Fever - Burned Part 42

All of it crashes into my brain as I take that horrific first moment of free fall, and in spite of myself, my mouth stretches wide on a scream as I try desperately to brace myself for whatever's to come: a brutally painful recovery or a happy reunion with Alina in heaven, because if I go to h.e.l.l, I'm breaking out. I will not be separated from my sister forever. I haven't been that bad. Besides, I just ate Unseelie, which means I can kick some serious demon a.s.s busting loose.

I slam into what feels like a seesaw between my legs and suddenly I'm choking and sputtering, trying to breathe.

"Good ... f.u.c.king thing you ... screamed," he rasps. "I've ... got you ... but can't hold ... long." I realize he let go of the rock, kicked his leg in the general direction of where he heard me (my pelvic bone is going to be sporting one heck of a bruise) and grabbed blindly for any part of me, ending up with the front of my jacket. He's hanging by one hand. Strangling me with my coat with the other.

He murmurs, "And that's ... what ... Dageus meant."

"What?" I ask as I flail wildly, finally get my legs wrapped around him and clamber up his body, trying hard not to clutch at any torn flesh in the process. It's a messy, slippery business.

"About my opportunity. b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, she's ... coming!"

I can't let go of him or I'll fall. If I don't let go of him, I'll get lanced when she stabs him. I sincerely doubt she's going to get close enough to us, with all the intruders she's spotted on her mountain, for either of us to stab her.

I'm not leaving without what I came for. We'll finish the Hag later.

I hiss, "Can you sift?"

"Iron. Manacles. Can't. Too ... wounded ... anyway."

Terrific. I can pry the rivets out but my spear is useless for cutting the manacles off his arms. I'd wondered how she was preventing an Unseelie Prince from sifting. With iron, the same way Inspector Jayne does with the Unseelie he captures and keeps until someone slays them. Speaking of which, his cages must be crammed to overflowing.

I'm not dying on this cliff.

I wrap one arm tightly around Christian's neck, force myself up and to the left, dig my spear beneath the rivet holding his right hand. It won't budge. There's too much weight hanging on it. I dig the tip of the spear in deeper, start rocking it back and forth beneath the rivet, using my Unseelie-flesh-enhanced strength.

He looks up, growls, "What ... the ... f.u.c.k ... Mac! No!"

The rivet suddenly shoots from the cliff like a missile being launched, and for the second time I go into a full free fall.

I hold on to him tightly and scream, "Fly, Christian! f.u.c.king fly!"

36.

"Forever trusting who we are and nothing else matters"

MAC.

Once again, nothing goes as I expect it to.

I can't call what Christian does flying, and he confounds me by going up not down. I expected him to, at worst, be able to unfurl his wings and use them as a sort of hang glider, to soar us to the floor of the gorge without killing us. Instead he scrabbles higher with short, fierce bursts of his wings, digging and clawing at the side of the cliff, using them like appendages, a hawk that can't fly, scrambling desperately upward.

Closer to the freaking Hag.

"Why the h.e.l.l don't you go down?" I shout.

I hear roaring on top of the cliff, a scream and the rapid burst of gunfire.

The Hag shrieks and explodes up into the night sky. A whip cracks, followed by another banshee-like wail.

"Shut ... the f.u.c.k ... up," Christian grits.

I've got both arms clamped around his neck, hanging on for dear life, getting repeatedly bashed against the side of the cliff with each sc.r.a.ping lunge of his wings. My s.h.i.+rt is being ripped to shreds and the back of my head and spine are taking a brutal beating.

"Keep her away from them until they reach the top," I hear Ryodan bark.

"I'm trying to," Jada fires back. "She moves erratically. It's hard to compute."

"Stop f.u.c.king trying to compute and feel," he snarls. "She's not a machine. She's a G.o.dd.a.m.n p.i.s.sed-off, bloodthirsty woman."

I hear more cracks from the whip. The sound is bounced back and intensified by the surrounding mountains. I decide they must be using it to mess with the Hag's echolocation.

"Behind the b.i.t.c.h, not to the side," Ryodan orders.

"You're almost there, lad," Dageus shouts down at us. "Grab the b.l.o.o.d.y cable." He's hanging over the cliff's edge swinging a length of thin black cord at us.

But Christian's desperately trying to sustain our alt.i.tude and in no position to reach for it. I grope wildly for the cable, praying I have enough strength to pull us up because each time I get slammed into the cliff my vision goes a little dark and I can feel Christian growing weaker. Not even my Unseelie flesh rush is enough to stand this constant battering.

Looks like we may end up trying to hang glide after all.

"She's coming back," Barrons shouts. "Get the f.u.c.k away from the cliff's edge, Highlander."

I hear the whip cracking furiously again, and Barrons roars, a horrible, guttural sound, and I cringe to the bottom of my soul because I know without needing to see it that Barrons just got lanced. Doesn't matter that I know he'll be back. It's one less person to protect the Keltar and Jada, and I despise the sound of that man dying. I have no doubt he stepped in the way to protect someone.

"f.u.c.k." Dageus snarls down at us. "b.l.o.o.d.y grab the b.l.o.o.d.y cable."

Then Drustan is beside Dageus and I hear Jada and Ryodan taunting the Hag, more gunfire and the sound of the whip cracking as they try to buy us time to get to solid ground.

I kick upward and Christian grunts with agony when my boot catches him in the stomach, but I close my fingers around the cord.

Moving quickly, Drustan and Dageus begin to pull us up.

We're nearly there when Jada and Ryodan start shouting again, then suddenly something explodes out of the front of Dageus's chest and he goes rigid, yanks upright and makes a soft grunt of shock and pain.

It takes my brain a second to process what just happened.

The Hag just lanced Dageus from behind.

Christian howls with such animalistic, inhuman fury that it chills my blood. It occurs to me how ironic it is that four of us on this mountain possess immense power but can't use it. Barrons and Ryodan won't turn into the beast in front of strangers. My inner Book has gone dead silent. Christian is too weak to use his Unseelie magic.

His wings begin that awful scrabbling again but it only slams me hard into the side of the mountain. I squeeze with all my might, struggling to merely maintain my grip on the cable with one hand and Christian with the other, but Dageus is no longer holding our weight and we begin to slip slowly, inexorably, downward.

"Pull them the f.u.c.k up," Dageus growls at Drustan, blood gus.h.i.+ng from his mouth. Then he's airborne, impaled on the Hag's leg. She shoots out over the canyon as Drustan, joined by Ryodan and Jada, yank us to the top.

Christian collapses, rolls, and stares into the night sky over the gorge. Painted crimson and silver by eerie moonlight, the Hag hangs above the gorge, Dageus clutched in her gruesome, b.l.o.o.d.y embrace.

"f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!" Christian pushes to his feet, but Drustan tackles him and prevents him from leaping off the edge to attempt to fly, something we both know he can't do right now.

"You will not make my brother's sacrifice for naught, lad!"

The Hag shoots across the chasm, smashes Dageus into the far cliff once, twice, three times before violently shaking her leg to dislodge the unmoving Highlander.

Dageus plunges silently down, a dark speck, vanis.h.i.+ng into the shadows as we all watch in horrified silence.

The Hag whirls midair and rockets back across the chasm, straight for us, head down, unfinished gut-gown streaming out behind her.

Then Jada is shoving Drustan away from Christian. "Get down and stay down," she hisses at him. She drags Christian to his feet and steps in front of him and commands, "Mac. Spear. Now."

There's no time to argue. Barrons is down and Dageus just gave his life to save us. I want vengeance. Nothing else matters. I move to her side, place my hand against hers and make sure she feels the cold metal of the blade between us. "I'll let go at the last minute so she doesn't see it. Don't you dare f.u.c.king miss or I'll kill you myself."

She doesn't dignify my threat with a response.

Christian tries to push Jada out of the way, snarling that no one else is dying for him on this cliff. Jada shoves back, pus.h.i.+ng him behind us.

The Hag dives headfirst, slicing through the night, mouth twisted with rage, black holes where her eyes should be narrowed in fury.

Jada freeze-frames us and suddenly we're standing twenty feet away. My spear is no longer in my hand. While I was dis...o...b..bulated from being freeze-framed, which she knows makes me feel sick, she took it from my grasp.

"What are you doing?" I explode.

"Not letting you die, Mac." She shoves me so hard and unexpectedly that I go sprawling face-first to the ground.

Christian howls and I don't need to look to know he just got lanced. When I peel myself from the rocks, wipe snow from my face, and look back over my shoulder, I see the Hag has impaled him and is preparing to fold her knitting-needle legs together around him and soar off into the sky.

Ryodan and Jada exchange a glance and she tosses him her whip.

He cracks it in the air behind the Hag, impeding her flight, and goads, "Come and get me, b.i.t.c.h. I don't die either." He moves closer, snapping the whip so fast I can't even see it, keeping her penned into a small s.p.a.ce of air. Unlike Jada, he seems to have no problem antic.i.p.ating her airborne lunges.

The Hag levels her free leg at his head. He dances around, ducking and dodging like a boxer on meth, cracking the whip repeatedly. "But you know that. You killed me once before." He's become a blur, and I wonder if he's actually going to be able to get close enough to kill her however it is the Nine do.

Then Jada materializes between the Hag and Ryodan with the abruptness of a Fae sifting in and I realize that was never his plan.

With that one shared glance, he and Jada made another one.

Ryodan was the distraction.

Jada closes her hands around the leg upon which Christian is impaled and with the grace of a circus acrobat swings herself up, spear tucked into the waistband of her camo pants.

The Hag rears back, violently shaking her leg, trying to dislodge her, but Jada doesn't let go. When she reaches the writhing, b.l.o.o.d.y mess of a gown, she uses the guts as ropes to vault herself up, grabs the Hag by the hair, yanks back her head and slits her throat from ear to ear.

Blood sprays everywhere and the Hag's head lolls back. Jada shoves the spear deep into the bone and gristle of her corset, expression fierce, savage.

The three of them crash to the ground in a heap.

The Crimson Hag is dead.

37.

"And the shadow of the day will embrace the world in grey"

MAC.

Ours is a somber group that descends the cliff, battered, weary, and bleak.

I now understand the meaning of the phrase "hollow victory."

In the past, each time we did battle with the enemy, although there were losses, none cut so deeply, so close to the heart.

I realize belatedly that for some time now I've counted the Keltar as one of us: indomitable soldiers, battling tirelessly against evil, fighting the good fight, always surviving to wage war another day. I counted on it.

One of the good guys died tonight.

A man with family.

A legend of a Highlander.

There's no hope Dageus survived the brutal gutting, the crus.h.i.+ng blows against the cliff, and the subsequent twelve-hundred-foot fall.

Like the Hag, Dageus MacKeltar is dead.

Drustan doesn't speak a word, supports Christian on one side, with Jada on the other, and they half carry, half drag the now unconscious prince down the mountainside.

When we reach the bottom and load him carefully into the Hummer, Drustan murmurs, "Och, Christ, how am I to tell Chloe? They fought so hard to remain together. Now she's lost him for good." He whispers something over Christian in Gaelic then turns to leave.

Ryodan steps into his path, blocking it. "Where do you think you're going, Keltar."

"Unlike you, I'll no' be leaving without retrieving what remains of my brother's body for burial."

He's referring to Ryodan hastening us from the mountaintop without pausing to collect Barrons, which I know he did so Drustan and Jada wouldn't see him vanish but no doubt appeared callous to the others.

Drustan's gaze is bleak, haunted. "Too many times he took the burden upon himself to save us. I'll see him buried properly, in the old ways, on Keltar ground, in Scotia. If the Draghar still inhabit his body, certain rituals must be performed. If not, aye, well, b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l if not, they're free again."

"I've no intention of returning to Dublin without Barrons," Ryodan says. "I will collect your brother's body as well. Christian needs you. Your clan needs you now."