Page 19 of Ghoul Huntress (Maelstrom Duology #2)

19

The Night of War and Reckoning.

The glassless window whose frame she stood upon faced onto the chasm between War Quarter and the next quarter. Her boots rocked to and fro on the edge.

The open space before her was five stories below the Top, and it would be miles of free-fall to the bottom. A pigeon pottered about on this same window opening, cocking its head as if suspicious of her intent.

She didn’t blame it—she had eaten a few of its friends. Pigeon roasted in garlic and olive oil was good… or pigeon fried by demon flame.

Cyn raised her arms. Her boots brushed dirt outward and the flecks were blown away by a gust. She flexed her knees and launched herself into the air, falling for a few seconds before her wings flamed and roared into being. They fried the air, blistering the paint on a GUN HEAVEN sign her left wing-tip brushed. Her wings were larger, brighter, and hotter than ever before.

The very air burned as she swept upward, electrons and molecules sizzling.

She spiraled, aiming to arrive a few seconds before the others. The others meaning absolutely everyone else from War Quarter who intended to attack the Ghoul Lords.

Her muscles shone. Her skintight black leather pants and the slashed red-and-black T-shirt with the Cute but Psycho slogan seemed the right degree of anarchy and violence. Her hair was a conflicting mess of sublime darkness and flickering red. Her eyes dripped fire motes as did her currently unlit hands, and she’d been so long without sex the nearest corpses had been tempting her, lately, and those were fucking ugly.

She sure hoped she had the right date. Although Mo had confirmed it, appointments always made her nervous.

Then she saw them coming. Below was getting populated.

The wing soldiers arrowed into the space beneath her, their blue-gray-black wings spreading and flapping. One of those might be Vargr. Others, horned-and-spiked foot soldiers, were climbing the facade. From the internal rumble of War Quarter corridors the armored vehicles, the tanks, and likely Big Mo, were driving up using the roadways.

She’d left Little Mo behind, deliberately. He was too small and puny to in any way influence the outcome of this battle, and someone might shoot him. This way his memory could be back-up for Big Mo anyway. That was her best excuse—she’d become attached to the mech critter that didn’t quite understand the human soul.

Souls were conundrums. If you didn’t have one you never much cared to own one.

As planned, she rose above the concrete of the quarter to within eye level of the ghoul guard, the scuttling stinkers with their knifelike legs, and the Ghoul Lords before any other beaster or vehicle arrived.

She smiled at them as they focused on her and turned, their arms and tentacles moving.

Her newly minted demon powers were going to get a work-out tonight, and who knew when they’d run dry? So she unslung the rifle from her back and aimed at the sprinting, ambling, slithering line coming her way.

Then she squeezed the trigger.

Her gun poured out the rounds, casually blatting away whatever ran into the torrent.

This was a sizzle gun, picked up from the cache Maura had revealed to her through Big Mo and Little Mo. It was loaded with bastardium-tipped flechette rounds. Sharp, minute, and light, they gave the magazine a nearly endless capacity. The Warriors had killed some stinkers to test these, and a few rats to see what they did to flesh.

What the blue, powdered bastardium did to Ghoul Lords, that no one knew.

Grinning, Cyn found that out in the first few seconds. A line of flechettes zipped across three Ghoul Lords and tore them to shreds.

A tide of the Lure swamped her and fizzled, burning up and burning out in a large visible sphere of influence that she gradually pushed outward—she could see the boundary where her abilities frothed it into nothingness. Still flying, hovering as the rest of the beast horde arrived, she kept firing but in smaller bursts, because this was slaughter.

The beasters fired, and whatever they hit, died. Not all of them held bastardium-loaded weapons, but normal bullets and bolts worked fine and dandy, they just took longer to kill.

The air was stitched with blue and red, with screams and cries, with bellows as the mighty Ghoul Lords collapsed into lifeless heaps of twitching blubber. Some of them spilled human brains from their jelly—a macabre reminder of what these creatures did to people.

She rose higher, flying above the battle and saw beyond the charging, slithering mass to where humans affected by the Lure stood, dumbly waiting. Some had been tending fields, a few were bloody and recently chewed on. There were also the blood-stained piles of bones she remembered.

Beyond the humans, more Ghoul Lords and their guards rushed closer, and past them were the queen mounds. Those were at least two stories high. Disdainful of the threat, she gained more height until the people below were dots, then dove at the nearest queen mound and emptied the rest of her bastardium magazine into it. The thing exploded into a creamy splatter that swept a small flood over the Top then settled lower into a vast puddle. A few chunks bobbed within.

Before the fire of the guards beneath her grew too accurate, she returned to fly above where the beaster army advanced.

Without the Lure this was a massacre. Without the Lure, the Ghoul Lords were bags of vulnerable meat.

The right flank was temporarily in trouble for a concentration of Ghoul Lords had overcome the beaster resistance. Swiftly she zipped across, losing height and slinging her empty rifle at her back.

Time to try some demon on these guys—her hands rained flame onto a cluster of the GLs, turning them into smoking lumps that slowly bubbled lower as she did circuits in the air above. Wherever the beasters had trouble she flew there and helped. It made her feel like a superhero on steroids—hosing fire on alien monsters was a job she could be down with, like, forever.

Already half the visible host of the enemy were deceased, and more were being flattened and made into fleshy sieves, when the armored column finally arrived a quarter of a mile away—a geyser of debris blew upward as they popped up through a sealed roadway entrance.

She spotted a horned beaster standing with legs spread on top of Big Mo, then a winged soldier helping him, firing where he fired, taking down the threats.

Rutger and Vargr. Dare she get closer? They weren’t exactly her foe or an antidote to demon, but…

The vehicles opened up as one with their cannon and the landscape lost an entire battalion of Ghoul Lords—or whatever one chose to number them by. They were shredded, flayed, and exploded into pieces of dead alien flesh.

Yup, the beasters were doing fine. Cyn chortled at the violence, the death, the cacophony, the orchestrated murder of these alien monsters.

Every fucking thing the beasters chose to fire upon was dying.

And they’d thought this would be a dire day which none of them might survive.

Wings still fluttering and frying random airborne molecules of dust and mayhem, Cyn raised a fist and screamed, “Death to the enemy! Death to the Ghoul Lords!”

The moon shone down. The stars gleamed. Blood flowed and guts spilled.

Greedily, she checked the battlefield again, from left to right.

A few beasters fell to agile stinkers that climbed them and struck. A few humans fell to sprays of friendly fire that threaded between the line of Ghoul Lords, guards, and stinkers. Minor, all minor.

“What else can I do?”

The Worshippers and Mercantors were reachable by flight but would likely be as successful as this. Boring.

She raised her head, grin widening, teeth showing. The rogue queen.

From the middle of the fanned-out armored column, a stark blue-white light rose, spreading in an inexplicable way, surging in a wide swathe as if it accelerated. The night’s darkness was eaten away. Yet it did not bother the beasters? Once her eyes adjusted to this unnatural light, Cyn zeroed in her demon sight. She focused and found she was witnessing the ride of Maura on Toother, galloping with her hand held high, sword clasped with its point upright.

The blue-white, eye-scalding glow came from the sword. The field of light froze the Ghoul Lords that encountered it and as Maura and Toother passed them, they shattered.

“Fuck. The bitch. She does have an Ice Sword! I knew it.”

Tempted to zoom down there and wrestle it from the fae female, she flew lower, closer, only to recall Vargr and Rutger’s presence.

The rogue queen would do as a goal. Here had become a boring massacre.

A little regretfully, because after all they were great fucks, she sent a final glance to Big Mo. Rutger still rode atop the centipede vehicle, spraying bolts and bullets merrily, and there she spied what she could not believe.

A small purple bot clung to Big Mo’s roof.

Little Mo had hitched a ride—no doubt he thought to protect her. Well, clearly, he was safe, as was she. This battle was won, done and dusted.

Time to go.

At that she carved a flight path in an arc, aiming toward the distant edge that overlooked where the rogue queen resided upon the rubble of the unnamed quarter.