Page 30

T he world changed abruptly, turning gray as if a veil had been flung over the top of it and then whiting out entirely. Only to be replaced with a very different landscape that slowly emerged from the fog, one of swift-moving, pale outlines of desert outcroppings, rippling sands, and squat bushes, as we were borne through non-time on a rushing torrent of ghostly power. I could just make out our surroundings, but I couldn’t concentrate on them because they were whizzing by too fast.

Our pace far exceeded what the jalopies had been able to do and was frankly terrifying—and unexpected because ghosts could barely lift anything. I was used to them having to exert a marathon’s worth of effort to knock a pencil off a table, which is why most didn’t bother. But these were bothering, and there were so many of them that they could bear us along on a white cloud of power like a magic carpet worthy of Aladdin.

It was like the necromancer I’d seen in Stratford being borne aloft by the ghosts he’d enslaved, only in our case, it was a multitude, and they’d volunteered. Which was great except that I couldn’t control them like he had. Or even see properly with the ungodly speed .

“Where are we?” Bodil yelled, looking frantic. I guessed this was another thing a few thousand years of life hadn’t prepared her for.

Me, either, I thought, trying to figure out how to explain with the ghostly wind tearing my words away.

In your head! She yelled back mentally, and so loudly that my ears hurt in sympathy.

“Where the devil did you bring us?” ?subrand echoed, his hand on his sword before I could answer.

“Oh,” Enid squeaked while Zara and crew just stared about with shining eyes, looking like they were having the time of their lives.

I was glad somebody was enjoying it.

“The Paths of the Dead!” I yelled to be heard over the wind. “Don’t resist, and don’t stray off!”

“Stray off? Stray off? ” That was Alphonse. And it looked like whatever Mircea had done really had been temporary because he was vocal again and loud about it. “How the hell do we do that? Can you even stop this ride?”

No, I thought, as the city loomed ever closer.

“Why are we not to stray off?” Enid shouted, staying on point. Because the girl had developed a good set of survival instincts. Or maybe she’d already had them from growing up at the poisonous fey court.

“Some of the ghosts here are on our side!” I said, wondering if I had ghost particles in my mouth because it kind of felt like it. I spat them out. “But the rest…”

What about the rest? Bodil hissed in my head.

“They’re hunters! This is where ghosts go who run out of power and can’t maintain their hold on our world anymore! The rest come here to feed!”

“They cannibalize each other?” That was Enid, looking shocked.

“Only the weaker ones,” I said, which didn’t seem to help.

Alphonse had a lot to say about that, but most of it was borne away by the winds before it reached me.

“Yes, and they’ll do the same to you if they can!” I added as they needed to understand that much, at least. “Don’t give them the chance!”

And suddenly, I had a knot of people closing around me as everyone tightened the hell up. I barely noticed, being too busy watching the city coming swiftly closer. The ghosts weren’t wasting time, rushing us across the desert as if we’d been shot out of a cannon and straight toward—

“Watch out!” I yelled because I didn’t know who was driving this thing. And taking us straight at—

“Fuck!” Somebody yelled. That sounded like Pritkin, who was right behind me and holding onto my waist, but I could barely hear him because of the wind. Or the babble of thousands of voices, I realized, which is why it got worse as the ghostly brigade veered sharply to the right to miss a patrolling god. We were going so fast that it looked like he’d flashed into existence out of nowhere.

The ghosts screamed by him before I could tell if the god had sensed our passing, and we were too far away in an instant for craning my neck to do any good. Not that I could see anything with the masses of white, churning energy behind me, literally thousands upon thousands of ghosts, combining their strength to do this, but not, it seemed, entirely coordinated. Because the next time we saw a god—

“Auggghhhh!” I yelled as my party split, with half abruptly going one way and half another. Pritkin held onto me with a death grip, but Mircea, Alphonse, and the fey were jerked away. The witches somehow stayed on this side, however, holding tight and no longer looking quite so much like they were enjoying things.

“Get us back together,” I yelled, although I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. “Tell them!” I yelled at Hansen, who I still had by what I hoped was the scruff of his neck.

“I’m trying,” he said, sounding entirely too calm for the moment. Especially as buildings were whizzing past us now. Not all in a row, as would be the case in a moment, but close enough to indicate that we were passing through the city’s outskirts.

And unlike the rest of the world I’d seen so far, Vegas was... well, not intact. There were burnt-out buildings and empty lots with just a few ruins, misshapen by the occasional rainstorm that happened a few times a year and scattered by the wind. But there were other buildings still standing and even looking pretty solid.

Better than I’d have expected, although that wasn’t the point, Cassie!

That was the point, I thought, as I watched Mircea’s group trying to curve back toward us like people riding the world’s craziest motorcycle. They were all leaning this way as if attempting to influence direction, but it wasn’t enough. Maybe because the gods we’d passed had company.

I didn’t know if they were there in anticipation of an assault or just doing the usual hunt for food, but there were a lot of them. Most looked human, albeit multiple stories tall, and appeared as if they were the godly version of street people. Their robes were tattered and dirty, their faces slack and staring, and their eyes burned with a hunger I knew all too well.

And there were enough of them that Mircea’s crew were having to dodge in and out of the crowd, which had gathered around something that—

Oh.

Oh, no.

Oh, shit.

“Don’t look,” Pritkin said roughly into my ear, but it was too late. I’d already realized that it was another god on the ground, one who was only faintly moving, maybe because he’d been ganged up on. I stared as another crouched beside him, ripping into the prone body with ravenous savagery and pulling out what would have been intestines if the gods had any. Instead, wild pieces of power burst out in lightning-like filaments, causing a mad scramble by everyone in the vicinity.

“Hold on!” Pritkin shouted because the ghosts had all started to babble at once, making the roar around us increase despite the fact that we’d slowed way down.

His arms also tightened around me, probably with worry, but he didn’t need to. I wasn’t remotely tempted right now. Maybe because I was too far away from the feast, or maybe because they were hurting him , all those hungry gods now tearing into his body. They looked like a pride of lions savaging a gazelle, only the damned lions would have killed it first!

The gods hadn’t been so kind.

I finally looked away, horrified and sickened, and then screamed because we were about to plow into another man-shaped tower ourselves.

He was heading at a run for the feast and had cut across our path unexpectedly, causing us to dodge just in time and almost spill out onto the desert scrub in the process. But we were caught at the last minute by the mass of ghosts and thrown back up into the air, just in time to encounter another body that was somehow in our way. And this one we didn’t miss.

I had a half second to see a godly torso, bare except for a few livid welts that spoke of the savagery of god-on-god violence. And then we were plowing right through the middle of it, tearing past skin and bone and through blinding, brilliant energy that I could see all around me for a second but not touch. Not on the wrong side of the barrier of non-space, with its membrane separating us from our reality, if only barely…

For an instant, I felt it anyway, or at least an echo of it, all that burning, delicious, dangerous power—

And then we were out the other side and circling around in a wide parabola because that seemed to have freaked out the ghosts, too. But the god was either too mad or too crazed with hunger to have so much as paused, although he had prey closer than he realized—much closer. That little trick had almost thrown us out of non-space.

“No, no, no!” Hansen was yelling, I guessed to his fellow ghosts. “You can’t touch them! They’re too powerful, and their magic can pull us back in. You must avoid them!”

There was a rumble like thunder all around us as if the other ghosts were saying “No shit” all at once, or words to that effect. And then they started to straighten up, only another body was in the way. And this one definitely did not look human.

He was too late to benefit from the feast, as the fallen god had already disappeared, consumed by the crowd now fighting over scraps. So the hulking, fiery, massive thing beside us screamed its rage at the heavens as we circled him, mouths agape. Or at least mine was until I managed to tell my brain to shut it, but I didn’t have to tell anyone else.

For once, no one was saying anything, not even the quarreling ghosts who had gone dead silent. They seemed to know and fear this one, and why the hell not, I thought wildly. He looked like a goddamned Balrog.

It shouldn’t have surprised me. Gods were energy beings and could look like anything they chose. Zeus had demonstrated that often enough, seducing various women in a multitude of disguises, many of them not remotely human. And while those with some brains probably preferred human guise, as it made it marginally easier to interact with their followers, the rest...

Didn’t care. Very definitely didn’t, I thought, as a burning orange-red maw worthy of a primordial entity roared again in frustration and fury, causing the remaining feasters to jerk their heads up, and then abruptly head for the hills lest they be the next thing on the menu.

But while that helped us somewhat because nobody was running in this direction, the other half of our party was suddenly inundated with panicky gods. I sat there, my heart in my throat, and could do nothing but watch as Mircea and the rest desperately tried to find a path through the crowd and back to us. And failed.

Probably because the metaphysical space around them was being churned up like waves on the sea. Crashing ones, knocking them and their ghostly crew this way and that, like a boat trying to ride out a gale. Stray pieces of energy peppered them, power arced and snapped overhead, and godly limbs came within a hair’s breadth of smashing through them as they struggled to ride out the storm.

And as they flashed in and out of non-space, showing up for a second at a time before the ghostly horde pulled them back in.

“No,” I whispered, watching them flicker between regular, human-like coloring, which is how they looked on our side of the barrier, to the ghostly outlines they took on in the real world. And not once, but over and over again, as their ghostly host struggled to hold onto them while godly energy pulled and tugged and jerked the other way. And then my brain caught up to my horror, and I shook Hansen mercilessly. “ No! ”

“I know, I know! I’m telling them,” he said frantically, no longer calm because who the hell could be calm in this?

“Go down,” Pritkin said, suddenly grabbing Bodil and causing her to hiss at him. “Tell them to go down and find a place to hide on the ground. They’re too high, almost at the eye level of those bastards. They’re going to be seen!”

Bodil nodded, recovering fast, and her vision went distant again. And she must have gotten through to Mircea, whose metal gifts were also formidable, or maybe Hansen did to the ghosts, because the brilliantly white clouds bearing the others aloft abruptly started to descend. For a second, I thought we were okay, that this was going to work, and that everything was going to be—

“ No! ” I screamed before Pritkin’s arm tightened in reaction, enough to cut off my air.

All I could do was watch as the group of terrified people flew straight through the middle of a running god, who had changed direction at the last second when lunged at by another. He plowed into them, and worse, he was crackling with power from the other god’s attack. It was enough not only to send them back into real space but to pulverize them when they got here!

“No! That’s them! That’s them!” Enid screamed, pointing.

And I realized—they hadn’t gone through the god, as I’d initially thought. They’d gone through the gap between his legs. And came shooting out the other side, screaming and careening straight into us, hard enough to send both our parties falling and tumbling and hitting the earth, with explosions of ghostly power going on all around us to cushion the fall.

It seemed to have worked; we didn’t die despite hitting the ground really goddamned hard from what had to be six or eight stories up. I slammed into it with only a thin ghostly cushion and my own palms shielding me, hard enough to just stay there for a second, trying to get my breath back. And wondering if my wrists were broken, only to be distracted from the pain by something else.

Something much, much worse.

I had landed face down and was now staring at the darkened ground from a few inches away. It shouldn’t have been interesting; it was just cracked dirt littered with pieces of shattered concrete and a few hardy little weeds. Yet it was.

Because it wasn’t a ghostly outline.

We were back in the real world!

The others must have been trailing some of that godly energy they’d been hit with when they crashed into us, forcing us out of non-space. I stared around, my head reeling like an accident victim who’d just had an airbag go off in her face, and realized the truth. We might have survived the fall, but that didn’t mean we weren’t about to die of something else, because the Balrog had sensed something.

And even though the ghosts recovered faster than we did and jerked us all back into the Paths in a few scant seconds, it wasn’t fast enough.

The monstrous-looking thing was on top of us, snarling and growling with arms slashing through the air as if it could sense us, and maybe it could. I didn’t know all of their abilities from my brief time as one of them, but it sensed something, being on us before the clouds had even cleared. And they cleared pretty darned fast because Billy’s buddies were freaking cowards!

The ghostly host panicked and scattered on the wind, leaving us behind, teetering on the brink of the human world so closely that I could feel some of the heat coming off the goddamned Balrog. Who was now stomping about, looking for us. He didn’t appear to know what we were, but there was power in the area, and he wasn’t leaving until he tasted it.

And ?subrand was about to help him.

I guessed the idea was that if he was going out, it wouldn’t be flat on his back with fear clawing at his belly. Which, okay, I could sympathize, but his alternative wasn’t going to work any better. But he apparently didn’t agree, rolling back to his feet before I could form the words to stop him, gripping his spear in one hand and his sword in the other, ready to throw down.

Or, at least, he was until the young fey discovered exactly how powerful a couple of master vamps could be. Mircea and Alphonse seized him and bore him to the ground, and struggle as much as he would, he couldn’t break that hold. Not that he wasn’t trying.

Do something! I mentally hissed at Bodil, who I guessed deputized Enid because she was closer. Or maybe for another reason.

If I’d had any doubts that the silver prince was smitten, they vanished when the beautiful half-fey calmed him with a single touch.

So great, one problem solved and one big fiery motherfucker of a problem left to deal with. And this one wasn’t getting bored and leaving. This one was doing the exact opposite of that, and maybe he had some rudimentary intelligence left, after all.

Because when the frantic search turned up exactly nothing, he paused suddenly and—

He’s coming in! Bodil warned me, and yeah. Got that, I thought, as a godly paw tore a hole in non-time and came through. At approximately the same moment that I grabbed a spark of the godly energy still spritzing around like fireflies and pulled us all out, just in time to witness a fiery red and black-encrusted god the size of a casino tower vanish into nothingness.

But it was a nothingness that could still see the real world if he was close enough to the border, so I didn’t waste time.

“Run!” I breathed, scrambling to my feet.

“What?” Zara asked, her eyes huge, as I guessed she’d been distracted.

“Run!” I screamed, and we ran across an empty lot and behind a burned-out hulk of a building, which must have been built better than most, as it was still standing.

“What the—”

“Silence!”

“Shut up!”

That was Mircea and Pritkin, back-to-back, taking charge and pointing out the obvious as a furious, tricked god tore back out of non-space and started staring around.

Rebar, I thought dizzily, focusing on a few twisted pieces sticking out of a mostly missing concrete column. This was probably a parking garage at some point when, you know, people had cars. I hadn’t seen any since we arrived, not that I’d had much time to notice, but if anybody needed a place to park, Vegas could still oblige.

“Cassie!?” Purple Hair grabbed me and had Zara clap a hand over her mouth so fast that she only got the one word out.

Rebar and concrete had stood up to hurricanes before, so I didn’t know why I was surprised that this example had managed to do the same to the Apocalypse. But I was staring at it as if transfixed while a demon-looking thing that wasn’t a demon, that was far, far worse, tore around the landscape. And then roared, ear-piercingly loud, probably alerting everyone else that something was interesting here, right here, just over here , before beginning to throw stuff around.

A car—and oh, look, they had one at least—sailed by overhead, with the rusted-out undercarriage blotting out the moonlight for a second. Then it was gone, and Hansen was back, looking as apologetic as a stump of a man could. And I grabbed him, and we were suddenly back in non-space again and moving.

And it seemed that my feet were smarter than my brain, which was still waxing lyrical about the advantages of good construction, even while we fled through the white night. But this time, our ghostly army was nowhere to be seen. Nothing was except for pale outlines of buildings and a barrier of—oh.

So that was where all the cars had gone.

I stared upward at an absolute wall of burnt-out cars towering over us for what had to be four stories before we fled through the middle of it. We didn’t have time to go around, and the only thing that mattered now was putting space between us and the asshole back there. Because he might be an idiot, but he was a loud idiot, and others weren’t so stupid.

And they were expecting us.

I didn’t know if Jonas’s plan was going to work because we’d just let everyone know that something interesting was happening in the city. But something interesting was happening outside, too, as the cavalry came to the rescue in the force of a dozen loud explosions from seemingly all sides. Maybe because they were on all sides, as all of our allies attacked at once, giving the gods more to think about than some asshole having a temper tantrum.

At least, I sincerely hoped so.

I got a flash of Bodil’s black eyes in my mental vision and then of Jonas’s resolute face. He knows we arrived, she whispered. I managed to get that much through. He says to hurry.

“Then let’s not… disappoint the man,” I panted, although I didn’t know why I was so badly out of breath.

And then I did when we all tumbled back into real space the next moment, with a very apologetic Hansen looking at me with those huge eyes.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he said frantically. “But I can’t do it alone, and you’re not powerful enough to help me—”

“Help you do what?”

“Keep all of you skimming along the surface of real space. It takes too much energy. You either need to go farther in or stay out. But this won’t work, not with just the two of us.”

“But we can’t see where we’re going if we’re farther in!”

“I know! I know! I’m sorry!”

Goddamnit.