12: BURNING BRIDGES
Oilcan could barely believe that this was his Pittsburgh. A wall of rubble blocked South Aiken Avenue at the bridge over the busway. Dead oni littered the payment. Humans—friends and neighbors he’d known half his life—in camo rain gear and plastic trash bags, gathered tight within his shield. They gripped rifles, splattered with blood. Oni blood. Their own blood.
The rain did little to wash away the smell of gun smoke.
He thought he’d been racing to Oakland to save Tinker. He’d managed to beat her there. He hoped it meant that she was slowed down by organizing a larger force than what he had to bring to fight.
What he found made him glad that he’d come as quickly as he had. These were his people. He was the only one that could protect them until Tinker showed up.
Geoffrey Kryskill and Snapdragon had flagged Oilcan down near Sacred Heart.
“Oh, dude, so glad to see you! Everyone here is fine for now.” Geoffrey had pointed toward South Aiken. “But the militia needs domana backup at the bridge over the busway!”
Anyone else, Oilcan would have ignored and checked on Forge. Geoffrey was careful and precise. Measure twice, thrice even. Oilcan trusted Geoffrey to have weighed the situation as carefully as he worked with wood.
Snapdragon had handed a quiver of spell arrows through the driver’s window to Moon Dog. “Take these, holy one. I will get more from the enclaves.”
“Waya!” Moon Dog said. “I was low! Thank you!”
Oilcan didn’t expect to find Geoffrey’s older sister leading the militia. Jane had been grappling with a male nearly two feet taller than her, shouting out curses, even as death was blasting toward her. Oilcan barely got his shield up in time to stop the rocket from taking out Jane and the rest of the militia crouched behind the wall.
The Kryskills always had that Norse god vibe going on. Jane Kryskill turned—tall, blond, and regal as a Valkyrie. Her hair had come out of its ponytail when she’d grappled with the oni brute. It fell down over her shoulders in a golden mane. She wore the same neutral warrior mask of the sekasha: rage burned in her blue eyes but otherwise didn’t show. Lightning flickered across the dark sky behind her. Her big elfhound, Chesty, stood in guard position, rumbling threats.
“We should move,” Jane said in clumsy high school Elvish. She obviously wanted the sekasha to understand her tactics upfront. “If we were fighting humans, this is when the enemy would call in an airstrike to soften up the target.”
“I agree with this assessment,” Thorne Scratch said.
“Pull back!” Jane shouted, waving to the militia. “Follow me!”
Jane crouched as she ran, keeping behind the wall of rubble as if Oilcan wasn’t holding an impenetrable shield. He couldn’t blame her—he hadn’t been able to see the magical protection until he was made an elf. Her elfhound and the militia followed her.
Oilcan held his position, keeping the shield up as the militia retreated. The people he knew waved and smiled. One or two laughed, being as it was the first time they’d seen him since he became an elf.
“Nice ear job!” Dog Bow-Wow shouted as he followed Jane in a crouching run.
“Can I have one too?” Scary Mary asked, probably in all serious, as she kept glancing back with longing on her face.
Jane thought that the oni were pulling back to do an air strike. Certainly the enemy seemed to be retreating. Oilcan wasn’t sure, though, what to prepare for. More rocket grenades—or a dragon?
“What would the oni use to do an air strike with?” he asked Thorne.
Thorne Scratch clicked her tongue in an elvish shrug. She followed with guesses. “There is a chance that they will use human weapons—more of those that you just stopped. They know you are here, holding a shield, so that is unlikely. I believe it will be some kind of monster. Jewel Tear warned that they had horrors at the camps.”
Oilcan had been at the top of the Cathedral of Learning during Windwolf’s fight with Malice. It had given him a bird’s-eye view of the massive dragon trouncing the elf lord. The idea of fighting something that big and intelligent scared Oilcan. He backed up, following the militia as he maintained his shield.
Jane crouched at the corner of the driveway at the end of the bridge. The rest of the militia was retreating to the parking lot behind her. A fifteen-foot-tall redbrick wall lined the left side of the two-lane driveway. Ivy-covered steel girders spanned the lane overhead, spaced a dozen feet apart, seemingly acting as structural support to the century-old building. While the two-hundred-foot passage was safe from gunfire from the bridge, it seemed like a solidly narrow box to get trapped in.
“Is that safe?” Oilcan waved his right hand down South Aiken Avenue. “Shouldn’t we head to the enclaves?”
“We need to hold them here at the busway,” Jane said. “There’s no other choke point. If they spread through Oakland, they’ll just roll over us.”
Oilcan nodded even though he had no idea how to hold an army. He could barely see in the rainy dark, and his night vision had improved since being made an elf. Jane probably couldn’t see anything.
Amazingly, Nigel Reid was halfway down the driveway, being filmed by a cameraman. What was the Earth-based naturalist doing on Elfhome? When had he come to Elfhome? Oilcan doubted his eyes but there was no mistaking the Scottish burr as the man said, “We had to skedaddle off as the situation got a bit radge. I think we’re alright. That was a barry display of domana spell-casting, it was!”
Nigel must have come to Elfhome during the last Shutdown. Oilcan’s and Tinker’s lives had imploded after saving Windwolf in June. They changed species. They moved to new homes. They abandoned their business. They fell out of contact with many of their old friends.
Oilcan had even stopped listening to the radio. Thanks to Chloe Polanski, the media was full of outright lies, half truths, and pure speculation that were all emotionally painful. It reminded him too much of the days immediately after his mother’s murder. Oilcan used his ancient iPod to listen to music instead of the radio.
Lightning flickered, striking nearby. Thunder boomed, making Oilcan flinch. On the oni side of the bridge there were weird flashes of magic, like firecrackers going off against his new senses. He wasn’t sure what it meant—he didn’t have the experience to translate the input. The snap and crackle went on and on. What was that?
He backed up more, following the retreating militia so his shield would continue to protect them.
Jane moved down the driveway, giving orders over her headset radio. “This is Storm Six. Hot Metal, find an escape route from the parking lot. We can’t get bottled in here. Homestead, move into the building. Use windows for sniper position but stay back from the sills…”
“Oh, geez! Not again!” Corg Durrack yelled from somewhere behind Nigel. “Incoming! Freaking huge bees!” There was a burst of machine-gun fire. “How do you kill these things?”
A swarm of the giant hornets came flying out of the dark rain—too many to count, and each the size of a wolf. The massive insects were too widespread; Oilcan couldn’t block them from attacking the scattered militia. He had no idea how to expand the diameter of this shield.
“We just need to kill one,” Moon Dog said. “The swarm will focus its attack on those nearest to the death scent.”
Oilcan remembered that Moon Dog had them burn Rebecca’s clothes to get rid of the attack pheromones soaked into them. He concentrated at keeping his left hand cocked, holding the shield spell, as he summoned a force strike. He aimed toward the bridge instead of the driveway, hoping to lure the swarm away from the militia.
The force strike took out a half dozen hornets, reducing the massive wolf-sized bodies down to rat-sized smears on broken pavement. Instantly the swarm turned and dove at him. They landed on his shield, closing off what little light was left in the night. It plunged them into utter darkness, surrounded by the defending noise of hundreds of giant insect wings sounding like a thousand angry violinists.
Thorne Scratch took out a spell light and activated the shining orb with a word.
It was not an improvement.
The hornets’ alien amber faces, close enough to reach out and touch, gazed in at them—each as large as a dinner plate. Antenna quivering. Wedged shaped jaws working. Butcher-knife-sized stingers jabbing against his shield.
Normally, Oilcan wouldn’t have said he was afraid of bugs; this day was testing that belief. Even knowing that the hornets were magical constructs, that the real insects hidden inside the fake puppet shells were less than a foot long, didn’t help.
Lightning flashed, barely visible through the thick layer of massive angry hornets. Thunder boomed loudly. Even as it faded, something trumpeted nearby.
“War horns,” Thorne Scratch identified the sound.
“They are releasing a horror,” Moon Dog added. “That is the command to clear the area as a horror will readily attack the oni army if given a chance. The creatures kill anything in front of them. The oni are to swing southwest.”
Thorne Scratch glanced hard at Moon Dog.
Moon Dog took the look as a question. “I was on a gossamer with veterans of the Oni War for a week. I made good use of my time. You know what Tempered Steel says…”
“‘The true battle starts before the first weapon is drawn,’” Thorne Scratch and Moon Dog said together. They’d both studied under one of the most famous sekasha at Cold Mountain Temple. While they had just met this morning for the first time, they had known of each other for years due to the common connection.
Oilcan hadn’t wanted another person following him around, but he was glad now that Thorne Scratch had backup. He tried to shut out thoughts of how it could all end badly. What should he do now?
Southwest would take the oni to the Centre Avenue Bridge across the busway, over three blocks away.
“The oni are heading to Centre Avenue!” Oilcan called to Jane. “I’ll deal whatever they’re throwing this way. You should move to Centre.”
“Roger that!” Jane shouted.
It meant that Oilcan would have to handle the horror solo while the militia dealt with the main oni force.
If he could handle the horror…
First he needed to kill the hornets.
Holding his shield stable with his left hand, he flashed through force strike after force strike. He was beating the hornets to a pulp when he felt a huge flare of magic on the other side of the bridge. It felt the same as the firecracker motes that had preceded the hornets but on a larger scale.
“Here it comes!” He moved away from the driveway’s mouth, hoping to lure the mystery beast away from the militia. “Whatever it is!”
A creature came bounding over the bridge, jumping from point to point, ignoring the concertina wire, the dead bodies, the rubble wall. It was like nothing Oilcan had ever seen before. It had the general build of a warg—if said warg was as big as a house. It had a thick armored hide that reminded Oilcan of an ankylosaurus. Random spikes and tusks and horns protruding all over its head and body.
“Kau!” Moon Dog said in his thick Stone Clan accent. “It is a baenae!”
“A what?” Oilcan asked.
“You should know the shield that you are currently holding has limits,” Thorne said quickly. “It is very strong against sudden impact like a force strike or human guns. It allows, however, certain elements like sound, light, and air to pass. It must or we would be deaf and blind on the battlefield and would slowly suffocate. Unfortunately, to allow these elements in, others can follow. We need to kill this horror quickly.”
In other words, the beast did something that would penetrate his shield over time. Oilcan could feel the chill of the night. The wet of the air. While the thunder was muffled as it rumbled over them, it was still shockingly loud. Any number of things could breach his protection.
The creature slammed into the invisible edge of his shield, snarling. A pungent smell like an angry skunk seeped in over the smell of rain, mud, oily pavement, and wet dog. Moments later, his eyes started to burn.
“Is it poisonous?” Oilcan guessed.
“Among other things,” Thorne said.
Oilcan hit it with a force strike, trying to knock it back. The thing hunched its massive shoulders, digging into the pavement with claws the size of pickaxes. Mist blasted out of its nostrils, freezing the rain puddles around it. A thin frost formed on the outer edge of Oilcan’s shield. The stench intensified. Tears started to well up in his eyes.
He needed to get some breathing space! If he couldn’t knock it back, could he move them?
“We’re moving!” he warned the two warriors. “Grab hold of me!”
A childhood full of experimenting with the written spells within the Dufae Codex was all he had to pull from. He hadn’t had time to properly learn the Stone Clan esva as it was meant to be used.
Holding his shield tight, he cast the spell that he and Tinker called “catapult.”
“Wh-wh-what?” Thorne Scratch cried as they soared up in the air. “This is not how you use that spell!”
“Waya!” Moon Dog shouted joyfully as if he were on a roller coaster.
As they soared upward, Oilcan aimed force strikes at the utility poles that lined either side of South Aiken. The tall creosote-soaked poles shattered at their base, tangling the beast in electrical lines, streetlights, and transformers. One of the barrel transformers struck the baenae, making it flicker, revealing the animal within controlling the puppet shell.
Moon Dog shot a spell arrow in that instant. It flashed forward, transforming into a beam of light. It struck the inner beast but missed a killing shot as it flinched its head to the side at the last moment. Its ear was clipped and its shoulder grazed by the laser-intense beam. The puppet shell went back to solid. The creature roared with pain.
“Ah, I got greedy,” Moon Dog said sadly. “I should not have gone for a head shot.”
The baenae drew back its head and then lunged forward to breathe out a blizzard of cold.
The world went white around them. The rain smearing down Oilcan’s shield turned to thick ice. His breath misted in the sudden cold within his protective circle. The cold seemed to suck away all his heat, leaving him shivering. He could barely see as his eyes burned like hot cinders, and tears poured down his cheeks to freeze.
He cast catapult again. The momentum shattered the ice encasing them. They shifted only a dozen feet before starting to descend again. He cast the spell again to boost them high up in the air. He felt two more large spikes of magic on the other side of the bridge. The oni had created two more horrors. “We have two more incoming!”
“We cannot stand against three of these,” Thorne stated calmly, as if they weren’t fighting for their lives. “The poison will overwhelm us.”
“Okay,” Oilcan said while thinking fast. “We can hurt it if I hit it with a big hunk of metal and you two shoot spell arrows.” The only thing he could see that qualified as “a big hunk” was a red fire hydrant, just beside the driveway that the militia had vanished down. A childhood with Tinker made him very familiar with how they worked. He’d have to hit it so that the water pressure within turned the pieces into projectiles. “Ready?”
Oilcan landed them with the edge of his shield nearly touching the hip-high pipe. He hit it with a force strike. The metal sheared off at the weak point, the massive water pressure within the pipe shooting the pieces out to slam into the oncoming monster. The solid illusion of the horror flickered, revealing the beast within. Instantly two shafts of light lept the distance as the sekasha released their spell arrows. They both had gone for the heart, choosing the sure kill. The massive beast staggered and went down.
Even as it collapsed, Oilcan’s eyes teared up until he was blind. He staggered backward, blinking and wiping at his face with the hem of his T-shirt. Two more horrors were coming at them and there were no other handy pieces of metal lying around.
Flaaammbooom!
Blind as he was, Oilcan couldn’t see what had just caught fire. Whatever it was—it was huge. The light and heat and smell of burning asphalt washed over him even with his shield up. As he blinked his vision clear, a second column of flame bloomed mid-bridge. Massive. Hot. Loud. The horrors were on fire. Even as they trashed about, howling in pain, a third and fourth and fifth column of flames beat down on them.
“Thank the gods,” Thorne murmured. “Tinker domi has arrived.”