Hardboiled: Not Your Average Detective Story (The Lillim Callina Chronicles Book 5) (8 page)

A blast of chilly air hit me in the face, making gooseflesh rise on my arms. I don’t know how, but in the space of time it took me to cross campus and get to the top of the tower, storm clouds had opened above me in full force, letting loose a deluge that left me drenched and shivering as lightning crackled through the sky above.

As I took a few more steps out onto the balcony so I could circle around and find the cyclops, I held my hand out into the wind and called one last time for Shirajirashii, infusing my words with power.

“Come!” I said, and the lightning overhead crackled. I had never called my weapons to me from such a distance, I don’t think anyone ever had, but I could feel them coming to me, feel them rushing to my aid. I just needed more time. But with the cyclops holding Connor hostage, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to wait for them. Besides, I could probably take a cyclops even without my swords.

The cyclops turned the corner, spotting me. He narrowed his huge eye at me, and a shiver completely unrelated to the cold sprinted down my back. He was so much bigger than I remembered him, pretty much filling up the balcony with his bulk. Behind him, I could see Connor’s unconscious body lying against the stone, but thankfully, as far as I could tell, he was still breathing.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing,” I screamed into the wind as my hair whipped around me.

“What I was ordered to do,” the creature replied, lowering itself on its haunches like a cat about to pounce. I really hoped that didn’t happen and not for the obvious reason of I didn’t want to be crushed by a five-hundred pound cyclops.

“Please don’t jump,” I said. “If you do, I’m pretty sure this balcony will give way and we’ll both fall to our deaths.”

The cyclops tilted his head toward me, considering. Then, in one fluid motion, he grabbed Connor and flung him over the side. My heart smashed in my chest so hard I thought it would explode as I leapt over the guardrail without thinking. I reached out with my hand, focused my power around me like a rope and flung it at Connor. I grabbed at him with invisible force, jerking his floppy, unconscious body toward me in a surge of will that left little spots of color dancing in my vision.

The moment my hand grabbed onto his arm, I spun my body and drove my other hand outward, smashing it into the wall of the building. There was a shriek of stone as I slid along the face of the building, gouging into it with all the strength my magic-fueled muscles could muster. My shoulder screamed in pain as we slowed, Connor’s body swinging below me like a macabre pendulum.

A moment later, I kicked off the wall and we crashed to the cement below. I stared up at the grinning face of the cyclops as he clapped his hands together like an annoying five-year-old. Evidently, I’d amused him. Swell.

“That was pretty cool,” Lang’s octopus voice said from behind me, and I whirled to see him standing there in the rain, shirt still unbuttoned and plastered to his skin. “I’d heard you were good, but I never imagined…”

“Yeah, well, wait until I get really angry,” I said, trying to block Connor’s body from view with my own.

“Then what?” Lang asked moments before the cyclops slammed into the ground between us, landing so hard he shattered the concrete. Cracks whipped outward along the walkway as he took a huge, looming step toward me, his hammer swishing through the air, absently swatting raindrops as he moved.

“Look Polyphemus, you better back the hell off before I put you down,” I snapped, my eyes narrowing. I could feel Shirajirashii getting closer, it’d be here soon. I just needed to stall a few moments longer.

“You… you know my name?” the cyclops asked, taking a step backward, awe cascading across his face as he inclined his head toward Lang. “She knows me,” he said, voice filled with glee. “The Dragonslayer knows me.”

“Um…” I said, mostly because I’d just used the first cyclopean name that came to my mind, and in that second, I felt my eyes get as wide as trashcan lids. This was Polyphemus? The actual Polyphemus who had been tricked by Odysseus in Greek mythology? Seriously? I swallowed, and I’ll admit part of me wanted to ask for an autograph.

Lang sighed, rubbing his face with his unbroken hand. “Okay, you’re famous, I get it,” he said. “Now go kill her already so we can move this whole thing along.”

“But…” Polyphemus eyed me warily, hammer held loosely to his side, and for some reason, I think dropping his name had unnerved him.

Before he could say anything, I held one hand in front of me, my fingers splayed out so that I was looking through my fingers. Very slowly, I lowered one finger.

“Valen the blood drake,” I said, then lowered my second finger. “Jiroushou Manaka.” Next two fingers. “Sobek and Crom Cruach,” I closed my thumb so that I was holding a fist. “Do you want to be next?” I called a bit of power and released it so that it flitted around my fist like tiny iridescent fish. I took a step toward them, and Polyphemus shrank back from me, which was somewhat hilarious because he was a huge mountain of a cyclops, and I’m a five-foot-nothing—seventeen-year-old girl.

“Polyphemus?” Lang asked, octopean eyes narrowing into slits above Lang’s own lifeless eyes. “What are you doing?”

The giant cyclops glanced sideways at Lang and swallowed so hard that it was like a bowling ball moved within his throat. “I’m scared,” he said.

“Be more scared of what our master will do to you if you don’t defeat her,” Lang said and lightning flashed across the sky like an angry exclamation point.

The cyclops turned back toward me, hammer half-raised before him. Before he could do more, I felt the siren’s call of my swords. I reached out, a grin spreading across my face as the blades hit my hands with a familiar thunk. I took a menacing step toward them, the pure white blades of Shirajirashii glinting in the storm light.

Even with Shirajirashii, it wasn’t like I could kill Lang, since he was just being possessed by some body jumper. Maybe I could scare the body snatcher into fleeing? That’d work.

I called upon their power, and it surged through me in the trinity of voices it always used. My wakazashi throbbed with Set’s chaotic presence. It treaded across the back of my brain like a cat stalking prey through the tall grass. I took a step forward and red light exploded from the blade, throwing off little wisps of crimson electricity that arced through the air and shrouded my face in sanguine shadow.

“Finally!” Lang cried, shouldering the massive cyclops aside as he strode toward me. “I was wondering how long it would take for you to call upon Shirajirashii.”

“Why is that?” I asked as Isis pulsed in my other hand, spinning across my mind like wisps of icy spider web. Magic crackled off the blade, blue-white tendrils dancing across its surface like electric blue ballerinas.

“Because I need them,” he said and flung one hand out toward me. “Well, more precisely, I need Set and Isis.” Red lighting exploded across the gap between us, and as I blocked with my wakazashi, the blade… the blade turned on me. Searing pain exploded under my temples. I fell to my knees, my wakazashi, Set, thrashing in my hand like a living thing.

“No!” I cried as the pure white blade exploded into a million scintillating shards that flashed through the air, swirling toward Lang’s outstretched hand in a cloud of crimson fairy dust.

Before I could even recover, Lang’s boot caught me in the chest, flinging me onto my back. Isis slipped from my hand, hitting the concrete with an empty clang. As I struggled to get up, Lang reached down and trailed his fingers across the weapon’s edge. It shattered in a spray of blue light that whirled up into the ether like a rising tornado.

Pain, like nothing I’d ever felt, ripped through my thoughts. I grabbed my head to silence the screaming, crying voice of the swords as they were yanked away from me. Their ethereal fingers clawing gouges in my mind. Thunder boomed above us as Lang smiled at me, an eerie grin that made me want to punch him in his stupidly smug face.

“Well, that was easy,” Lang said, dropping the lifeless, snake-wrapped hilt of Isis to the ground besides its equally dead brother. He turned toward the huge cyclops and put his hand on its arm. “Let’s get out of here before she recovers. I think the master will be pleased, don’t you?”

“What about the last one?” Polyphemus asked, gesturing toward the busted hilts of Shirajirashii with his hammer.

“The master said he does not require the dark one.” Lang threw a glance at me, laughter in his eyes. “He is too chaotic. As long as she keeps hold of that one, it cannot interfere with his plans.” He grinned, his face breaking into a leer as he patted the cyclops. “And she won’t release him either. She’ll cling to him like a toddler hanging onto a favorite blanket. After all, he is the last vestiges of her power. She won’t give that up.”

I wanted to say something, anything to keep him from escaping, but the only thing I could do was roll into a ball as the rain came down like angry tears. Lang threw me one last glance before he and Polyphemus vanished in a puff of sapphire smoke. Overhead, the sky cleared, all at once and so quickly, that I knew the storm had to have been summoned by Lang, or more accurately, whoever inhabited his body.

That scared me. I’d only known two people who could manipulate storms like that and one was my father. The other was my mother, and she was dead.

I crawled forward, my body heavy with rain water and fatigue. This felt so much different from the last time I’d broken the swords… so different from when Haijiku had left me. This felt like a hole had been torn in my soul, and I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with that.

I reached out grabbed the bladeless hilts of Shirajirashii. A spark of life surged through me. So Apep was still there. Thank god. I held them to my chest, not saying anything. It was one thing to lose my spirits, Set and Isis. It was another to lose Apep because he wasn’t really mine. Apep, the Egyptian embodiment of chaos and darkness had been my friend Mattoc’s spirit.

“Are you okay?” I murmured, holding the hilts against my rain-slicked flesh. The sigil above my left breast, where Mattoc had transferred his power over Apep to me before he died, flared to life. It cast a shadow in the shape of an immense snake across the field in front of me.

“No,” the shadow’s voice boomed in my ears.

“Apep,” I said, swallowing. “Are they really…”

“Isis and Set are gone. I should be able to feel them, but I cannot. I fear they have been captured.” Apep’s voice rippled out over me, making goose bumps crawl across my skin. The shadow of a huge serpent unfurled itself in the back of my mind, rising up like a lazy cobra who had been awoken from its noontime slumber.

“What does that even mean? I’ve never heard of that happening to a Dioscuri weapon before,” I said. “How can someone just take
my
spirits like that?”

“I do not know,” Apep hissed. “But I will find out!” and with that, he was gone, leaving me standing alone in front of the school with two busted swords. The snakes wrapped around the hilts of the weapons began to writhe under my hands. Black wisps of smoke, slipped out through my fingers and encircled my wrists like I’d seen them do to Mattoc in Fairy. They went still, solidifying into obsidian bangles that reminded me of an Egyptian ouroboros.

“Lillim?” Connor asked, voice groggy and well, garbled sounding. “Lillim, what’s going on?”

I spun to see him getting to his feet. It took him a moment to do it, but when he was finally up, he only managed one tiny step before slumping heavily against the tower wall.

“You’re okay?” I asked, surprised at how relieved the sight of him moving made me.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said, trying to smile at me but wound up wincing and grabbing his head instead. “But I think I need to lie down.”

I had a million things to do. I had to figure out what the hell happened to Lang and my swords. I had to make sure my god of a boyfriend was okay. I had to track down Polyphemus and give him an express ticket to Tartarus, but instead of doing any of those things, I smiled at Connor.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s get you home.”

Chapter 8

“What are you talking about?” I growled, swatting angrily at the hand that was trying to shake me awake. “I’m not going to a party…”

That was when I sat bolt upright, my eyes wide in shock as I stared around the room. It was larger than I’d have expected and had thick, lush green carpet. Instead of posters, actual artwork depicting giant dragons adorned the walls. In the corner, a six foot tall sword that reminded me of something a frost king in a videogame might wield was suspended in a glass case.

Connor backed up so quickly that he fell on his butt, a look of terror flashing across his face. A second later, he was grabbing his heart and laughing. “You scared me,” he huffed indignantly.

I swallowed, throwing myself out of his bed, guilt crawling over my skin as the realization of what happened hit me like a cement truck.

I hate to admit it, but well, Connor and I slept together. It makes me blush just thinking about it because I’m not that type of girl. See, when we got to his house, I dragged him up to his room. No problems there, right? As I was laying him in bed, I was suddenly overcome with incredible exhaustion. The next thing I knew, I was curled up next to him, my eyelids so heavy I could barely keep them open.

I mean we didn’t
do
anything, but still, I probably shouldn’t have been sleeping next to random boys I just met. Even if his sheets were so soft that touching them was like touching a cloud. I had a boyfriend after all. He would not like finding me in Connor’s mahogany, four-poster king-sized bed, fully clothed or not.

“Look Lillim, it’s at my friend Thes’ house. I have to go to his party, or he’ll never forgive me. Besides, it’ll be off the hook. The whole school will be there,” Connor said, smiling at me with his best charming smile, which let me tell you, needed a little bit of work.

“That last bit about the whole school being there does not make me want to go more. If anything, it terrifies me,” I replied, crossing my arms over my chest and scowling at him. The thought of having to pretend to be normal at a party full of drunks was so scary that it made me want to crawl back into Connor’s bed and hide beneath his too soft sheets.