Page 32 of Witchbane
“Can you help us?” Liam asked the forest god. “Underhill isn’t safe, but Sebastian needs to get back there to release this power. It’s killing him. Making him sick.”
The forest god seemed to consider for a moment. “You must stay together. Mate and trickster. Without mate, fox becomes demon. Such a fine bond has been woven. Strong and dancing like ivy around brick.”
Was he admiring our mate bond?
“Okay,” Liam agreed. “Yes, our bond is strong and beautiful. We will stay together.” He didn’t even look at me when I knew he could tell I wanted to argue. I wanted him safe, dammit, especially from me. “How do we release the kitsune?”
The forest god seemed baffled by the question.
“I’m not sure he understood you,” I whispered to my mate.
“Sebastian’s fox demon is locked inside…” Liam began, trying to explain.
The forest god turned that massive head to examine me again. The spindles of its power seemed to glide over the ice walls inside of me. I wondered if he’d shatter them.
One of the dark shadows I’d been seeing reached the base of the god’s back hooves. It paused for half a second before lurching upward. I gasped as the darkness rolled up the forest god’s leg and the entire being shuddered. It began to turn, but as it moved the parts the blackness was touching seemed to change it from living wood to petrified stalks of dead branches, freezing it in place.
“Liam?” I cried stepping away as the forest god cried out. It looked like pain, the petrification eating through the living tree. It was a slow spread of horror and death, the creature appeared to become less living and more plant matter frozen in ice. The enormous size of him, width spanning the distance turning from a moving creature, to dry branches, blowing in the wind.
What the hell was powerful enough to take out a forest god? I couldn’t imagine the level of magic needed to overrun an elemental. As the darkness shifted upward, the moving being became a tree again like all the rest, like it had only temporarily borrowed their branches. The forest looked like any forest rather than some mythical creature of unimaginable power. Not dead then, escaped.
Liam tugged me back, both of us stumbling several feet. “Run, baby,” he said, obviously understanding. If the forest god saw fit to run away, maybe we should too.
But if he thought I was going anywhere without him, he was nuts. He turned as the shadows grew closer. Everything the darkness touched died instantly, like a forest long frozen or too long without water. Liam took my hand and pulled as he began to run. I followed, working hard to keep up. His legs were longer than mine, but I had a lot of experience with running.
“The backpacks,” I called even though they were long gone now, likely buried in the spread of whatever the fuck that was.
Liam kept moving, his werewolf body made for endurance. Mine was not. Tired and cold, and already weakened by the kitsune’s unrest, I stumbled. Liam turned and lifted me, throwing me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and raced into the distance, my added weight not slowing him at all.
The fact that he had me, and could probably carry me a long way without tiring, was amazing. But watching the world behind us go from a sleepy winter world of wonder to dead gray ash terrified me. It kept getting closer, even though I knew Liam was racing faster than any regular person could hope to run.
Could we escape it? Whatever the fuck it was? It ate up the distance as though it were tied to me, pulling energy from me as the ice continued to build inside. Layer upon layer around the kitsune, yet never enough to silence the growing madness.
I struggled to breathe. The darkness engulfing the world behind us, with Liam trying to outrun death, seemed poetic and disheartening.
“Open a portal,” Liam demanded.
At random? I couldn’t really control where they went.
“Seb!” Liam screamed; his breathing labored from running hard. “Open a portal!”
I’d practiced a couple hundred times, but I’d only been able to hold them for a few minutes. And they always opened to different places, but I could do it. I focused on an open area to our left, enough space for a portal, a small one at least, as long as we moved fast. It popped into glowing existence like some beacon of hope.
Liam made a beeline for it, trying to outrun the devouring shadow even though I’d made the portal more off to the side than in front of us. That had been a bad idea. It was a race to see who would get to it first.
A wailing scream of something huge echoed from inside the wriggling lines of magic. It reverberated around us, shaking trees and making it hard for Liam to keep his feet. Whatever it was had to be enormous.
“Shit!” I screamed.
Liam echoed my curse as something huge popped its head through the open portal. A mix of some sort of Godzilla twisted with bug-thing, trying to stretch itself through the small space. Liam turned, heading forward again. The black mass of deadly darkness flowed over the portal and the beast protruding from it.
The monster’s cry lasted only a few seconds as the portal snapped shut, shattering a layer of ice inside me, and cutting off the head of the beast. The last flailing bits of life from the monster died quickly under that shadow’s assault, devoured like the life had been sucked out of it. It turned to ash that fast, blowing away like it had never happened.
“Fuck!” I screamed as Liam kept moving. He was tiring. I could feel the minuscule change in his speed, and it sounded like his lungs hurt. His gasps for breath were loud and heaving.
“Another portal,” Liam wheezed, trying to keep moving.
We were running out of time. I unleashed a bunch all at once. It was a bit like casting away a layer of snow, throwing piles into the distance which opened in a dozen ways and places.