Not Quite Human

Chapter 26

Nerezza couldn't find the logic in it.
The Magpie had let them find her. That much was obvious. She'd herded them here deliberately, through vines she clearly controlled — vines that could just as easily have strangled them where they stood. The sheer volume of growth would have been sufficient. Instead she stood there smiling, eyes too wide, expression hovering somewhere between ecstatic and unhinged, goading them to move first.
Which meant she wanted them here. Which meant moving first was exactly what she wanted them to do.
Nerezza didn't get the chance to finish the thought.
The shadows beside Margie thickened and pooled, solidifying slowly into a shape that made both brothers go completely still. Their grandfather stepped out of the dark with a small, satisfied chuckle, shadows still blurring at the edges of him like smoke that hadn't decided what it was yet.
Miorag.
It should have been obvious, Damien thought distantly. Someone was plotting to flood the world with the worst of Ement's inhabitants — who better to help than the one demon who thrived on dark contracts, who fed on the sanity of everyone foolish enough to make one? The ones who stood to gain most from the gates opening were Miorag and those like him. It also explained the spell — the knowledge of it destroyed or hidden so thoroughly that they hadn't found so much as a mention of it, no matter how deep they'd searched. Miorag had passed it on himself.
"Sad, isn't it," Miorag said, his eyes finding Damien's with the particular pleasure of someone who had been waiting a long time to be seen, "that my own grandchildren would stand against my return?" He turned to Margie. "You know what to do, my dear. I have people to visit at the castle. Things to attend to." He smiled at Damien once more — a smile that took something with it when he disappeared back into the shadows.
Damien felt the absence immediately. A piece of his composure, gone cleanly, like something lifted from a pocket.
"You haven't had the pleasure of meeting Xaxes," Margie said, with the tone of someone introducing a guest at a dinner party.
The beast that answered to its name was enormous — dog-shaped in the loosest sense, saliva stringing from its jaws, thorned vines coiling around its legs like extensions of itself. It didn't wait for a signal.
It went for Nerezza first.
She threw herself sideways and felt the air move where its claws had been. Abbadon was already throwing spells — one after another, nothing landing, nothing holding. He drew his sword. Nerezza drew hers. They fell into a circling pattern, working opposite sides of the beast, landing hits wherever the other drew its attention, surviving on coordination and the fact that it hadn't managed to catch them both looking the same direction at the same time.
It was clever. Fast. It gave very little away.
The vines found Alaster and wound around him before he could react, locking him in place — held there by something that felt older than any enchantment Nerezza had encountered, keeping him from helping her, from retreating to the Abyss, from doing anything at all.
Damien slipped into the shadows.
Margie was watching the fight, absorbed, expression lit with a kind of gleeful ownership. He moved toward her carefully, knife in hand, closing the distance one step at a time. She wasn't looking at him. He got close enough. He drove the knife through her from behind, straight to the hilt, pulled it back, ready to strike again.
She turned to face him.
She was smiling. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth, and she was smiling.
Margie's knees hit the ground. She was laughing and coughing blood at the same time, and neither one stopped the other. It was done. Finally, finally done. She could feel the runes beneath her drinking greedily, her blood the key she'd always intended to use. The other runes would have their fill soon enough.
She had planned her own death from the beginning.
She had used them to make it happen.
The beast vanished the moment she stilled — purpose served, contract complete. Nerezza stood in the sudden quiet and looked at the ground beneath where Margie had fallen. A rune was forming there, growing outward from the blood, glowing brighter as the miasma thickened around them. It took them a moment to understand fully what had happened, and when they did, no one said it aloud. They had been played. Every step, every decision, every move they'd thought was theirs — she'd accounted for all of it.
The day after this one was not going to be good.
"It isn't over." Abbadon's voice was tight. He was holding his arm carefully against his side, the wound deep enough that Nerezza could see bone at the edges of it. There was nothing to be done about that right now, and he clearly knew it. "Miorag went to the castle. He wouldn't bother unless there was something there worth going for. We need to move."
He was right. The silver lining was thin enough to be almost theoretical.
They moved anyway.