Nero met his defiant stare and was unimpressed. “We are sworn to protect you, and you are making that difficult. You didn’t just put yourselves in danger by coming out here. You put my soldiers in danger.”
Nero’s voice was as cold as ice. I shivered in the balmy air. He sure was scary when he was pissed off. His anger was barely contained, boiling hot below the icy surface of his self-restraint. Gold and silver swirled in his eyes, pulsing with the shifting shades of his anger. Only two hundred years of practice in controlling his temper was keeping him in check.
He spun around, his sword a silver arc of death. For one horrible moment, I thought he’d actually lost it, but then I saw the spasming tentacle hanging from his blade—and the monster he’d severed it from. The creature wasn’t a creature at all. It was a curtain of twisting vines sliding down the building behind him. Before my eyes, the severed vine regrew into two new vines.
“Great, just what we needed. A hydra plant,” I commented.
Thick fog rose from the ground, moaning. Haunted fog was another thing we didn’t need.
More vines poured down the building like a green waterfall. They struck out, snapping like a whip, wrapping their thick coils around us. Nero set a bundle of vine monsters on fire. They swelled fatter, larger. He tried frost next. The monster froze, and Nero cut his blade through the frost-bitten plant. It shattered to pieces.
“Use ice spells,” he told us.
I reached for my potions kit. I couldn’t cast elemental magic, but I had a few potions that would produce a similar effect. I tossed a snowy powder over a nearby vine beast. Once it was frozen, Drake shot the monster, and it exploded like a shattered mirror.
We were just starting to make progress on the Lost City’s weed problem when the fog showed its true nature. A patch of dew-dripped light shifted in front of me, forming into the shape of a man. Before I could move, the smoke had turned to solid rock. The man-shape slammed its stone fist into my side. Pain exploded in my ribs. The monster had broken two of them. Biting back the agony, I swung my sword at the monster, but my blade passed right through it. It had changed back into smoke.
A cyclone turned inside the sunken city, a whirlwind of magic that sucked the smoke in. Nero stood at the center of the spell, his hands twisting and turning to keep the air spinning—and the fog monster trapped. But how long could he keep it up?
The rest of the team was busy with the vines. Beyond the battlefield, Valiant was retreating deeper into the city. He was going alone, going after the relics. The other two Pilgrims weren’t far from me.
“Come,” I said, channeling the siren. I knew it had worked when their terrified faces went blank. “Stay with me.”
Holding to my side, I ran toward Valiant. Those relics were going to get us all killed long before we even found them.
“Stop!” I called out to him. “You can’t go alone, Valiant. There will be more monsters.”
“Then come with me. You I can trust.” He frowned. “But not that angel who threatened to tie me to his truck.”
“Nero is trying to protect you,” I told him as the other two Pilgrims came up behind me.
“You can protect me.”
I glanced down at my broken ribs. My breaths came out in uneven gulps, each one like a stab from a hot needle. “I can’t. We need Nero. We need everyone. And most of all, we need to come back after dawn. It’s not safe here.”
“No, we can’t delay. The hood—”
“Is not here.” I held out my hand. “Come on.”
Valiant’s eyes flickered from me, to his companions, then back to me. I didn’t have enough magic left in me to compel him too, so I was just going to have to count on his survival instincts.
It seemed I’d overestimated his will to live. He turned and ran off.
He didn’t make it far, though. He slipped on a patch of black asphalt ice and fell, bumping his head on the street. From the sounds of it, he’d broken something too. Good. The pain would succeed where common sense had failed. It would keep him from running off.
“Gods, I’m thinking like Nero more and more every day,” I muttered to myself as I went after him, careful to avoid the black ice.
Valiant stirred, letting out a pained moan. And then my vampiric senses smelled it. Blood. The vines screeched and changed direction, drawn to that same smell. I hurled ice potions at the vines, but that hardly slowed them down. The blood had incited them, bringing out their most primal need: hunger. They crashed through their frozen kindred, shattering and splitting them apart in their need to reach the source of that blood.
I was all that stood between the wave of vines and the three defenseless Pilgrims. Unfortunately, I was out of elemental spells, and my sword did nothing but sprout new baby vine monsters.
“Our chances don’t look good,” I told the two mesmerized Pilgrims beside me.
They only nodded, watching the monsters with disconnected interest. The vines were so busy fighting one another to get to the blood that it was slowing them down.
Valiant lay on the black ice. He’d fallen on a sharp rock, which had penetrated his arm all the way through. On the plus side, the rock had kept him from sliding too far. He was still close enough for me to reach without having to step onto that black ice. Beyond him, the shimmery black ground slowly dipped…and then disappeared into a chasm. I could work with that. I hoped.
“Valiant, I need you to listen to me, and do exactly as I say,” I said. “Can you do that?”
He nodded, his eyes wide with horror.
“Don’t look at the monsters. Look at me.”
His gaze flickered to me.
“Good. Now I’m going to come get you. When I pull you off the ice, throw yourself on the ground. Got it?”
He nodded. I didn’t think he realized he was impaled on a rock or how much it would hurt when I lifted him off of it.
“You two, stay down and out of the way,” I told my Pilgrims.
They obeyed, and I stepped up to Valiant. The vines were coming, so it was now or never. I pulled him off the rock. I tried not to jostle him, not completely succeeding. He was bleeding out all over now. I helped him off the ice, quickly cutting his shirt off of him. He dropped to the floor, and I launched the bloody bundle of fabric across the ice.
The vine monsters shrieked, taking the bait. I threw myself over Valiant as the vines shot over me, straight for the blood-stained shirt. They skidded when they hit the black ice, sliding over the edge into the chasm. Rising to my knees, I pulled out a healing potion and poured it into Valiant’s mouth.
“Thanks,” he coughed.
“You can thank me by promising to listen to me next time.”
A burst of magic slammed into my chest, throwing me onto the black ice. The fog monster had broken free of Nero’s spell. It was spinning, twirling out of control around me, speeding me along on my way to the edge. I looked for something—anything—to hold onto. There was nothing. My fingers slipping off the glossy lip, I fell into the abyss.
9
Order and Chaos