Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,223

of hell, and for what? Some dead bitch’s sense of entitlement?

I realized I was screaming and cursing Jo’s name, over and over. And this time, over the cries of the crowd, over the detonation of faraway bombs, over the sound of fire eating up the street, I swear I could hear her laughing. Because she knew we couldn’t handle this. Not alone. It would take an army—

And then an army arrived.

Suddenly, all the green shutters on the second floor of the great pharmacy slammed open, almost at once. And a group of aproned employees stepped out onto the balconies, fists full of tiny potion bottles, the kind the world paid a premium price for. Because Rothgay’s was the best in the business, the Cadillac of potion sellers, the place where even war mages shopped when they couldn’t be bothered to brew their own.

As evidenced when a hail of death rained down onto the street.

Dozens of tiny bottles hit the cobblestones, sending up waves of brittle blue flames that turned anything they touched into powder. Hundreds of bodies puffed away all at once, creating a cloud of pale ash so thick that, for a moment, it looked like a sandstorm on the other side of the barrier. The cremated remains slammed into Pritkin’s shields harmlessly, but there was another group of attackers right behind them, scrabbling and tearing at the thinning blue walls, as if nothing had happened.

That wave went up in flames, too, and part of a third, the rest of which were caught by a sticky black substance that looked like tar but flowed upward from shattered vials on the ground. It climbed the rotting bodies in seconds, surging along their torsos and over their heads, blinding them. And then abruptly jerked them down.

They were left stuck to the road in a writhing pool of sticky black, yet still reaching for the heavens, like something trying to emerge from the primordial ooze. It was horrible, mind-bending, macabre. And lucky.

Very lucky. Because the blind eyes and reaching limbs tripped up the fourth wave of the assault, not knowing what they were grabbing. They dragged them down, and the black ooze covered them, too. Some completely, while others were only trapped by a foot or a leg.

But they were going nowhere.

Unlike the throng surging around them, or using the backs of the fallen like stepping-stones in a river, not caring how much damage they caused as long as they reached their objective: us.

And plenty of them managed it. Because the remaining blue diamonds were almost at street level now, and were vomiting up an army of the dead. Ones that hadn’t been damaged in the fall like the others, but were fresh and fast and deadly. And while Rothgay’s people were doing their best, there was no way to contain them all.

It was something the potion sellers seemed to have figured out, because they’d resorted to protecting the area nearest to their shop, providing a narrow escape route for the remaining customers.

It appeared to be working.

But it also left us standing alone.

The area inside Pritkin’s shields had shrunk as he drew them tighter and tighter to save power. They were barely three feet from his body now, and didn’t look like water anymore. They were more like rubber, stretching inward in the shape of hands and elbows and knees, and the ghostly faces pressed against the surface on all sides, their mouths open, their teeth bared and biting. They were going to eat us alive, I thought, clutching the little girl. They were going to—

And then Pritkin’s head jerked around, I didn’t know why. I couldn’t see anything but death. But then I heard it, faintly over the screams from the street, the still echoing drumbeats of the explosion, and the little girl’s sobs: the sound of boots hitting stone—hundreds of them.

And I realized: the real army had just arrived.

War mages flooded the scene like a brown leather river, more than I’d ever seen in one place before. They knocked away the monsters, ripped straight through them with spells I didn’t know and couldn’t name, surged up the street. A dozen took over shielding the main hall of the apothecary, just as Pritkin’s great shield failed. While the rivers of leather and pale flesh met and clashed up the road, with so many spells being thrown that I was all but blinded by the light.

Chapter Fifty-one

For a moment, I just stood there, being battered by the army of leather coats