No matter what, no matter how this turned out or what happened to me, I had to keep fighting the good fight.
I ran at Stryge, the sword held out high in front of me. I rose off the ground as Stryge’s magic caught me up again, but my momentum kept me moving forward, too. He tried to unmake me—I felt my joints stretching, weakening—but before he could, I plunged the sword into his stomach. Stryge howled in pain. As formidable as Van Lente’s magic sword was, I knew it couldn’t kill the Ancient, but it hurt him a lot and that felt pretty damn satisfying in its own right. Stryge stopped, releasing me from his spell. I would have fallen nearly twenty feet to the ground if I hadn’t held onto the sword hilt like a mountain climber dangling from a piton.
Stryge swatted at me, his claws tearing open one side of my trench coat, but I managed to hang on. From the ripped pocket of my coat, my gun fell out and tumbled to the ground. Damn. I knew bullets couldn’t hurt Stryge, but I didn’t like losing my gun. Underwood had done too good a job drumming that damn Golden Rule into my head.
“Trent!” a voice called from below.
I looked down and saw Bethany standing near the tree line. Then Isaac, Gabrielle, and Philip came through the branches behind her. They were bruised and bloodied, but they were alive. I felt a surge of relief. Then Stryge swatted at me again, tearing off the rest of my coat as I struggled to keep my grip on the hilt.
“Little help here?” I shouted.
Isaac raised his hands, Gabrielle raised her morningstar, and Bethany pulled the mirrored charm from her vest. From each of them burst a bright light. Stryge reeled back with another loud howl, and covered his eyes with his arms. He unfolded his wings and started flapping. We began to rise off the ground.
“Trent, get down from there!” Bethany cried.
“No,” I shouted back. “We can’t let him get away! He’ll unmake the whole damn city!”
With great beats of his enormous wings, Stryge tried to lift himself higher, but couldn’t. The light and pain were distracting him, and my added weight kept him off balance. But these were only temporary diversions. It wouldn’t be much longer before he found a way to take flight for real.
“Come down!” Bethany shouted again. “There’s nothing you can do up there!”
She was wrong. There was something I could do. The one thing I was good at. The one thing I’d always been able to do.
I called to Bethany, “The gun! Use the gun!”
She looked down at my gun on the ground, then back up at me. “Bullets won’t kill him!”
“Not him!” I yelled back. “Me! It’s the only way to stop him!”
“What?” She’d heard me, she just couldn’t believe what I was saying.
Carefully letting go of the hilt with one hand, I reached into my shirt and pulled the amulet she’d made for me from around my neck. I hated to take it off, especially now that I knew it worked, but just this once I needed it not to.
Stryge swatted at me again, trying to knock me off of him. I held onto the hilt, swinging my body out of the way of his claws, but as I did the amulet slipped from my fingers and dropped. It tumbled down to the grass below. I hoped it survived the fall, but there was no time to worry about it now.
“Now, Bethany, before it’s too late!” I called to her. “Then run as far from here as you can! All of you!”
Bethany slowly picked up my gun. Damn it, I needed her to move faster. Every second she wasted, Stryge brought me farther out of range. She aimed the gun me. I couldn’t make out her features anymore, we were too high up, but I heard her voice.
“I’m sorry!” she cried, and she pulled the trigger.
She was a good shot, even at long range, though I already knew she would be. The bullet hit me square in the chest. The pain ripped through me like a scalpel, but it was mercifully brief. I died almost instantly, but not before I saw Isaac, Gabrielle, Philip, and Bethany start running, the smoking Bersa semiautomatic still in her hand.
Forty
For a moment, there was only blackness, an empty void. Was this the dark that separated the worlds of the living and the dead, some part of me wondered? Were the dead watching me even now? Then, suddenly, there was light again. Way too much light. Even before I sucked the first gulp of air into my lungs, I knew something was wrong. I opened my eyes, and what came out of them was a coldly burning white fire, the same fire that had burned in Stryge’s eyes. The fire of the Ancients. I exhaled, and more of it erupted from my mouth and nose.
I felt like I’d swallowed a nuclear reactor. It flowed like lava through my veins, burned inside me like the heart of the sun. I felt … altered. Changed.
It is a combination of elements that were never meant to be combined.
I got to my feet, but I couldn’t stand for long. I dropped to my hands and knees, vomiting up more gouts of cold white fire. It just kept coming. There was more of it in me than my body could hold.
It is a danger to all who live.
Had the oracles foreseen this? Had they been trying to warn me?
As long as it walks upon this world, as long as it dwells among us, it puts us all in peril.
The fire burned and burned and felt like it would never stop.
Bethany’s voice came from a distance. “Trent? Are you okay? What’s happening?”
She’d come back to check up on me. I squeezed my burning eyes shut and turned away from her. “Stay back! I don’t know what’s happening to me!” I heard her footsteps running toward me, and shouted, “Damn it, stay away!” Something powerful coursed through me, something frightening and building in pressure. “The plan worked, but something’s wrong, it’s different this time.” Then I couldn’t contain it anymore. I leaned back and screamed, the white fire jetting from my eyes, nose, and mouth. Before I knew what was happening, I was floating into the air, as though I were being lifted. I stopped myself somehow, hovering a dozen feet above the ground.
Above, the red and black clouds Stryge had summoned were gone, replaced with a far more normal-looking gray cloud cover. The warring factions of gargoyles were gone, too, probably frightened off by Stryge. In the near distance was the wreckage of the Cloisters, its broken stones littering the hillside. The bits of trees and rocks and body parts had fallen to the ground as well, the laws of physics restored with Stryge’s death.
As for Stryge himself, the once mighty creature lay on his back below me where he’d fallen to the ground. A thirty-foot-tall mummy, shriveled to bone and dried tissue. Once again, I’d done the impossible. I’d killed an Ancient.
Out of habit, I added his name to my mental list.
11. Stryge.
Eleven names. Eleven lives I’d stolen. God. My heart felt heavy at the number, and even heavier when I thought about how many more had died over the last couple of days. More than I could count, and most of them had died because of me. It felt like there was so much blood on my hands they would never be clean. The oracles were right. I was a threat.
Bethany stared up at me in awe, which angered me. Didn’t she know what a monster I was? What an abomination?
But of course she did. She’d seen it firsthand. The thing inside me had almost killed her. I had almost killed her.