Chapter 546
Christian’s eyes widened. “Get out of here? We can’t. We have to get Daunator.”
“We will. But for now, we need to go back and regroup. The most important thing is that you’re safe now,” Cadence explained to him.
Christian was starting to freak out again. “No, Cadence, you don’t understand. We can’t just leave from here! We can’t just let him go!” His eyes were wild, and he reached forward and grabbed my sister’s shoulders. That lasted about half a second before Aaron grabbed him and pulled him off.
“Listen, Christian, I agree. It’s important we come back and end this, but you need medical attention. And a good visit with Hannah.”
And a shower, I thought to myself. But I was staying out of this one for the moment. I felt a stirring in the ground and a shift in energy somewhere further up the mountain. The argument was about to be moot.
“No, you don’t get it. I wasn’t the only one down there. He’s building an army. As soon as the vessels are full, it will be time, and they’re almost there.”
His message sounded cryptic, but I got it. Daunator was waiting for all of his newly captured souls to become creatures, and then he’d unleash them on the world. They wouldn’t be ready for a few more weeks, from what I could tell by looking at the newer ones, over in another section of the mountain, where Dala was still partially herself below the surface. The energy I’d felt a moment ago increased, and the ground vibrated hard enough I could feel it without my feet touching the ground.
“Christian—” my sister was saying.
We were out of time. “Too late. He’s coming.”
“At least she didn’t say, ‘They’re here,’” Elliott said, mimicking the little girl from Poltergeist. His eyes were trained on the mountain in front of us. “Where?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer him before Daunator let us all know. The ground beneath their feet began to shake violently. The holes were opening up, and I knew that the ones where we were standing were occupied by fully-formed monsters, ones that had been incubating here for hundreds of years. They were climbing out of the holes the same way they scaled the sides of buildings. I didn’t have to see them to know that. I could hear them coming.
“Run!” Aaron shouted at my sister, pushing her back in the direction from which we’d come.
My sister moved a few steps back, but I could tell by the look on her face she wasn’t backing down from this fight. I looked around and saw that the ground was shaking even back by the trees, but there were no holes there, so if the team moved back there, we could regroup.
We were all trying to move that way when Christian broke free of the group and headed the other direction, back toward the mountain. Dust and debris floated up around us, and with the ground shaking, loose rocks were flying, so it was hard to see what was happening or even comprehend what we could see. Christian would’ve collided with Elliott, who was dropping back with the rest of us, but the ground opened beneath my friend’s feet, and he was falling. Christian leapt right over top of him and kept going.
“Elliott!” I caught him with my powers just in time. His hand sprang out of the hole, and he began to pull himself up as I lifted him into the air.
The others had stopped to make sure he was all right. I saw my sister’s face out of the corner of my eye as I put Elliott down between the holes, and that’s when I realized falling back would do us no good. Not only were the creatures beginning to reach the surface, up on the mountain, the Vampire waited.
Daunator was standing directly in a moonbeam, his black cloak almost shimmering through the darkness, his pale face translucent. He’d grown himself so that he was at least eight feet tall, and his arms were spread out like wings. Even from this distance, I could see the evil smile he wore.
Aaron was trying to get Cadence to fall to the back, though I was sure he knew that we couldn’t avoid the battle now. He was trying to protect her. “I’ll go get Christian, but you need to get out of here,” he was saying to her.
“It’s too late,” Cadence said. “We said if he showed himself, we wouldn’t run. And I won’t run from him, Aaron. I can’t.”
“Could you please just let me handle him, and you find something else to destroy?”
“Like what?”
Cadence got her answer as the first of the black creatures scurried out of the ground, followed by another and another until the earth was a mass of moving shadows, like I’d seen in Eliza’s hunt the other night. Elliott was already engaged with them, and falling in the hole had him agitated. We didn’t have time to talk about how to fight them off, we just needed to do it.
Aaron and Jamie had no choice but to fight the creatures as they moved in to attack. I was floating high enough that they didn’t seem to notice me, but I needed to figure out how I could use my powers to best combat them. I could pull my Beretta and open fire, but I had a better idea.
I began to swirl the air again, as I had done to move the dust off of the holes. This time, I used it to create a small tornado and suck the monsters inside of the vortex. It was hard, and I had to stay clear of my teammates, so I was catching the creatures further away from where we were standing. I’d have to be careful not to fill it too much or else I could begin to lose them as I moved it, but once I had a dozen or so of them circulating around in my wind, I moved them to the edge of the mountain, gathering a few strays as I went, and deposited them off of the ledge.
