“Hell’s bells!” I blurted. “At least tell me why!”
The mantis’s scythe-hooks latched onto two of the bars and began straining to tear them apart. Metal groaned and began to bend, and I suddenly felt one hell of a lot less clever. Tessa wasn’t all that big, and it wouldn’t take much of a bend in the bars to allow her into the strong room with me, without leaving an opening big enough for me to use to escape. If she opened them enough to come in, I was going to die a savagely messy death. Seconds ticked by in slow motion as the demon mantis quivered with physical strain and pure hatred.
“Why?” I demanded. My voice might have come out a little bit high-pitched. “What the hell are you doing screwing around with this mission?”
She didn’t answer me. The bars groaned and slowly, slowly bent maybe an inch, but they’d been built extra thick, as if they’d been precisely intended to resist superhuman strength, which in all probability was exactly the case. Tessa threw back her insect’s head and let out a screech that pressed viciously on my ears.
Halfway through, the mantis’s head and face just boiled away, and the screech turned into a very human, utterly furious scream as Tessa’s head appeared, both sets of her eyes wide and wild.
“I have not invested fifteen centuries to see it thrown away!” she shrieked.
I stared at her helplessly, my heart pounding furiously in my chest. I tried to think of something clever or engaging or disarming to say, but what came out was a helpless flick of my hands and the words “Psycho much?”
She focused on me, utterly furious and she spat several words that might have been an incantation of some kind, but her fury was too great to allow her to focus it into a spell. Instead, she just opened her mouth and screamed again, a scream that could never have come from a simple set of human lungs, one that went on and on and on, billowing out of her mouth along with particles of spittle, and then clots of something darker, and then of larger bits of matter that I realized, after a few seconds, had legs and were wriggling.
And then her scream turned into a gargle and she began vomiting a cloud, a swarm of flying insects that poured through the bars of the cage and came at me in an almost solid stream, slamming into me like water issuing from a high-pressure hose.
The impact drove the air from my lungs, and I couldn’t suck it back in right away-which was just as well. The insects that hit my body clung on, roaches and beetles and crawling things that had no names, and swarmed up my neck toward my nose and mouth and ears as if guided by a malign will.
A few got into my gaping mouth before I clamped it shut and covered my nose and mouth with one hand. I chewed them to death and they crunched disgustingly and tasted of blood. The rest went for my eyes and ears and burrowed beneath my clothing to begin chewing at my skin.
I kept my cool for maybe twenty seconds, slapping them away from my head, getting a few strangled breaths in through my barely parted fingers, but then the insects got between my fingers and into my eyes and ears at almost the same time, and I let out a panicked scream. Burning agony spread over my body as the swarm chewed and chewed and chewed, and the last thing my stinging eyes saw was Tessa’s body emptying like a deflating balloon as the insect swarm kept flooding out of it, and I had a horrified second to realize that she was in the strong room with me.
And then my mental shields against pain fluttered as panic began to settle in, and agony dropped me to my knees-putting me hip-deep in the focused malice of thousands and thousands of tiny mouths.
I dropped my hands desperately to fumble with the key to the thorn manacles, because without the use of magic I was going to die one of the more ugly deaths I’d ever considered, but my hands were one burning sheet of flame and I couldn’t find the damned manacles and their keyholes under the layers and layers of swarming vermin, which seemed devilishly determined to keep them hidden from me.
Seconds later, the swarm filled my nostrils and started chewing at my lips, and forced me to close my eyes or lose them, and even then I could feel them chewing at the lids, ripping at the lashes.
I have been trained in mental disciplines most people could hardly imagine, much less duplicate. I have faced terrors of the same caliber without flinching. But not like this.
I lost it.
Thought fled. Pain came flooding through my shields. Terror and the urgent desire to live filled every thought, blind instinct taking over. I thrashed and crawled and writhed, trying to escape the swarm, but I might as well have been holding completely still for all the good it did me, and after time, the lack of air forced me to the floor on my side, curled up in a fetal position, just trying to defend my eyes and nose and mouth. Everything turned black and red.
And voices filled my ears. Thousands of whispering voices, hissing obscene, hateful things, vicious secrets, poisonous lies and horrible truths in half a hundred tongues all at once. I felt the pressure of those voices, coursing into my head like ice picks, gouging holes in my thoughts, in my emotions, and there was nothing, nothing I could do to stop them. I felt a scream building, one that would open my mouth, fill it with tiny, tearing bodies, and I knew that I couldn’t stop it.
And then a broad hand slammed down onto the crown of my head, and a deep voice thundered, “Lava quod est sordium!”
Light burned through my closed eyelids, through the layers of insects covering them, and a furious heat spread down from the crown of my head, from that hand. It spread down, moving neither quickly nor slowly, and wherever it passed over my skin, as hot as scalding water in an industrial kitchen sink, the swarm abruptly vanished.
I opened my eyes to find Michael kneeling over me, Amoracchius in his left hand, his right resting on my head. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving, words of ritual Latin flowing from them in a steady stream.
Pure white fire spread down over my body, and I remembered when I had seen something similar once before-when vampires had attempted to manhandle Michael, many moons before, and had been scorched and scarred by the same fire. Now, as the light engulfed me, the swarm scattered, outer layers dropping away, while the slower inner layers were incinerated by the fire. It hurt-but the pain was a harsh, cleansing thing, somehow honest. It burned over me, and when the fire passed, I was free, and the swarm was scattering throughout the vault, pouring toward the tiny air vents spread throughout.
I looked up at Michael, gasping, and leaned my head forward. For a second, the pain and the fear still had me, and I couldn’t make myself move. I lay there, simply shuddering.
His hand moved from my head to my shoulder, and he murmured, “Lord of Hosts, be with this good man and give him the strength to carry on.”
I didn’t feel anything mystic. There was no surge of magic or power, no flash of light. Just Michael’s quiet, steady strength, and the sincerity of the faith in his voice.
Michael still thought I was a good man.
I clenched my jaw over the sobbing scream that was still threatening me, and pushed away the memory of those tiny, horrible words-the voice of Imariel, it must have been. I forced myself to breathe in a steady rhythm, despite the pain and the burning of my skin and my lungs, despite the stinging tears and tiny drops of blood in my eyes. And I put up the shields again, forcing the pain to a safe distance. They were shakier, and more of the pain leaked through than had been there before-but I did it.