small grey darting things with big black eyes, fungus-starred spiders crowding against the snap-slavering tentacle-hounds.Bigger things loomed in the back, exhaling a collective cold hideousness that threatened to turn her into jelly.
Or send her howlingly, gratefully insane.
You’re immune, beautiful, Erik would have said, but he wasn’t here.Ignatius probably had some sort of plan to killhim, too, and the thought snapped Liv out of hypnosis as the Father lifted the knife and the things holding her down hummed a limping melody, one snatching a hand back and shaking its fingers as if Liv’s bare skin burned.It didn’t matter—the thing clasped her wrist firmly again with both flabby appendages, but the quick, almost unseen motion gave her an idea.
“You’re a Father,” she said, desperately.A susurration went through the unholy crowd at her voice, just like a bunch of lions at the watering hole scenting a wounded zebra.“You’re better than this.Youknowyou’re better than this, Ignatius.”
“Do I?”His teeth, strong and white, snapped together with a startling click.“Do you have any idea what it’s like, you little bitch?Himin your head all the time, no rest and no reward, nothing but endless suffering?And little sluts like you running around, wasting your lives on television and fast food—you and your kind are a plague, Miss Stellack, andheis the cure.”
I think you’ve got that the wrong way around, mister.Still, the knife had paused, and she had a fighting chance.If she could keep him occupied, maybe she could think up a decent plan that didn’t end up with her carved like a Christmas turkey on whatever the fuck kind of altar this was.
However immune she was to a mad god’s mumblings, she was decidedlynotimmune to stabbing.
