Page 119

ANGEL

I woke to the sustained crackling roar of gunfire. The ground shook beneath me as I lay on my back in the grass, staring up at the pulsing purple and black heart of the otherworld in the sky overhead.

Victor crouched over me, claws and fangs out, making him look more menacing as he kept everyone back. He bled from a half-dozen wounds that he ignored.

“V...” I tried, finding my voice faint and trembling.

“Stay down,” he ordered.

A shadow writhed in the distance, like some sort of multi-headed leviathan, squirming and wriggling through a growing tear. When had that happened?

Nox chuffed in my face, surprising me with a fluffy headbutt.

“Hi?” I grumbled at him, and tried to sit up.

“Will you stay down?” Victor demanded. “You’ve been shot.”

“So have you. A lot more than me,” I growled.

I realized I ached with a deep, bone-tired throb that radiated through my entire body. I blinked down at the blood caking my skin, sticky and dark against my hands, my chest, my arms—human, not Bastion or cat. How badly had I been hurt to shift back like this?

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

The yard was a warzone. Soldiers in tactical gear had abandoned their formation, their rifles pointed not at the house, but at the thing pulling itself out of it.

A massive, octopus-like shadow, tentacles of darkness unspooling from the walls, the windows, the door. It was dragging itself free of the house, which had half collapsed in on itself, and with every inch it gained, the tear in the sky widened. No longer a merge, the house had become a brand-new Veil tear expanding by the second.

Gunfire focused on the monster. Rounds tore through the air, through the shadow, through the tentacles. I gaped at it, trying to distinguish an actual shape, but it seemed all inky darkness and movement.

Was this Erlik?

Just how big was this nightmare?

One massive limb swept across the yard, slamming into a wall of soldiers and vehicles, scattering them as if they’d been hit by a battering ram. Vehicles flipped over. People screamed, flying like ragdolls. Everyone else ran.

A tentacle of darkness snapped up a running soldier, wrapping around him like a snake. The man thrashed, screamed, clawed at the shadow, but it was already too late. His eyes went from terrified to empty in a heartbeat, the light behind them snuffed out like a candle. His body went limp in the tentacle’s grasp, and then it dropped him to the ground with a motionless thud.

Erlik had eaten him. Maybe only his memories, or maybe his entire soul. I wasn’t certain as I stared, frozen, watching the rest of the tentacles mimic the first, catching soldiers, devouring them and dropping their discarded bodies to the ground like broken toys.

“Tell them to retreat,” I tried to shout, but it came out muddled.

“I’m certain they’ll listen to us, since they were ordered to kill us,” Victor growled.

“Rest of the team?” I asked.

“Fighting. That’s all I know.”

Bullets rattled against the writhing darkness, slamming into it without effect. Erlik’s tentacles snapped up another soldier, crushing the gun in one curl and devouring the man in another. On to the next. Men who’d been firing their weapons seconds ago lay scattered across the lawn like discarded toys, their bodies intact but their eyes hollow.

Not dead. And wasn’t that even worse?

Erlik grew with each soul it consumed, swelling through the tear, erupting with new tentacles to feed. I feared it wouldn’t stop, that it would keep expanding until it devoured everything—the neighborhood, the city, the whole damn world.

Phelps barked orders from behind a small wall of soldiers and vehicles, a mask of fury on his face, as if he still thought he could win. The sound of planes roared toward us from the distance.

That couldn’t be good. Not that the government was above bombing suburban neighborhoods. I’d seen it myself in the last war. But since Phelps didn’t retreat, I suspected it wasn’t the first plan, but a backup.

I rolled over and tried to make my way to my knees, thinking to save some of the soldiers at least. They weren’t there by choice. They shouldn’t be fodder for a monster in human skin to throw to the supernatural kind.