Page 55 of Samhain Savior

Even a slight brush against it had me feeling like the earth was tilting beneath my feet. The sensation was less like a battery and more like an entire fucking generator. Instead of ozone, my mouth was filled with the taste of bile and rot, and it took far too much concentration to keep my stomach from turning itself inside out.

No, this was no ordinary storm, and that meant it was time to fucking go.

“What the fuck were you thinking, Nathaniel?” I muttered, my eyes scanning the steeple below me, searching for any sign that there was something there to find. Once again, I cursed Asmodeus and his cryptic fucking orders. Why could no one in my life everspeak plainly?

“Fuck!” Another abnormal gust of wind swirled past me, spinning the weathervane like a top, the rippled ends of the golden flag barely missing taking off my Hells damned head.

“Archer!” Delilah’s voice was soft, her words carried away by the wind, and I glanced down again to see her looking, not at me, but down toward the street below. “Archer, they’re coming!”

She was right.

The streets below had cleared of tourists, the abrupt rise of the storm sending them all scuttling for cover, so it was easy to spot the approaching cabal marching our way. A half a dozen figures draped in black cloaks, I could sense that they had power, but it was the one at the back of their formation that caught my attention. A hulking figure, standing nearly a foot taller than all the others, it was their magic alone that I knew was causing the chaos of the storm around us.

Taking a deep breath, I tasted the magic on my tongue, my heart racing as I recognized it as a power I hadn’t come across in a long time.

Because the wielder of that magic was supposed to be locked in a cell in one of the deepest levels of purgatory, paying for the crimes he’d committed against the Dark Lord in the last uprising.

Yet here he was, striding down a Boston street as though he had all the right in the universe to do so.

Furfures, The Storm-bringer.

Hanging off the steeple of the church, I snarled my rage, letting my own power ring out in challenge. I could tell the moment he felt it because he paused, head tilting from side to side before he looked up at me, slowly removing the thick black hood from his head and revealing an impressive rack of antlers that sprouted directly from his skull.

And when our eyes met, the fucker had the gall to smile at me, as though I wasn’t about to turn his guts into boot laces.

“If it isn’t The Archer,” he called, his voice reaching my ears on a gust of magic wind that he fucking controlled. “Well met, my old friend.”

“I am not your friend, you fucking traitor.”

For a moment, his smile fell, his expression forlorn and a bit resigned.

“I had hoped we could handle this like gentlemen,” he called, and I curled my lip. “But I can see that you have no desire to parlay. So be it.”

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning crashed, striking the weathervane above me and sending a shower of sparks falling to the street below. Over the din of the storm, Icould hear Delilah’s shocked scream, and like the besotted idiot that I was, I dropped my attention to her in concern.

The antlered head of the Storm-bringer dipped, too, following my gaze to land on Delilah, and I cursed myself for a fool.

“Ah, just the witch we’ve been looking for,” he said, and the five other Order members he was with scuttled forward, clamoring toward Old North Church at a crooked, limping run.

Cursing again, I began my descent down the steeple, needing to head inside and put myself between Delilah and whatever the Order threw at us, but before I got too far, she called to me again.

“Archer! Look!”

Turning my head, I saw where she was pointing, my eyebrows rising in shock at the sight.

The weathervane, the gold and iron monument that had stood upon the steeple for over three hundred years, was currently smoking, the heat of the lightning the Storm-bringer had wrought raising the temperature to near melting.

But that wasn’t what had concerned Delilah. No, what she was pointing at was the bulb on the tip of the weather vane and how it was currently glowing brightly with a very familiar symbol.

The Sigil of theUmbra Fratrum.

Chapter twenty-four

Delilah

The burn in my chest intensified, feeling like a hot coal was pressed against my skin. Inside her pouch, Pandora began to squirm, as though she was trying to get away from the burning heat, but there was nowhere for her to go. Placing a comforting hand against her in the pouch, I offered soothing words, but she didn’t want to settle.

“I know, girl,” I conceded. “I hate it, too.”