Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,69

The creature turned on a dime, lightning fast, and flung itself back down at me.

All I saw was a pale white underbelly, blotting out the sky. I tried a time spell, but it didn’t work—maybe because this was a spirit battle, where time didn’t have the same effect, or maybe because I was pissing myself; I didn’t know. And then it was on me.

I felt claws rake me, the pain of a power loss stagger me, a weight far heavier than anything my human body could have withstood flatten me.

“Kill it!” I screamed mentally, letting loose the only weapons I had left, a pair of ghostly looking knives that reside in the bracelet I had stolen off a dark mage months ago. They were horribly unreliable, and as often ignored me as not, not to mention the fact that I didn’t even know if they’d work in—

Here. I finished the thought while being deluged in what smelled like fish guts. My knives had taken my attacker right through what I guess was its belly.

That was both good and bad, because it reared up over top of me, releasing the pressure but also giving me my first good look at it. And it was horrifying. Like something out of Escher’s worst nightmare, it kept changing, but none of its forms were good. An eldritch horror of a thing, one second it was a large, lumpy undersea monster filling the narrow corridor and thrashing around with a dozen tentacles; the next it was half-man, half-fish, only nothing like the merpeople I’d seen. They had been beautiful, graceful—and terrible, yes, but in the way a summer storm is terrible, flashing across the sky, filling you with awe and wonder.

There was neither of those things here. It had a face that would have turned Medusa to stone, with slitted, pale eyes and more slits for a nose, and a huge mouth filled with long, superthin, razor sharp teeth. The backbone was humpbacked and misshapen, halfway between fin and bone, and the hugely muscled arms ended in incredibly elongated webbed fingers, like king crab legs if they commonly came with spiked talons on the ends.

It also didn’t seem to bleed blood. My knives were flying around, stabbing and stabbing at it, but the only thing that bubbled up to the surface of the skin was some kind of strange, translucent jelly. I knew that because it spat a lump of it at me, and it burned—God, it burned!

I screamed, because it didn’t matter now, and the thing roared back, a stuttering, nails-on-a-chalkboard-times-one-thousand sort of sound that had my skin crawling and my own scream turning into more of a shriek, and then it brought one of those huge arms down.

Another scream died in my throat, or maybe in my chest, which those wicked-looking claws had just stabbed all the way through. It was a stunning blow, one that left wild, windblown echoes swirling around us. And me trapped against the ground, my mouth open but unable to speak, my body writhing like a bug on a pin—on four of them.

“Hey!” someone yelled, and the creature’s head turned. “Hey, big and ugly!”

Billy, I thought. Run!

He wasn’t running. He was waving his arms, trying to get the creature to let go of me and chase him. And that was so stupid I didn’t even have words.

Didn’t he get it? In a spirit battle he’d go down before I would! I had the strength of my body to draw on; he had nothing, no protection at all!

So I did the only thing I could think of and grabbed one of my knives as it passed. I couldn’t normally touch them, unless you counted the tiny, interlocking daggers on my bracelet. But that wasn’t true in the spirit realm, where the hilt felt cool and solid against my palm when I closed my hand on it.

And used it to slash at the creature’s claws.

It cut them clean through, leaking more of that burning jelly, but the rest were still buried in the ground—and in me! I wasn’t any better off, I realized, as the monster looked down, as if surprised that his prey would fight back. But it wasn’t alarmed—not until my second knife slapped into my palm, and the two of them together lunged upward, pulling me up and off the terrible, bony protrusions.

Power flooded out into the air, my spiritual substitute for blood. I was hemorrhaging and wouldn’t last long, not bleeding life energy like a geyser.