THE MAN IN Black descended upon me, swallowing me in his fury. His fist lashed out, and I twisted away, using all the skill learned at the hands of sensei, instructors, and masters.
His knuckles grazed my cheekbone, barely brushing along my skin. The blow knocked me off my feet.
I spun, rolling with the impact, scrambling to stay out of his circle of power. My eye began to swell, pulsing closed with each heartbeat.
He stomped forward, and the ground shook under my feet. The standing stones jittered up and down in their earthwork sockets, and it struck me what I was truly up against.
What have I done?
Daniel, I’m going to fail you.
Movement above caught my eye. I dove to the side.
A capstone the size of a truck crashed where I’d been standing, crushing the grass and weeds, narrowly missing me. A string of black coat tore free from its moorings, snapped by the impact. It whipped through the air, slapping around my calf and latching on.
Music exploded in my head.
The coat was urgent.
Insistent.
I could feel it pushing my magick, its song inside me like a vibrato, dumping raw power into me. The song became clearer in my skull, not sung in English or any human language, but still I understood it.
It wanted me to fight. It wanted free of the Man in Black, and it would help me if only I would fight.
Driven by the song, I lunged, twisting with my hips for power, slashing at the Man in Black with the Knife of Abraham. The point caught him in the arm, gouging a chunk of flesh that flapped open like a big-lipped mouth, thwapping in my direction. Dark yellow fluid ran freely from the cut, thin streamers of what could have been urine from the look and smell.
He stepped back, and I pressed forward.
My hand became a blur as I tried to slash him to pieces.
There was no art to it, no science, no training. Instinct rode my body while my mind screamed for Daniel to be okay.
Hold on. Please just hold on. I’ll save you.
In the center of the stone circle, the Man in Black stopped.
Caught in my frenzy, I didn’t see him draw up, didn’t see his hand, his red right hand, flash out, until it clamped around my wrist, jerking me to a stop.
Viselike fingers bruised my skin, grinding the small bones of my wrist against one another. He yanked me forward, slamming me into his carved teakwood chest. His lip curled, his pinnacled teeth showing wetly.
“ENOUGH!”
Power slammed into me with bone-breaking force, battering my face like fists coated in acid. He swelled, lifting me like a child into the air. He was all-powerful. Unstoppable. He was death and doom and hot, sweaty destruction all rolled into one terrifying form.
“I have had enough of you, Charlotte Tristan Moore. Your time has drawn to an end.” A fat, blister-pink tongue lolled from between his lips. It flicked out, impossibly long, and lapped across my face from chin to cheekbone. It snapped back inside his mouth between rows of shark teeth. “Delicious.”
The Man in Black would devour me, and I hung helpless before his hunger.
His arm trapped mine between us, the knife in my hand useless, fingers going numb with no leverage to cut. He squeezed as his head reared, preparing to strike. I couldn’t breathe. My head lolled loose on my neck. My free arm flopped in the air, useless.
It was over. Darkness closed in on me. I wouldn’t even feel it when his elder-god teeth ended my life.
Something constricted around my calf, tightening into a circle of pain sharp enough to clear my head.
Musical language trilled through my brain.
I.
Am.
A.
Survivor.
I swung my free hand in one last effort.
I slapped the Man in Black across the face with all the magick inside me, all the magick lodged in the Aqedah, and all the magick being given by the coat.
It exploded like a shotgun blast.
He staggered, dropping me. I fell to the ground, knees banging against the hard-packed earth. I was drained, too tired to hurt, empty of everything inside me except my own hot torch of anger at him for trying to destroy me, for trying to destroy Daniel. The Man in Black looked down at me, his human hand pressed to the side of his face. Around his long, thin fingers was a vaguely hand-shaped burn. One so severe the flesh of his cheek and jaw crackled meat-pink through hard black scorch marks, bubbling and seeping from magickburn.
His hand pulled away, slick and shining with thin, runny fluid. He laughed, his basalt eyes fever-bright. “You surprise me, Charlotte Tristan Moore. I thought you a mewling, broken thing to be easily manipulated.” He smiled, and it broke the skin where I’d slapped him. “It appears I have misjudged you.”
I spat a bad taste out of my mouth. Even that effort made my head spin. I was almost done.
“You chose to hurt the wrong person.” I tried to stop them, but my eyes cut over to Daniel lying on the stone. I could still feel him, faintly, through the residue of magick left inside me.
“It matters not. In the end, my will shall be done on this earth as it is in the heavens. I will seek and find one more of my brethren and take them also, and then shall Azathoth be loosed. Then shall he be free to enjoy all his son has accomplished in his name.”
“I’ll never help you again.”
“There is another. He is almost ripe for plucking.”
What?
It hit like one of the standing stones falling on me.
Jacks. He’s the same bloodline as me.
“You’ll kill me first,” I snarled.
He stepped forward. “Oh, that I will. Disobedience must be punished.”
Come closer.
He stood before me, looking down on me as I knelt. My head weighed forty pounds as I looked up at him. Exhaustion hooked the corners of my eyes, dragging at them.
He took another step.
Just a little closer.
He bent at the waist, bringing his face low and close to mine. The two god-prison gemstones fell free, rubbing against each other. The larger one swung toward my face, and inside I saw a tiny rendition of Cthulhu. He didn’t move much, but his tiny Cthulhu head turned toward me as I stared.
An echo in my head.
three … to break the sealthree …
The Man in Black smiled, lips parting around his teeth. Ashen chunks of charcoaled skin fell from the right side of his face. His jaw slung down, unhinging and opening. His head swelled like it had in the alternate reality, eyes moving sideways as his throat flapped open, stretching into a ring-tubed trachea large enough to swallow me whole. This close, I watched the teeth slip in flesh-pink gums, sliding against each other like knives of enamel. Black ichor ran from under the gums, dripping down the thin edges of each tooth, bumping along the micro-serrations that would cut flesh like shears through lambswool.
Hot, burning saliva fell on me as his shark teeth grazed the air over my face. He would clamp those jaws shut on me, taking my head off at the shoulders. I reached up, fumbling against his chest until my fingers curled around Cthulhu’s gemstone prison, knotted into the coat-scrap necklace. Using it to pull myself up and him down, I thrust the Knife of Abraham deep into the side of the chaos god about to eat my face off, pushing with all my strength, twisting from my hips and driving with the large muscles of my legs.
He exploded backward, twisting and writhing around the blade that now jutted from his ribs. Hot-pink etheric energy boiled from the gash, leaking around the magick knife. He screamed, howling in pain and anger. His red right hand scrabbled at the knife handle, trying to pull it free.
That’s when the coat fell on him.
It dropped from above us, slapping itself around the Man in Black. For one horrible second, I thought it would try to rescue him, to save its master, betraying me. Then the scrap around my leg throbbed and the song in my head roared to a crescendo and I felt, I knew, the coat was on my side.
It attacked with all the hatred and anger built over centuries of abuse at the hands of Nyarlathotep, fighting with all its strength. The chaos god ripped at it, his body transforming into anything it could, one form flowing to another, flowing to yet another, all deadly with fangs and claws and stingers. Nightmare versions of tiger, wolf, spider, scorpion, and shapes so alien my eyes couldn’t translate them.
The coat shrieked in my head as it was torn to pieces.
My head swam as the coat poured information through our connection, gifting me with knowledge as it sacrificed itself.
The Man in Black had been weakened.
He’d used a lot of power fighting the Sushi Priest and then Cthulhu. He depended on the coat to act as a battery, draining its magick to fuel his own, and now the coat in its rebellion had cut that off.
There was a chance.
A tiny, tiny chance.
I shoved myself, staggering, to my feet.
The Man in Black didn’t see me, too busy trying to shapeshift into something that could defeat the coat.
He didn’t see my hand grab the handle of the knife that still stuck from the side of his body.
But he felt it when I yanked it out and rammed it into his chest, twisting the blade as I did. The point slipped in, the blade sinking to the hilt, stopping as it hit something hard that jarred it to a stop. I felt the knife slice through one of his hearts, the main part of him, felt it as the alien, evil heart continued to convulse around the blade in my hand. Magick burst out over me in a sickly-sweet rush of power.
His scream scoured my brain, flash-burning my nerve endings, before he burst into a million tiny flying stinging shapes and disappeared.
One of the gemstones tumbled to the ground, its tether severed by the impossibly sharp iron blade.
I stumbled until I reached Daniel and fell, landing across his cold, still body. I lay there weeping atop him, the tattered fragments of an alien song in my mind as the world fell into darkness.