"I owe you nothing but my wrath!" Lilith shrieked back in the negotiating language of their kind while leaning over the table and meeting Nuit eye to eye. "But it will be a first in chambers." She pulled back and shook her head, and then laughed. Damali froze. That was not the expected reaction.
Nuit leaned over farther and brushed Lilith's mouth with a quick kiss, and then closed his eyes. "Thank you, Madame Chairwoman. Forgive my outburst." Lilith swept away from him and waved her hand, chuck ling in a low rumble. "The pulse of that erection, Fallen, is enough to make you deaf, dumb, and blind. I hope I find more than your ashes when I return."
Nuit glanced at Damali and dropped his black safety barrier from around her. "If it is thus that I am ash, surely it will be because she has scorched me." Damali smiled a tight smile, watching Lilith slowly walk away, and knowing Lilith did have eyes in the back of her head. She drew her Isis blade into her palm, ready.
"Now, where were we?" Nuit crooned, walking around his throne and beckoning her to him with a look.
Anything she was about to say to stall him came to an abrupt halt as the marble floor began to rumble and Lilith and Sebastian whirled into the chamber. Damali began back
ing away from the central vibration point that seemed to fol low her around within seconds of her every move. Wall torches were falling along with rocks. Fallon Nuit was trying to get to her like a valiant lover. But she made it appear as though she was falling from his grasp, too - knowing full well he'd jettison her somewhere she'd never been in the pit, and wouldn't know how to get out.
Then just as suddenly as the underground earthquake began, a swarm of vicious Harpies came up from the wide fissure that opened in the floor. They rushed at her, screeching, causing Fallon Nuit to foolishly attempt to come between them and her as she butchered the little beasts with her blade.
"Call them off, Lilith!" Nuit shouted as gook from Damali's swings splattered him.
"I didn't send them," Lilith screeched over the din. "My husband did! Something's wrong!" Oh shit. Damali's mind screamed for an out as she gripped her Isis like it was a baseball bat and swung wildly, decapitating ugly little fanged faces from squishy demon bodies. Soon to be overrun, she had only one option left, the one she was saving for the Vampire Council as soon as the odds were even - but the best laid plans sometimes never stood a chance.
Fumbling as she hurried, Damali dug a hand into her jeans, pulled out the last grenade, and lobbed it over into the abyss to hit Level Seven's sentries. The moment the orb of Light
went over the edge, Harpies screamed and dove after it. Lilith flew at her with a blade poised at her heart, and Se bastian whirled on her with black lightning charges from be
hind that temporarily stunned her.
"She had to defend herself - your Harpies made her fight! She is a Neteru, it is her nature, Lilith," Nuit shouted in a standoff with Lilith, blade drawn. "Harm her, Sebastian, and know that - "
"Did you see what she threw into the Ultimate Darkness's lair?" Lilith whispered, staring at Fallon Nuit like he was insane.
"You can f**k her when she's dead, my friend, after you make a blood sacrifice of her -
but if you do not address this breach, you may find yourself unable to enjoy it if she lives." Sebastian turned to Lilith for approval and then slowly drew away. "Oh... noooo ..."
"What?" Lilith screeched, spinning to look at Sebastian. Damali flipped up, took a fighter's stance, and kept her eyes on the pit and the three vampires before her.
"They reversed the spell! Take cover!"
Huge, monster-sized tentacles vomited up from the floors, its various-sized limbs undulating with messenger demons and Harpies in their grasp. Damali began running toward the door as the long ropes of spell lashed out, twin ing around thrones, wall torches, and the table as Lilith, Nuit, and Sebastian tried to escape each grab. Funnel clouds of transporter demons in the vaulted ceiling drew vertical tendrils to shoot up and snatch the teeming mass of mating bats down into the fissure in the floor. Black charges from an infuriated Nuit chased Damali across the floor like machine-gun spray. But a bolt of blue-white energy resembling C-4 blew council doors off the hinges, followed by a battle-ax lodged in Lilith's throne hurled by Eve. Dodging a charge from Sebastian, Damali flipped to corner his escape to the antechamber, shattering his blade in two. Nzinga and Eve had Lilith's attention tem porarily hemmed in while Penthesileia ripped through Fallen Nuit's Armani suit at the chest with a machete. However, the battle temporarily ceased when a black-fire-snorting, golden minotaur the height of a six-story building climbed out of the fissure, exploding the floor and walls, and quaking the vaulted ceiling to start an avalanche. It still had souls twisting in its jagged, blackened teeth like white maggots as it rose with a roar and leapt into the center of what had been Vampire Council Chambers. The great beast spun and pawed the earth with castiron, razor-sharp cloven hooves, its spaded tail a bullwhip against the cavern walls. Cornered, the Neteru Queens were backed onto the nar row crag that had once separated the Vampire Council Chambers from the rest of the portals, with the Sea of Per petual Agony's bubbling, lava surface separating the divides. The furious Vampire Council members were nearly hidden by the massive girth of the huge beast that suddenly lowered its head with black, gleaming horns pointed at the Queens and charged. One mind - all four Queens moved as swift mirror images of one another. Damali's blade replicated into the hands of her Queen sisters. Penthesileia quickly thrust her blade into the cavern dirt, reached over her shoulder and drew an Amazon bow and arrow, and fired with a silver energy rope attached to her arrow. The arrow burned into the rock surface behind the beast as it lunged and cleared the lava sea. The Amazon Queen immediately grabbed the end of the line, and yanked her blade from the foul dirt to pass the beast gouging out an eye.
Eve covered her, sending power pulses like mortar fire into the wide open and unprotected Vampire Council Chambers, while Nzinga grabbed the blue-white energy line as it swung back to propel herself past the bucking, injured beast to maim it again, shearing off one horn.
Taking flight, Damali's wings lit the cavern, further pushing back Lilith, Fallen, and Sebastian. As the angry entity thrashed in the cavern, she was able to grab hold of its ear, flip herself onto its back, and drive her blade into the other eye. But when it leapt and smashed its back against stalactites, goring itself in its agony and rage, Damali flattened her body to its smelly, oily, scaled skin. Only narrowly had she missed being crushed to death, were it not for the jagged rock formations in the cavern ceiling that dug into its huge shoulders while she hid between the kneading sinews.
But opportunity was opportunity. Seconds mattered, and Damali slipped off the raging beast as it bucked against granite and struggled to free itself, bleeding black blood. Her Queen sisters were in an unguarded portal area, and Damali headed toward them. The spell tentacles had rushed up over the edges of the now wide-open Level Seven fissure in Vampire Council, and had Lilith by the leg, Nuit in a full coil, and only the outline of Sebastian's struggling form could be seen. The corridors were cleared, as entities on every level were temporarily trapped by the spell, and massive, seeking tentacles were reaching out with yearning toward the huge minotaur.
"We're out," Damali said, glancing around quickly for any landmark she knew, and finding none. Even the Sea of Perpetual Agony was writhing as tentacles came up with tor tured souls in their clutches before submerging again into the inferno.
"Let us go out with a blinding reminder to never screw with Mother Nature," Eve said, her gaze hard but satisfied.
The four Queens smiled, touched their blades together, and raised the combined Isis as a column of light shot up, creating a vacuum opening.
But Damali's smile was the widest. "We kicked their asses tonight!"
* * *
"you did what?" Aset whispered, looking at the four dirty, demon-splattered Queens as she walked behind her li onesses in the decontamination chamber. She shook her head as she stared at Damali's wings. "You look more like a Valkyrie that escorts dead soldiers to Valhalla on the battle field than a healing Powers angel that is - "
"We slayed them," Eve said, unable to contain her joy. "All the way to the bottom."
"You should have seen Fallon's face - he actually bulked on Lilith!" Damali threw her head back and laughed. "I so owed them both that shit, Aset, if I don't live twenty more minutes, it's all good ... just to see that. In council, too!" The foursome laughed and exchanged back slaps.