Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(70)

“Mark. Mark!” She waved the wallet over her head. “This is a clue. An actual clue. I think I love you.”

Mark’s eyebrows went up. “In Faerie, if you said that, we would have to pledge our troth, and you might put a geas upon me that I would not stray from you or I would die.”

Emma shoved the wallet in her pocket. “Well, here it’s just an expression that means ‘I like you very much’ or even ‘Thanks for the bloodstained wallet.’”

“How specific you humans are.”

“You’re human, Mark Blackthorn.”

A sound echoed through the room. Mark jerked his gaze from hers and raised his head. Emma almost imagined his pointed ears twitching toward the sound and suppressed a smile.

“Outside,” he said. “There’s something outside.”

Her incipient smile disappeared. She slipped into the tunnel, sliding her witchlight into her pocket to douse the illumination. Mark fell into step behind her as she drew out her stele with her left hand, scrawling a number of quick runes onto her arms—Sure-Strike, Swift-Footedness, Battle-Rage, Soundless. She turned to Mark as they neared the entrance, her stele out, but he shook his head. No. No runes.

She flipped the stele back into her belt. They had reached the mouth of the cave. The air was cooler here, and she could see the sky, dotted with stars, and the grass, silvery in the moonlight. The field in front of the cave looked bare and empty. Emma could see nothing but grass and thistles, pounded flat as if by the tread of boots, reaching all the way to the edge of the bluff. There was a sharp musical sound in the air, like the buzz of insects.

She heard Mark’s sharp intake of breath behind her. Light flared as he spoke. “Remiel.”

His seraph blade blazed to life. As if the light had ripped away a glamour, suddenly, she could see them. Whistling and chittering among the long grass.

Demons.

She whipped Cortana free so quickly it was as if it had leaped into her hand. There were dozens of them, spread between the cave and the bluff. They looked like enormous insects: praying mantises, to be precise. Triangular heads, elongated bodies, massive grasping arms ridged with blades of chitin, sharp as razors. Their eyes were pallid, flat, and milky.

They were between her and Mark and the motorcycle.

“Mantid demons,” Emma whispered. “We can’t fight all of them.” She looked up at Mark, his face illuminated by Remiel. “We have to get to the cycle.”

Mark nodded. “Go,” he said.

Emma sprang forward. It came down like a cage the moment her boots hit the grass: a wave of cold that seemed to slow time. She saw one of the Mantids turn toward her, lashing out with grasping, spiked forelegs. She bent her knees and sprang, rising into the air as she slashed downward, severing the Mantid’s head from its body.

Green ichor sprayed. She landed on soaked ground as the demon’s body folded up and vanished, sucked back to its home dimension. A flicker rose in her peripheral vision. She spun and struck out again, jamming the point of Cortana into another Mantid’s thorax. She jerked her sword back, struck again, watched the demon crumble around the blade.

Her heart was beating in her ears. This was the sharp point of the blade, the moments when all the training, all the hours and the passion and the rage narrowed down to a single point of focus and determination. Killing demons. That was what mattered.

Mark was easily visible, his seraph blade lighting up the grass around him. He slashed out at a Mantid, severing its forelegs. It wobbled, chittering, still alive. Mark’s face twisted with disgust. Emma ran toward a heap of rocks, darted up the side, and sailed down, slicing the crippled Mantid in half. It vanished as she landed in front of Mark.

“That was mine to dispatch,” he said with a cold look.

“Trust me,” Emma said, “there’s plenty.” She grabbed him with her free hand and spun him around. Five Mantids were lurching toward them from cracks in the granite hill. “Kill those,” she said. “I’ll get the cycle.”

Mark leaped forward with a cry like a hunting horn. He cut at the Mantids’ legs and forelegs, crippling them; they fell around him, spraying green-black ichor. It stank like burning gasoline.

Emma began to run for the bluff. Demons surged up at her as she went. She slashed at where they were weakest, the connective tissue where the chitin was thin, severing heads from thoraxes, legs from bodies. Her jeans and cardigan were wet with demon blood. She skidded around a dying Mantid, slid toward the edge of the bluff—

And froze. A Mantid was lifting the cycle in its forelegs. She could swear it was grinning at her, its triangular head splitting open to reveal rows of needle teeth, as it clamped razored forelegs around the cycle, crushing it to pieces. Metal screamed and rent, tires popped, and the Mantid chittered in joy as the machine came apart, the pieces hurtling down the side of the bluff, taking with it Emma’s hope of an easy escape.

She glared at the Mantid. “That,” she said, “was a really sweet ride,” and catching up a knife from her belt, she threw it.

It jammed into the Mantid’s body, severing thorax from prothorax. Ichor sprayed from the demon’s mouth as it tipped backward, spasming, its body following the cycle down the cliffside.

“Jerk,” Emma muttered, whirling back toward the field. She hated using throwing knives to kill an enemy, mostly because you were unlikely to get them back. She had three more in her belt, a seraph blade, and Cortana.