“Right behind you,” she heard Bruenna shout, “Keep going!”
As she shot from the end of the magical tunnel with Bruenna hot on her heels, Glissa slowed and looked back. The quicksilver wall shimmered, the surface perfectly smooth. The vampires were nowhere to be seen.
“Nice trick,” Glissa told Bruenna as the mage caught up.
“It should hold them long enough for us to get away,” Bruenna agreed.
Together, they bobbed and weaved through a surprised group of nim and goblins engaged in a life-or-death struggle. Glissa wished she could stop to help the defenders, but Bruenna was right. Yert was all that mattered. In the end, getting her hands on the Miracore would save a lot more people than one more sword in the fray.
“We’re getting close,” Bruenna said. “I can’t believe he’s made it this far into Krark-Home.”
The pair veered off at a three-way intersection where leonin and goblins were knocking an unending wave of nim into the smelting pools below. Bruenna steered them up a rising path that Glissa noticed was more brightly lit than the rest. It was also strangely empty.
“I don’t like this,” Bruenna said. “I know where this tunnel leads.”
“Where?” Glissa asked, ducking to avoid a hanging copper stalactite.
“The nurseries.”
The higher up the tunnel they went, the closer Yert felt. Glissa no longer needed to concentrate to feel the vampire necromancer.
The tunnel ended just ahead. They had yet to encounter anyone in this passage, friend or foe. Bruenna and Glissa slowed and pulled up short, hovering just in front of a set of double-doors that the elf girl would have to duck to get through. Bruenna shook the door latch, but it wouldn’t budge.
“I’ve got an idea,” Glissa said. “Stand back.” She floated back a few feet and reached out to the Tangle energies, calling on the strength of the forest. She felt a surge of physical power and felt her armor and tunic tighten around her muscles. Glissa felt strong enough to take the top off of the mountain with her bare hands.
Bruenna, impressed, floated aside. Glissa clenched her fists and flew straight at the door, fists held in front of her, a living projectile. Halfway there, she heard Geth scream.
The elf girl’s gloved fists connected dead center and shattered the crystalline locking mechanism, sending the small iron door flying inward with a tremendous crash. She plowed headlong into a stunned vampire. Glissa’s fists drove straight through the creature’s torso like a hot knife through lead. She kept going, willing herself onward, and ripped the vampire in two. Greenish-black gore blinded the elf girl momentarily.
When this was over, she was going to bathe in hot oil for a week.
“Stop!” a familiar, slithering voice bellowed. Glissa whirled in midair to face the voice and wiped foul, stringy goop from her eyes.
Yert stood in the center of the room, flanked by a quartet of vampires. He stood over a pair of leonin corpses in bloodstained white robes. Tiny figures-human children, goblin kids, and leonin cubs-were huddled in terrified clusters around the wall. Nim warriors blocked every exit except the one Glissa had just forcefully opened.
In one raised hand Yert clutched a crying leonin cub, in the other an even smaller goblin infant that wailed and kicked its tiny, flapping feet. Yert smiled and showed two rows of razor sharp teeth, and locked his blood-red eyes with the Glissa’s. As she watched, frozen, he licked his lips with a forked, leathery tongue.
Glissa raised her open hands wide and descended until her feet touched the ground. “All right, Yert. You’ve got me. Again. Put the children down.”
“The children are quite safe at the moment,” Yert replied. “I can’t say the same for the nursemaids.”
Glissa felt the chain wrapped around her wrist slide down her arm, and it gave her a terrible idea.
“You will come with me, of your own will,” Yert continued. “You showed me mercy, once. It was foolish of you, but I still feel ever so slightly in your debt. You helped make me the man I am today. And you did share that lovely repast with me.” Glissa felt a twinge where the wound in her neck was still not quite healed. Her heart leapt. With Yert’s arms spread wide, his robes parted and revealed a sliver of the Miracore on his chest, glowing a faint greenish-blue. So close …
“And so I swear,” Yert hissed. “These children and infants will not be harmed, if you come with me. Besides, I’ve discovered I have a bit of a sweet tooth. And you can’t enjoy your sweets all at once.”
Glissa nodded, but was doing her best to make eye contact with Bruenna, who finally caught her look. Glissa gave an imperceptible nod that Bruenna returned faintly. The entire exchange took a little over a second, and Yert didn’t seem to notice.
“I guess that’s the best offer I’m going to get,” Glissa said, casually lowering her arms and edging her left hand closer to her right. “But what are you going to do to me?” she asked, trying to inject fear into her voice, which wasn’t difficult.
As Glissa spoke, she rubbed her right wrist with her left hand as if trying to get her circulation going, but instead working her fingertips slowly up her arm to the gemstones. “Now hold on, Yert,” she almost drawled, “How do I know you won’t Bruenna catch the kids YERTYERTYERT!”
As the last “Yert” left her lips, she gulped a deep breath of air. The nursery, Yert, the vampires, and everything else flickered out of existence for a millisecond. When she reappeared, she was inside Yert’s body. And Yert’s insides suddenly had no place to go.
Corroded bone, brackish blood, wiry muscles, fetid tissue, and withered organs exploded violently through Yert’s ruptured skin and robes in every direction, tearing his body into tiny chunks of flesh, metal, and blackened bone. The elf girl punched upward, sending what remained of Yert’s head flying, then thrust her upturned hands out to catch the Miracore before it could hit the ground. She blinked foulness from her eyes for the second time in as many minutes and found herself in the center of the room. A quartet of very surprised vampires, horrified children, and Bruenna, who held a blood-spattered but still healthy pair of infants in her arms, stood gaping. Everything was covered in stinking bits of Yert.
Glissa didn’t give the other vampires time to recover. She swung the Miracore like a bludgeon, collapsing the skull of the nearest bloodsucking fiend, which stumbled over backward and collapsed. The traumatized children scattered and bolted for cover. Glissa shifted her grip and grabbed hold of the heavy chain strung through the artifact and whirled the Miracore overhead like a flail on a very short handle. The chain decapitated the remaining vampires in one clean sweep, and three lanky headless corpses flopped, twitching, to the nursery floor.
“Bet he didn’t see that coming,” Bruenna said, wiping Yert from her eyes and face.
“Bruenna, I didn’t see that coming,” Glissa said. “But it worked.” The elf girl gently set down the heavy artifact. She still had work to do. Her sword appeared in her hand, and she stepped forward to face the nim that blocked the other exits but saw they were motionless and silent.
“Meyr mill mooing mum mey-”
Glissa reached back for Geth’s pack, but it wasn’t there. She looked over to where she had been standing before teleporting herself inside Yert and saw it rolling lazily back and forth. She ran over to the mumbling bag as Bruenna tried to calm the children and herd them away from the nim and back to safety.