“May the gods be with you, Prince,” he said and just as quickly fled down the stairs to complete his task.
“May the gods be with you,” Dimitris replied, although he doubted the man had heard.
Rounding the final turn to the inner wall walk, Dimitris came to a dead halt at the sight before him.
It was the same creature he’d killed in Aidesian.Veiny, shredded ebony wings filled the sky. Razor sharp teeth flashed in the light of flaming catapults, its fur around the middle shaggy as a mangy dog. Thedaimon’ssnake-like tail whipped through the air as it swooped down to the ground below, spearing a soldier with its curved talons that protruded from two front legs. The way the soldier writhed on the talon before blood and foam began to leak from his eyes and ears and mouth turned Dimitris’s blood to ice—made worse because it wasn’t just onedaimon.
Hundreds of the winged creatures soared through the air, paired with an army of five hundred men, cyclopes, and feral hounds four times the size of any horse. Their tails were as thick as a ship’s mast and tipped with a morning star-like end, and their claws jutted out like sharpenedxiphe. Even from this distance, their blood-red eyes were nauseating. The hounds and cyclopes pulled catapults, ladders, and battering rams along with them outside the wall. Inside the wall, the winged beasts dropped oily, flaming boulders, fracturing turrets and the wall walk and sending soldiers to a grave of rubble below.
They were outnumbered. If it was only the army of men that prowled across the fields and out of the forest with unnatural speed they might stand a chance—Skiathans, as Dimitris had learned, were as vicious as they came, each equal to at least three men—but the beasts that roamed with Hades’ army made defeat seem imminent. More so because of the state of the stronghold in such a short amount of time.
The ash that whipped around in the air stung Dimitris’s eyes as he made his way to Amalia. “Where do you need me, General?” he yelled over the creatures’ howls and shattering stone.
Chest heaving, Amalia ran her fingers through bloodstained brown curls. Linen bandages were already wrapped around her left arm and midsection, both with blooming, sanguine stains seeping through. “I…I don’t know…” Her hands slipped down her face before she took a deep inhale. “You have powers, yes? Other than shifting.”
“I cannot aervade like my brother, nor can I summon the skies, but I have non-elemental magic from the Grechi.” He threw out a tendril of power at the soldiers stalking toward the wall. “I can craft illusions in the minds of the living, alter the reality before them”—Dimitris swallowed a lump in his throat as his magic fizzled out—“although that will not help us now.”
Amalia turned toward him, her skin going pale. “And why is that?” she asked, voice trembling.
“Because that is no army of the living.” None of them should be surprised that Hades’ army was amassed with soldiers of the dead, and yet it caused his mouth to turn sour. Bodies of barely more than bone and thin, maggot-ridden, gray skin clad in gold armor hid beneath onyx cloaks. They drifted over the earth rather than walked it and their cries were more akin to adaimonthan human. Would their weapons still kill them? Did they stand a chance at all?
“Behead them,” Dimitris whispered to himself, fiddling with one of his daggers. It was a long, thin blade with an intricate vine embossed in the metal, gifted to him by Cal.
Gods, where was his uncle? They could use his keen ability for mending and masonry at the wall. With a swish of his hand, Calcould reinforce the stone to buy them a modicum of time. What if he was already dead? What if the creatures had pulled him into the sky, spearing him like the soldiers that lay mangled below? No—Dimitris would have felt a thrum around him, a shift in the air as power seeped from his uncle back into the earth.
Smack!A hand flung into the back of his head. “Are you even listening?” Amalia growled. “This is not the time to daydream.”
She was right—he needed to focus, needed to think of a way they would all make it out alive. A plan that no one, even a god would see coming.
“I think we need to behead them,” he repeated, this time speaking to the general. “Thedaimonscan be slain like any living being, but the army of the dead cannot bleed out. I have read about them, the myths of Hades’ fiercest legion. They still have bones—they are not ghosts. If we can behead them, they should fall. We will need to get close enough to drive a blade through their necks.”
“Do you not see the creatures that lead them? The ones that torment us from above?” Her tone was sharp and laced with vitriol. “How, exactly, do you expect us to break through their ranks?”
Dimitris stared out at the fire and brimstone before him and with a twitch up of his lips he said, “Because I will act as a distraction.”
He took off running toward the end of the inner wall where the first enemy ladder was almost up.
“You are a fool, Dimitris Kirassos!” Amalia yelled after him.
Looking over his shoulder, he caught the gratitude in her eyes. “So I’ve heard. But I am a fool that always wins.”
With that he launched himself off the edge of the wall, using all his leverage to catch the ladder and send it hurling back toward the ground below.
Time.
They needed more time.
And he would give it to them.
Death be damned.
The ground barreled closer as the ladder fell through the air. Howls of the creatures below screeched as the wooden structure pummeled them into the earth. Several of the cyclopes were caught beneath, their blood pooling out into the grass. A cloaked soldier on a skeletal horse stared Dimitris down as he rose from the dust, brandishing his two swords. It screamed to the others in a language not of this world and the closest line of soldiers came running toward him.
Looking back up at the wall for only a moment, Dimitris lifted one arm in the air. “For Skiatha!” he yelled to his fellow men and women.
“For Skiatha!” his compatriots roared back, letting their flaming arrows rain down from the wall.
Time blurred and Dimitris lost count of the number of his enemy he beheaded, slicing his sharpened blade through decaying flesh. Their skin turned to dust as heads rolled to the ground, leaving a trail of bones in Dimitris’s wake. With every slice of his blade, Dimitris sank further into bloodlust. He would not rest until every single creature was dead. There would be no mercy for thedaimonsthat tormented these people, who had already overcome so much.
