She threw up a hand and, as she swayed, as Keegan caught her, she stood on the other side with the black castle looming.
“So valiant.” Odran laughed. “The key, they say, but not just for them. Your father’s blood closed it. And yours opens it. Blood on your hands.”
He swiped the blade of a knife over her outstretched palm.
She held it up as Keegan steadied her, showed him the blood.
“He’s coming.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The tree bled. Black streams of blood sizzled down its trunk and carved through to smoke. As the smoke, fetid with sulfur, eked out, Keegan raised his sword.
He turned to the elf beside him. “Go.”
She blurred away while, dazed, Breen stared at her bloody hand.
Marg gripped it, and that sudden fresh shock of pain brought Breen back. “Fight. He won’t take you, he won’t have you, but you have to fight.”
Dark drove out behind the smoke. As the cracks lengthened, claws gripped the edges, pulling them wider. A head pushed through, black eyes rolling, long teeth snapping. Keegan severed it, but more cracks opened, breaking the rough bark like a shattered mirror.
The dark pouring out sucked at the light.
With a long sword, Sedric impaled a demon dog as it leaped through, and even as its body writhed on the ground, more came. On a feral snarl Bollocks charged. Breen saw him latch on to the throat of a demon before they rolled away, lost in the smoke.
She threw out power, more from instinct than purpose as the light died to dusk, and they came and came.
So many, too many, crawling, clawing, leaping through the widening portal.
As she stood frozen, Phelin shoved her away from the diamond-point antlers of a black stag. “Defend,” he told her as he destroyed it. “Yourself and all.”
He took wing, shooting up to send a dark faerie plummeting to the ground. When it landed at her feet, Breen stumbled back. Bleeding, one wing gone, it gained its feet to come at her.
Marg drenched it in flames.
“Fight!” she snapped, then turned to slash her short sword at an oncoming elf.
But she could barely see Keegan, splashed with blood, battling with sword and magicks as more flooded through the portal, and his mother, fighting back-to-back with him.
Then Bollocks ran to her through the smoke, his muzzle bloodied, his eyes fierce and feral.
And he felt, she felt.
Fight. Defend. Destroy.
When he leaped at the demon charging her, putting himself between her and the sword, rage replaced fear.
Breen enflamed the sword and the demon with it.
As the smoke thickened, it seemed she fought alone, furious and desperate, enraged and terrified. Surrounded by enemies, by shrieks and screams, all but smothered by the stench of smoke and death, she hurled everything she had.
Fight. Defend. Destroy.
She turned a scrabbling gargoyle to dust with her wand, slapped burning power at a demon with wings like a bat so it screamed and burned.
It was nothing like watching a battle in the fire, nothing like fighting wraiths on the training field. She was no observer here, and the consequences would be more than bumps and bruises.
She fought for survival, for the world of her birth and all beyond it. She fought, even knowing they were too vastly outnumbered to win.
Then in a rush, others came to fight with her. Led by the swift elves, followed by faeries and riders, more Wise spinning light through the smoke, they charged into the forest.
Through the terrible noise of war, she heard Keegan’s shouted orders.
Arrows whizzed by her, and though two of the enemy drove her back, attacking with power, with fang, her training held. A vicious swipe of called wind shot them both away from her. When she stumbled over a body, she blocked out the horror and took the sword from the dead hand.
Beside her, a tree exploded, a flaming red bomb that sent shrapnel flying. A limb, sharp as a spear, impaled the wizard who’d ignited it, and impaled him, writhing, to the ground.
Bollocks streaked up to her, snagged a gargoyle in his teeth, and shook it like a rag doll. He heaved it aside, took on another as she cleaved the third in two with the sword.
Through the haze, Loren fought his way to her. Soot smeared his hair, his face, and blood—from his own wounds and from others—stained his doublet.
“We’re to fall back,” he shouted. “I’ll get you safely away.”
“I have to fight.” Fight, defend, destroy sounded like a drumbeat in her head.
“And you’ll fight. But some have broken through the line to the east and the castle. Keegan wants … Shana, don’t!”
He shoved Breen back as Shana broke out of a tree and struck out with a knife. Its jeweled hilt glinted in the dim light as she drove it into Loren.