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Chapter 26
And with the battle begun, Nyx disappeared in a glimmer of stardust. I waited, watching for the gods to make their first move, crouched low and prepared to vanish into the Dark Room, where I could plan my steps.
“Brothers,” Amaterasu cried out. “Handle the others. I’ll take the vampire.”
“Like hell you will,” Sterling snarled, hooking his arm under Herald’s. “Igarashi, you take this one.”
“What are you doing?” Herald said, but he hurtled across the field, propelled by Sterling’s strength.
The self-satisfied grin on Amaterasu’s face dropped. Herald’s feet skidded against the earth, and the two came face to face, barely yards away from each other. Issuing fierce battle cries, Herald and Amaterasu lifted their respective swords, then brought them down against each other in a crash of shards and sparks.
It was for the best. Amaterasu could have fried Sterling in a second flat, but Herald’s command of ice magic meant he had a fighting chance against her arsenal of sunlight and flame. With frost left to fight against fire, Sterling zipped across the battlefield in a blur of silver and leather, heading straight for Susanoo. The storm god smiled cockily, his body wavering as he disappeared in a flash of lightning.
Sterling sped onwards, thrusting his fist out for a vicious, velocity-driven punch – and where his knuckles should have met with thin air, they instead made a thunderous smash. Susanoo reappeared, laughing and rubbing at his cheekbone. The god was fast, but Sterling’s heightened senses and preternatural reflexes evened the playing field.
“Nice threads,” Sterling said, shaking his hand loose.
“Likewise,” Susanoo answered, slashing his sword in an electrified arc. Vampire and storm god collided, and the resultant flash forced me to look away with its brightness.
So that left Gil, Vanitas, and myself to deal with the moon god. Three against one? I was perfectly okay with those odds. I like it when I walk away from fights with my ass in one piece and my appendages intact.
Gil’s bloodcurdling howl gave away his intent, but it didn’t look like it presented Tsukuyomi with any real advantage. Our werewolf was exactly as Sterling had described him, a tornado of claws and lupine fury. Gil’s fur glistened a sleek black in the moonlight, the same color as his human hair.
His eyes, however, glowed a horrible red. I bode my time, watching as Gil took the frontal assault, and as each half of Vanitas flew in to smash at Tsukuyomi, a three-pronged attack that should have been powerful enough to flatten any enemy.
I’ll keep this simple. Tsukuyomi wasn’t just any enemy.
Still beaming his huge, infuriating smile, the god of the moon stabbed the end of his sword into the earth. White light shone around him in a momentary pulse, a faint bubble that faded as quickly as it had appeared. And as werewolf, sword, and scabbard hurtled into that bubble, they were summarily repelled, recoiling as if they’d struck an iron wall.
Vanitas’s halves rebounded at such an angle that I crouched even lower to the ground, barely avoiding his scabbard as it flew so close past my head that it ruffled my hair. Gil yowled like a wounded dog, tossed several feet away by his impact with the force field. But within seconds he had picked himself up off the ground, snarling, frothing, angrier than ever.
He sprinted for Tsukuyomi once again. I shouted after him, but the skin of the wolf had taken Gilberto Ramirez. He wouldn’t listen to reason, whether it came from friend or foe. In fact I suspected that turning into a werewolf destroyed his capacity for language altogether.
It didn’t end well. Even without my saying so Vanitas was prudent enough to hang back and regroup, but the berserk fury of lycanthropic transformation had sunk its hooks deep within what was left of Gil’s brain. He slashed at the empty space just feet away from Tsukuyomi’s face, and was once again brutally rebuffed. This time I definitely heard something break. Gil bounced off the force field again, limply clutching his wrist, which had been bent at an odd, horrific angle. He sank to the ground, and howled.
Tsukuyomi laughed good-naturedly. “You there. Shadow beast. You really must stop your friend before he attacks again. He can keep going, but he’ll only break every bone in his body.” He shook his head, tutting. “And what a terrible fate that would be.”
I scowled at him, unsure of how I could even hold Gil back. I wanted to call Tsukuyomi out for cheating, but the accusation hardly seemed fair. The problem was that I was far more accustomed to having the guys with the force fields play on my team. The last time we had to fight anyone who used shields was when Bastion’s mind had been controlled. Gil had broken off his talons then, but at least he was still human at the time, still possessed of enough sense and intelligence to stop.
The werewolf wasn’t. It kicked off the ground in a cloud of dust, then shot straight for Tsukuyomi again. The god laughed.
“I am so sorry, Gil,” I whispered to myself as I sent Vanitas’s scabbard rocketing towards him.
This wasn’t going to be pretty, but it was better to take Gil out of the fight than risk letting him hurt himself even more. With a sickening crunch, Vanitas met the side of Gil’s face. Gil thudded heavily to the ground, then stopped moving.
Tsukuyomi laughed even harder, clapping his hands. “Brother, sister. Do you see this? The mortals have turned against one another. They’ve taken their greatest, most spirited warrior out of the fight.” He raised his sword, its blade flashing in the moonlight. “And that leaves three scrawny humans and a flimsy flying blade. This should be far more manage
able.”
I caught a glimpse of Herald leaping out of the path of a dozen birds made out of pure flame, which was Amaterasu’s idea of artillery fire. He flicked his wrist towards Gil’s prone body, and a blast of frost lanced from his fingers, rapidly forming a dome of protective ice. Without missing a beat, Herald whirled, dodging another salvo of Amaterasu’s fire-birds, then countered with a lethal spray of knife-sharp icicles.
Damn. Okay, that was slick. Plus it proved that he supported what I’d done. No sense letting Gil beat himself to death against Tsukuyomi’s force field. My turn to play my hand, then.
“He’s down for the count, Tsukuyomi,” I called out. “The werewolf’s injured. Let’s leave our friend alone.”
“Fine by me, shadow beast. Now show me what you’ve got. My siblings say you defeated them in battle, Amaterasu twice.” He raised his hand to the sky. “So far all I’ve seen is cowardice and a reluctance to fight.”
He was baiting me, trying to get me all pissed so I’d do something impulsive. I hated to admit that it was working, my anger threading its way into the ball of fire hidden in the palm of my hand. But as I watched Tsukuyomi’s upraised hand, I realized that he was really only distracting me from what he was doing. The moonlight was filtering through his fingers, cascading into a spray of thin rays, as if passed through a prism.
