“Why did you bother waking him if you just…?” I trailed off as I pieced it together. In that moment, her plan spread out like a roadmap in my mind, and it all became horribly clear. “Oh, God,” I said. “You woke Stryge in order to kill him. You’re going to turn him into a revenant.”
She smirked at me. “And then all Stryge’s power as an Ancient will be mine to command. My most powerful revenant yet. Undead. Unstoppable. A perfect storm of destruction.”
A chill ran down my spine. Gregor had warned us an immortal storm was coming, a force so powerful it threatened everything. Even if I didn’t believe in prophecies, I had to admit this one was starting to sound pretty damn accurate. Stryge as a revenant under Reve Azrael’s control would very much be an immortal storm.
“You’re insane,” I said. “I won’t help you.”
“Then your companions will die, and this city will be destroyed regardless.”
“He’ll kill you, too,” I pointed out. “You won’t be safe from him.”
“You think I fear death?” Reve Azrael said. “Death bends to my will, I do not bend to its.”
The stone slab dropped down over the archway then, striking the floor with a heavy thud. It cut me off from Reve Azrael and sealed me inside.
I looked back at Stryge. He sat on his throne, his eyes still closed, his chest swelling and falling with breath. How much time was left before he was fully awake? Not a lot, I guessed. And was I imagining it, or did the broken stubs of his tusks suddenly look longer than they had before, as if they were growing back?
I grabbed my gun off the floor and pocketed it. I pulled Gabrielle’s morningstar off the pile of weapons, then ran to the cage. “Stand back from the door!” I shouted. I swung the weapon’s spiked head into the lock. The door didn’t budge. Damn. If Isaac were awake he probably could have blown the door off its hinges with a wave of his hand, but the mage was still unconscious on the floor, bleeding from the back of his head. I hit it again, with no effect.
Bethany came up to the door. “You’re just going to bend the lock out of shape like that, and then you’ll never get it open. There’s a charm in my vest, third pocket down, right over my stomach. It can get the door open, but you’re going to have to reach in there and get it. I can’t.”
She pushed herself up against the bars. I dropped the morningstar and tried to put my hand in her pocket, but the angle was off. She pushed herself closer, as close as the bars would allow, and I did the same, until we were so close I could smell a faint floral scent coming off of her hair. I managed to slide my hand into the pocket over her stomach. I could feel the unusual warmth of her skin radiating through the material.
“We just keep finding ourselves like this, don’t we?” I said.
Bethany looked past me at Stryge. “Trent, hurry!”
My fingers grazed something inside the pocket, a long, thin, metallic object. I pulled it out. It was the same charm I’d seen her take out of the drawer at Citadel, the small metal tube topped with a beveled glass bead.
“Touch the glass to the lock,” she said, stepping back. “Gently,” she added.
I did. There was a sudden shower of sparks, and the door swung open. I ran into the cage and untied Bethany’s hands. Once she was free, she rushed to untie Gabrielle. I freed Philip and took the silver chain from around his neck, tossing it aside. He breathed a sigh of relief, rubbing the red marks it had left on his neck. Then he picked up Isaac, and ran like a blur for the stone slab blocking the exit. By the time the rest of us caught up to him, he had already laid Isaac gently on the ground and was trying to push the stone aside, but even his immense strength wasn’t enough to move it.
“Help me,” Philip said. “We’ve got to move this thing—”
A low rumble of a growl echoed through the chamber.
I froze, then turned around very slowly. We all did.
Stryge’s eyes were open. They burned like fires in their sockets—cold, white fires, the same as Gregor’s eyes. Maybe those were traits all Ancients shared, I thought, invincibility and freaky eyes. Then Stryge stood up out of the throne, effortlessly snapping the chains that bound him. His tusks had regrown to their full length. His vast wings unfolded from his back.
The last of the broken chains slid off his shoulders and crashed loudly to the floor at his feet. Then Stryge noticed us, and let loose an angry, deafening roar that shook the chamber’s walls.
“Guys,” I said, “I think we should run.”
Thirty-nine
Stryge charged, his enormous, clawed feet pounding the floor so hard it felt like the whole chamber would collapse. Philip slung Isaac’s unconscious body over his shoulder, and sped to the other side of the room. The rest of us scattered out of Stryge’s way. The Ancient slammed into the stone slab that covered the archway. The stone cracked, a long fissure that ran lengthwise from top to bottom, but Stryge himself was unharmed. He turned toward us, bellowing his rage.
We ran for the weapons. Bethany snatched up the Anubis Hand, Gabrielle grabbed her morningstar, and I picked up Philip’s broadsword. I shouted his name and tossed it across the chamber to him.
Philip moved quickly. He jumped for it, grabbing the sword in midair, flipped, and landed on Stryge’s back. The Ancient batted him with his wings, trying to knock him off, but Philip held on. He stabbed the sword into Stryge’s back, but the blade snapped, the tip shattering against the Ancient’s invulnerable hide and leaving Philip holding a hilt with half a blade.
Stryge pulled him off his back with one claw and tossed him away like a toy. The vampire struck the wall where the circles had been carved, and then tumbled to the floor, landing in the column of sunlight that streamed through the hole in the ceiling. He screamed as the sunlight touched his bare face, reflecting like spotlights in his mirrored shades. His skin reddened into boils and began to steam.
“Philip!” I shouted, but I couldn’t reach him. He was all the way on the other side of the chamber, and a pissed off, thirty-foot-tall Ancient stood between us.
Philip thrashed in pain. He covered his face with his gloves and managed to drag himself out of the light. He pulled his hood up to protect himself, tried to stand, and fell back down. After that, he didn’t move. I hoped he was still alive, but there was no way to tell how badly injured he was.
Bethany ran at Stryge, preparing to strike him with the Anubis Hand. He kicked her away. The staff flew from her hands as she tumbled through the air and landed hard, headfirst, against the wall near me. When she slumped over, I saw blood in her hair.
I picked up the Anubis Hand and gritted my teeth angrily. “All right, you ugly son of a bitch.” I ran at him, clutching the Anubis Hand so tightly my knuckles went hot. But before I had a chance to swing it, he knocked me aside with a single sweep of his enormous hand. The sheer force of the blow sent me sliding across the floor until my back hit the wall next to Philip. I winced in pain. Next to me, the vampire was curled on the floor, unconscious but still breathing. That was the good news. The bad news was that Gabrielle and I were the only ones left conscious to fight an enormous, unkillable Ancient, but she only had one good arm and I wasn’t feeling all that solid after Stryge’s backhand. Frankly, the odds sucked.
Gabrielle pointed her morningstar at Stryge. In my dazed state, I thought it a strange way to hold what was essentially a club. But she’d taken it from Isaac’s vault, and Isaac didn’t keep ordinary weapons in there, only magical artifacts. The spiked ball at the end of the morningstar began to glow, and a bright sunburst of light exploded from it, like a flashbulb going off directly in Stryge’s face. Stryge bellowed in rage, throwing one arm over his eyes and flailing angrily with the other. Apparently he didn’t like bright light any more than other gargoyles did. Disoriented and in pain, he stumbled and fell, crashing into the enormous stone slab a second time.