For just a moment in time the situation was very simple.
Deirdre and the baby might live or they might die.
Lupé and my son might still be alive or they might already be dead.
But one thing for damn sure, they didn't have a chance in Hell if we let any more of these Froggies come a-courtin'. I leapt to my feet and joined Cuchulainn in meeting the charge.
We smashed into the first half dozen and Cuch immediately cut three of them down with the greatsword. I smashed two amphibian skulls together while a third fishman tried to climb me like a telephone lineman.
"She's alive!" Zotz bellowed behind me.
Of course she was. Lupé was a were. Unless they used a silver blade she'd be hard to kill.
I threw the climber off and onto a couple of his wingmen. Cuchulainn had sliced and diced through three more to get within ten feet of the door.
"I'm not sure the baby will make it, though!" Volpea yelled.
I wrenched one of the Deep One's heads so viciously it popped off showering me with ichorlike blood.
Of course not. We were more than a hundred and fifty miles from a doctor and adequate medical facilities. And the odds were against the hale and healthy getting off this boat at this very moment.
Cuchulainn cut down two more Deep Ones and then slammed the door shut with a massively muscled shoulder. Turning and bracing his back against the shuddering entryway, he tossed me the sword and I made short work of the remaining three Frogs.
I ran back to the pool and knelt down to where Volpea and Zotz had borne Lupé. Her face and hair were a study in scarlet and her eyes remained closed. Her breathing was ragged and all the more worrisome as she was breathing for two.
"Lupé?" I whispered.
"Save the baby," she whispered. "Save our son. Nothing else matters . . ."
I looked back over at Deirdre. "Where's Dr. Mooncloud?"
My former enforcer groaned. "Not here. Stayed with Theresa."
"What? They didn't come?" It vaguely occurred to me that Laveau had kept her word in giving Kellerman her own body and freeing Deirdre in the process.
Samm put a hand on my arm. "I thought you knew. Theresa refused to leave. Mooncloud stayed behind to help provide cover—"
I nodded. "So Irena could get the others out without Laveau's goons stopping them. Okay. No doctor." I would think about the likely fate of Dr. Mooncloud, Theresa, and one of the cloned fetuses later. Right now: the problems at hand!
Since Lupé was a were and I was a—what? No longer fully human but still largely undefined. The point: our son should have some genetic toughness giving him the edge in a medical emergency. And Deirdre, as a former vampire and now also undefined preternatural entity—she had survived a human sacrifice. But would the cloned human embryo implanted in her womb survive? And which one was it? My deceased wife? My dead daughter?
Dead twice because of me?
I ground the heels of my fists into my eye sockets. "Is there anything in the room we can fabricate stretchers out of?"
"We are running out of time," Cuchulainn called from his post at the door, the repeated pounding making his voice shake.
"Getting tired, Big Guy?" Zotz growled.
"No. Just thinking that no matter how stupid these things are, sooner or later they're going to figure out there are other ways into this room." It was the longest speech I had ever heard him make.
The rest of us looked at each other.
And I looked at Liban.
She was holding Deirdre's head up out of the carnage soup and looking at me.
"Can you open the door here?" I asked. "Take them to your healers?"
"Take them now?" she asked. "Both mother and son?"
"I can't let them die!"
She nodded. "But if he is born in my realm, you will never see him again."
"I thought that was the deal."
"No. Only that if I took him as changeling, you could not follow to visit. There was always the possibility he could come to you. You are his father. But if his mother comes to us and he be born in our realm then, under the Accords, he is no longer yours nor of your kind. The blood bond is severed. You sacrifice your claim forever."
I started and stared at her. "Sacrifice?"
Her breath stuttered and her eyes grew wide. "The Telling . . ."
My heart caught in my chest. Sacrifice . . .
Fate . . .
Fatum in the ancient Latin.
From fari, meaning to "tell" or "predict."
Was this the sacrifice preordained by some distant oracle from the start?
Or was it a more nebulous destiny that there would be some kind of sacrifice, some kind of loss, and every time I had conspired to keep my son from Fate's altar, events shifted, possibilities changed, outcomes wavered—but the final destination remained: there would be some kind of sacrifice?
The room was suddenly quiet.
"They've stopped trying to break through the door," Cuchulainn said. "They will try another door in a moment. Mayhap more than one."
"Save them," I told Liban.
"The mother and the child?"
"Both mothers, both children," I said. "I want you to take Deirdre, too."
She shook her head. "I do not know what the others will permit. I do not know if I have the strength to port all of us."
"If everyone wants my son so bloody much, those are the terms of the deal!"
She looked down at Deirdre then over at Lupé. "I can but try."
I leaned down and kissed Lupé on her forehead. The last time I had done so, the silver compounds in my tissues had burned her badly. Perhaps the nanites were detoxifying my lips for this one specific task. Or maybe the slimy skein of blood that coated her hair and skin protected her just enough from that chaste, momentary contact. "Take care of our son," I whispered. "Take care of yourself." Anything more seemed hurtful and inadequate. I eased her over into Liban's embrace.
Deirdre opened her eyes again and looked up at me. "Don't I get a kiss? I'm having your baby, too."
I think I started to laugh. I couldn't tell: there were tears in my eyes. "Which one? My wife or my daughter?"
She coughed a little and I couldn't tell if the bloody spittle on her lips was her own or from the pool. "Does it matter? You're never going to see us again, anyway."
"Hey," I murmured, "I'd rather never see you alive than see you dead."
"Yeah, yeah . . ." She rolled her eyes over at Volpea. "You the new enforcer?"
Volpea nodded.
"Take good care of him until I get back."
Samm leaned toward me and stage-whispered. "She doesn't understand. She thinks they'll let her come back."
"She understands," Lupé muttered. "I'd worry about the elves if I were you."
And that was that because three different doors flew open and more Deep Ones burst in to reclaim their temple.
Six things happened at once.
Liban began to chant.
I tossed the sword back to Cuch and picked up the Mossberg.
Volpea and Zotz climbed out of the pool streaming blood and gore like a couple of wedding fountains in a slaughterhouse.
Irena slipped from the tent of Cuchulainn's shirt, crouched down, and her smooth brown flesh rippled and flowed into a pelt of sleek black fur. The panther growled then screamed a challenge.
Samm raised the Glock and adopted a shooter's stance.
And something that looked like a cross between a bulldog and a komodo dragon with mange burst out of the pool and lunged at the largest knot of Deep Ones like a fat man at an unattended hotdog stand.
Chaos reigned. Blood flowed. Grievous wounds ensued.
There are those who have complained, upon those few occasions when I can be compelled to recount certain events, that I do not provide sufficient details of the epic battles, the face-to-face, to-the-death matches in which I saw my enemies fall before me or else saw them dispatched by my allies. It is as if some would find entertainment value in graphic descriptions of gruesome deaths, bloody mutilations, horrific acts of savagery—battle porn for the armchair warriors. I understand the bloodlust that rises on the battlefield, the body's fight-or-flight response to danger and the berserker rage that takes over in the presence of those who would do you and your family harm. It is one thing to joyously commit to the destruction of evil, personified by its foot soldiers in a physical confrontation. Quite another to revel vicariously in the tales of old soldiers, lusting for the gory details while surrounded by the peace and comforts of hearth and home.
Perhaps the details would be more important if, one by one, my companions were falling beneath the teeth and claws of the Children of Daddy Dagon. The Deep Ones presented a frightening visage to humans whose closest encounter with the dark side was a tax audit. One on one they were a lot less formidable for a Mesoamerican bat-demon or an immortal Celtic battle god, or even a cybernetically enhanced, necrophagically juiced, semi-undead, majorly pissed-off guy who had just lost his family, thanks to these finny cretins. One on one, we kicked ass like there was no tomorrow.
The disparity in numbers changed the dynamics, however. For each Deep One dropped, two more appeared to take its place. The room was getting crowded, not just from the pile of bodies but from the new bodies piling on. Slowly but steadily we were being backed toward the pool again.
Then the ambient light changed from red to purple. I looked over my shoulder. A nimbus of pulsing blue light surrounded Liban, Deirdre, and Lupé, contrasting with the red glow of the emergency lights. They flickered like an optical illusion and a fragrance of sap moss momentarily leaked into the sharp, sweet, metallic-tasting air.
I turned back to deal with the three Frogs that were attempting to eviscerate me with their claws and mostly getting in each other's way. I had yet to fire the Mossberg; it held a finite number of shells and our foes were beginning to appear infinite in numbers. It worked well enough as a club and I had just beaten down the second amphibian when the bang of displaced air behind me told me that my family was gone forever. I swung the Mossberg hard enough to take off the third creature's head and guarantee that the shotgun could never again be discharged in a safe manner.
I looked back at the empty place they had occupied and saw a fearsome sight.
A scaled creature was climbing out of the bloody swamp of sacrifices.
Humanoid, it was barely five feet in height and it glittered from head to toe in brass-colored scales. Metallic wings flared back from its bulbous head and sharp spikes and angles jutted from its elbows and knees. Its torso was encased in a hard-shelled carapace like a pale gold beetle and a curtain of blood veiled its face and draped its body in such a way that I didn't recognize her until she drew near and drew her short sword.
"Run," Fand said. "Take the others and leave the ship."
I stared at Liban's sister all decked out in archaic battle armor. "There are hostages and wounded all over the place."
She stared back. "You have made the hardest sacrifice. The rest will be easier, now. Go. The pathways are merging one last time. If you do not leave now you will miss your transport. And then how will you fulfill the Telling and save the world?"
I just stared at her with my mouth open as she turned and gutted a couple of attacking Deep Ones with her sword. What kind of answer could I give to a bunch of gibberish that continued to make no sense? Merging pathways? Transport? Save the world? And, hey, running away from the monsters right here and right now seemed a sorry start to the world-saving process.
Besides, pounding these Froggies into chum just felt so good!
"Look back at the sacrificial basin," Fand said as I grabbed another head and gave it a three-quarter twist.
I glanced back at Liban's point of departure and Fand's port of entry. The swimming pool was limned in an actinic black glow.
Don't ask me how the color black can glow and even give the impression of being too bright to look at directly but, there it was. The pool suddenly fell through the floor and the edges of the pool-shaped hole smoked and flickered in an oval-shaped line of red-orange. Meanwhile the black glow started to move away from that empty hole in all directions. Whatever it touched disappeared in gouts of odoriferous smoke. Flooring, pool chairs, bodies—anything.
"Don't let the glow touch you," Fand said unnecessarily.
At the rate it was spreading, the room's floor would be wholly consumed in less than seven minutes. Well, before that, in maybe two minutes, the room would be bisected where the ends of the pool were closest to the walls. As the divide widened, we would be forced into the arms of the Deep Ones as we ran out of flooring and the chasm widened at our backs.
It was time to retreat.
"Fall back!" I yelled. "And don't anybody touch the dark lights!"
As we retired from the field, the Froggies followed. When we jumped the widening divide, they jumped after us. So we turned and beat them down until the gap was so wide they were falling into the eerie area of effect.
The Deep Ones weren't fast learners. Even the sight of their comrades falling against the dissolving edge of the floor and being chewed in half by the boiling black light didn't deter them. Wave after wave made the attempt, screaming, "Ia! Ia!"
Zotz yelled: "Hey now!" and I yelled: "Hey now!" and we yelled: "Iko, iko, un-day!" to taunt them forward. Occasionally we'd change it up with "Old MacDonald had a farm, Ee-i-ee-i-oh!" It worked far longer than it should have: fifty or more fell into the glowy pit where the pool had descended through the decks below.
And now the sound of rushing, churning water began to rise from those same depths and the entire ship began to shudder.
"We've been holed!" Zotz said, peering over the edge. "We won't make it back out the way we came in, in time—even if we don't encounter any resistance."
"I'm thinking there will be resistance," Cuchulainn observed, wiping his sword on a discarded towel.
"We go up to an outer deck and lower a lifeboat," Samm said.
I looked at Fand. "Okay, you dissolve the ship. Fine. Force us all back into the water. The water's their element, not ours!" I yelled.
"First of all," she answered, "we destroy their breeding chambers—"
"We caught a couple of the little buggers breeding. Have to say I'm not impressed."
"Not the Deep Ones!" Fand yelled, pointing at another door. "The shoggoths!" A carpet of bubbling goo was pouring into the room and rolling across the cowering line of waiting sacrifices who had not yet fled during the confusion. I felt a flash of pity mixed with annoyance at their bovine stupidity. Then relief that one problem had been taken out of my hands.
Checking the scorecard: more monster than human, now.
"We destroy their temple!" Fand continued as the pudding flowed to the edge of the pit and began to hiss and burn where it made contact with the flickering field of black. "That buys you time."
"Time? Time for what?"
The floor was half gone and so were the shoggoths. We had to leave now.
"Time to go!" Zotz yelled as the ship lurched and tilted some fifteen degrees to starboard.
We ran, looking for an exit before it all turned into The Poseidon Adventure.
Every few minutes the ship would shake and groan and tilt some more as it settled deeper into the water. We threaded our way through a three-story theater and showroom, the multitiered rows of seats providing a diabolical obstacle course in their canted, new positions. We came to a five-story atrium but the glass elevators could not be trusted so we made do with ramps and companionways that were doubly steep now and angled to where we often split the difference between walking on a wall or a floor.
"Stop it!" Volpea growled at Zotz.
I looked at the werefox and the bat-demon who were jogging, nearly side by side. Volpea caught my look. "He's humming 'My Heart Will Go On'!" she explained. "I hate that movie! Even more so, now!"
Zotz turned his head and grinned at her. "But . . . Leo . . . ?" he pleaded with mock sincerity.
"Don't make me have to separate you two," I wheezed. The nanos were getting testy about my energy consumption this past hour. Either they were getting greedy or I wasn't taking enough time to refuel.
The Deep Ones were somewhat distracted by the destruction of their little city on the sea but they hadn't forgotten about us. We still had to fight our way through clumps and clusters and, more than once, were turned back when a corridor was flooded with a rising tide of shoggoth pudding.
A couple of times we turned the corner to find the corridor or stairs disappearing in a flicker of black light.
After an eternity of confused staggering and stumbling we emerged from the Hell-red glow of emergency lights to the death-dark purple of night sky.
A row of lifeboats were arranged about twenty meters up. It was an uphill climb now as the cruise ship's angle of descent quickened and sharpened. The good news? It was only a three-story drop to the water now instead of seven.
The bad news? Another set of lifeboats some eighty meters behind us were much closer to the waterline but a rising tide of glow-in-the-dark tapioca was bubbling out of a row of smashed view ports and recongealing around their support struts. If the boat tilted any more we'd be sliding down to dinner—it's, not our's.
More bad news: the connecting latticework of wrecked boats and the tipped oil platform, itself, were now infected with traveling bands of black light. Getting to our own boats in time would be a very near thing.
Samm groaned. "Can it get any worse?"
I tried to shush her but it was too late: another group of Froggies burst out of the hatches farther up the deck and began rushing down upon us.
"We don't have time for this!" I snarled as I fumbled with the covers on the nearest lifeboat.
Fand said: "Keep working!" And she and Cuchulainn stepped away from the release controls, redrew their swords, and walked toward the approaching hoard of Deep Ones like a gladiatorial defensive line with orders to run out the clock.
I started after them but Zotz got in my way.
"Hey, Professor," he grinned planting a huge, taloned paw against my chest, "don't be gettin' your classics all confused here. We're doing Horiatius at the Bridge tonight, not Thermopylae. Get everyone else off the boat."
I pushed back. "Yeah? Who died and made you Chichen Itza of the Sea?"
He smiled. "Hey," he said quietly. "You gotta let me do this. Remember when I first came 'round, asking to learn from you? Well, I've learned a lot and now it's dissertation time. I don't think I can learn any more in this classroom so I'm going to transfer my credits and do a little internship with Dr. Fand, here, before I graduate. This is my coursework, not yours, Teach. You've got other fish to fry." He clapped that weird-ass hand of his on my shoulder. "See you at the class reunion." He turned and took several long strides to catch up with the diminutive Fand.
I stood there, numb, watching him go. Then it was time to check on the others.
Samm was working the controls at the release station while Volpea assisted Irena into the lifeboat.
I looked back down the deck way. More pudding was seething and bubbling and picking up speed and mass as it boiled toward us from below. I felt something push against my ankles. It was a somewhat less mangy Burmese cat with two tails. I picked her up and put her in the lifeboat. Turning the other way I watched as Cuchulainn and Camazotz Chamalcan formed a line across the deck with Fand in the middle. It wasn't wide enough. Some of the beasties were going to get through.
"Can we launch this thing?" I asked Samm.
"Almost got it," she said, frowning.
The Froggies were almost to the line Fand was trying to hold with even more Deep Ones spilling out of the doorways behind them. They wouldn't be able to hold them for more than a few minutes.
And they'd never be able to rejoin us before we launched.
"Okay," I said, cracking my knuckles. "Start the launch sequence as soon as you can and get in the lifeboat. Bring a speedboat around if you can. If you can't, hold off just far enough to pick us up if we can clear the ship before it goes under. If you're likely to be caught in the suction or by these finny bastards coming in after you, pull away fast. Anything else means what has been done here today, what has been sacrificed—was all for nothing! Do you understand?"
She nodded reluctantly and I turned to move toward the Cséjthe-sized gap in the Cuchulainn-Fand-Comazotz line.
Volpea was in my way. "I concur," she said. She stepped into me. As she had shifted back to her human form she was nearly my height. She grabbed me, pulling me close and my face was an inch away from hers. "I made a promise to you and to your former enforcer," she said. "I'm on the clock, now."
Her bone and muscle mass had the density of a lycanthrope's. She lifted me with little effort, shifting her grip and tossing me into the lifeboat on top of Irena. She hissed reflexively. Then began to sniff at me. By the time I was able to untangle myself and peer over the gunwale, Volpea was shifting back to fox form and laying in to a couple of Frogs that had slipped past the line.
"Got it!" Samm yelled as the lifeboat gave a lurch. She hurried over and I helped her in as the launch began to descend.
"Zotz!" I bellowed. "ZOTZ!"
He glanced back and grinned.
"We're going!"
"Bon voyage, Professor!" he called back. And then he was too busy to talk anymore.
We dropped below the deck level and lost sight of them in another twenty seconds. I had three women now to think of—only one of them human—but I kept hoping I could bring the lifeboat around to where they could jump and we could retrieve them.
Our descent probably took less than two minutes but it seemed longer, watching and waiting for scaly foes to come slithering down the release lines on top of us. None did but then there was the matter of getting our keel in the water when the big ship was practically locked in by so many smaller craft in a jammed-up floating carpet of wood and lines, netting and sailcloth. We slid between a couple of overturned motorboats and unshipped the oars. Pushing away debris more than paddling, we eased the launch around to see if we could find a path closer to where Fand and the others were last holding their ground.
The way seemed closed: boats upright and sideways and upside down choked the area like a boneyard.
Then the first body leapt over the side and went crashing through a hull.
A second form jumped from above and landed on the side of a hull. Scrambled up and turned toward us. It was one of the Deep Ones.
Now dozens of Froggies were hopping over the side, hitting the water, landing on solid sections of hulls, or crashing through weak points in the debris field. They were coming from the point of battle with our friends.
"That's not good," Samm observed.
Maybe the fish-heads thought we had the greater target value. Or maybe Cuch and Fand and Zotz and Volpea were already down for the count . . .
"Or maybe they already done the sensible thing and your elf friend opened her a door now that we have got away," Samm said, looking at me like she could read my mind.
"Only we haven't gotten away," I said. "Not yet." I pointed back at the Deep Ones scrabbling after us like a wolf pack on a succession of ice floes. "Everybody grab an oar!"
As I struggled to fit my oar into the rowlock closest to me, Irena stood and stretched. Fortunately it was dark, further reducing the distraction that her now human form would have exerted as she had no clothes on. She leaned over as she moved aft and nuzzled my neck. "I like the way you smell," she purred. And then licked me, just once, behind the crease of my jaw.
I shivered. "If you really like my smell," I muttered, "you'd pick up an oar."
She ignored the suggestion and settled herself at the back of our little craft. A moment later an engine coughed to life and we began to pick up speed.
Thank you, Captain Pantera!
The oars were still handy for pushing debris and helping maneuver through tight impactions of flotsam and jetsam.
Then we got stuck.
By that time we'd raided the boat's survival stores and donned lifejackets. I loaded the flare gun and fired it at a section of the boat jam where our pursuers were getting a little too close.
Were we in a Hollywood movie, the boat I hit would have caught fire and, within ten seconds, blown up spectacularly with a gigantic fireball silhouetting dozens of Deep Fries flying majestically in all directions.
This being reality, there was some glow, some smoke, and a wee bit of fire after awhile. If we were able to wait long enough there was the possibility that something might get going within the next hour or two. If the Deep Ones left our mangled bodies aboard our lifeboat we could actually have a Viking funeral by sometime tomorrow. Maybe.
I reloaded the Very pistol and fired again.
This time there was a huge Hollywood explosion! Water erupted in double geysers and the ocean liner shook and then keeled over on its side. The resulting impact wave ripped the conglomerate of boats apart and pushed us farther away from the epicenter of evil. I looked at the flare gun in my hand and then realized two things.
The explosion took place well away from where the first or second flares had landed.
And there was a bright beam of light now shining across the water at our little boat.
Leviathan!
The light swept round and over the doomed cruise ship to the canted drilling platform where hundreds of dark forms were momentarily revealed to be scurrying like ants.
"What's happening?" Samm asked.
"Wait for it . . ." I murmured.
Another loud boom accompanied by a gout of water and suddenly a pillar of flame rose where the water was subsiding. Now there was a chain reaction of explosions, a series of fireballs that ignited flashpoints among the tangle of pipes crowning the platform. The massive concrete and steel structure was coming to resemble a giant birthday cake for an aging sea god.
The searchlight swung back around and fixed on our tiny boat again.
"What do you think I should do, Chris?" Irena asked from her seat by the rudder.
"The enemy of mine enemy . . ." I took a deep breath. "Steer for that light."
I had to sit beside Irena and help steer.
At first we were all blinded by the bright beam of light that revealed the location of our mysterious benefactor.
Then my nanites rehabbed my eyes, providing sufficient filtration that the better portion of the visible spectrum was blocked and I was able to use the enhanced bookends of infrared and ultraviolet frequencies. It was a bizarre color cacophony that made no sense unless you ignored tints and limited your judgment to shape and outline.
A further distraction was Irena's groping hands. Her excuse that she couldn't see what she was doing sounded a little lame when she kept leaning into me and telling me how nice I smelled. Shortly after that she "was cold and needed to share body warmth." This was probably true given the sartorial challenges commonly faced by shapeshifters. It was just that her enthusiasm tended to undermine her sincerity. She seemed to think my holding hands with her was very romantic but, truth be told, it was the only way I could keep them from wandering where they shouldn't and allow me to concentrate on our quarry.
As we approached, the hive-mind programming tweaked my wetware a little more, retinting the color scheme and revealing a submarine. I mean, what else could it be? A careful examination with the ranging subroutines (no pun intended) built into my visual software, and I could see a cylindrical body approximately eighty meters long and eight meters in diameter, tapered at both ends. It had a four-bladed propeller, six meters in diameter with a pitch of seven-and-a-half meters. I could see a diving plane amidships on this side and assumed it was matched on the opposite side. The rudder set aft of the propeller was the full height of the boat. Compared to most commissioned submersibles, this was not your standard-sized submarine. Not a mini-sub but certainly not a configuration to be found in Jane's Fighting Ships, either. That might explain the lack of a "sail." Instead there was what appeared to be a two-meter, boxlike wheelhouse with windows located forward and an area set apart near the vessel's midpoint where it was topped with a railing and a recessed object that may have been the upper portion of a covered disc-shaped lifeboat or launch. The searchlight was mounted aft.
Even though ninety percent of the sub was riding below the waterline, I could still see the grosser, submerged details. The nanites were working overtime and the resultant energy drain was creating a dangerous feedback: Irena was starting to smell good to me, too.
All of that was forgotten when a hatch opened behind the recessed launch and a creature emerged.
It was immediately obvious from the silhouette, alone, that the creature wasn't human. Nor were the three critters that joined it on deck.
The first was as tall as a man and manlike in general. His head, however, was leonine. Not in the romance novel sense of describing an older man of noble bearing, usually with a largish head of hair, great pride, and more than average strength. No, this thing had a head like that of a great cat!
The three things scampering around this apparition were even stranger in aspect. About the size and shape of deformed children with flat heads, it looked like someone had strapped giant tortoise shells to their backs and big bird beaks to their faces. Between them they had several rifles or long guns and one was handed to the cat-headed fellow while the others were being loaded by the turtle-monkeys.
Cat-head shouldered his gun, swung it in our direction and began to fire.
The first bullet zinged less than a foot away, past my shoulder!