"Keep growing, asshole. You're just a bigger target. You don't know who the hell you're dealing with he — "
The Nimble Man snapped both of her arms, the echo of cracking bone ricocheting around the room. Eve's words were cut off by her own scream. Then the damned creature held her by her head as she hung limply in his grasp, and reached up to run one long claw across her throat. Blood spilled from the gash like a scarlet curtain down her chest. The Nimble Man threw her across the room.
Eve collided with the splintered chrysalis, its magick cascading now throughout the room and across the floor. The collision cracked it open further, so that in several places it had fallen apart completely. Sweetblood's legs jutted out from the base of the thing. Eve lay in a tumble of broken limbs like some forgotten marionette.
"No!" Danny Ferrick screamed, as he raced at the gigantic Nimble Man.
Clay had recovered. Retaining his gleaming angelic form he darted at The Nimble Man, arriving before Danny. Clay placed one long-fingered, angelic hand over The Nimble Man's face, and divine light seared his golden flesh. Conan Doyle could have helped them, but only if he had been willing to sacrifice the world. Instead — with the sounds of the combat between Morrigan and Ceridwen behind him — he rushed toward the shattered chrysalis and turned to face The Nimble Man, and the dimensional doorway that had been slit through the fabric of the universe. He could feel Sweetblood's power coalescing around him. It caressed him as though it were a breeze that blew only for him.
The Nimble Man clutched Clay by the throat and tore one of his angel wings off, flesh and bone and cartilage ripping. Clay roared in agony and even as he did he began to change again, now a white tiger with black stripes slashing its fur. The Nimble Man crushed his jaws in one massive hand, and then slammed Clay into the floor with enough force to crack the woodwork. The shapeshifter returned to his arid, earthen form and did not move again.
In the strobing light from the magick erupting from the cracks on the chrysalis, Conan Doyle watched Danny Ferrick attack. When he saw the demon boy, the Nimble Man paused, a troubled expression on his face.
" You are horrors," he said, in a voice wet with the moisture of the things writhing in his mouth. Though he was growing, and beginning to recover from his transition to this world, he staggered slightly, unsteady on his feet. " Why would you fight my coming?"
"Why?" Danny shouted, snarling the word. "'Cause this is our world! It's got its problems, but it's home. And you don't belong here!"
Danny leaped up at The Nimble Man, driving his small demon horns into the damned creature's abdomen. Once more The Nimble Man cried out. He glared down at the boy, opened his black-fanged jaws, and the mass of squirming serpent-things that filled his mouth spiked out, stretching to impossible length, and punctured Danny's chest, punching out through the demon-boy's back.
"Danny!" Conan Doyle roared, and for the first time he nearly lost his composure, nearly surrendered the calm that his next move required. The boy's mother had entrusted her son to him, and Conan Doyle was afraid for him. If Danny was dead, he did not think he could face Julia Ferrick.
He bared his teeth, grinding them together. The magickal energy that trailed from his fingertips and spilled from his eyes seemed to dance with the power leaking from Sweetblood's chrysalis. Conan Doyle felt the two embrace. The fissures in the amber encasement widened. With a loud crack, more pieces of the chrysalis began to fall away. Within that shell, Conan Doyle could see Sweetblood's hand, twitching, fingers stretching.
"The boy was right," Conan Doyle said, starting toward The Nimble Man. "You don't belong here. You don't belong anywhere save that gray limbo. And if you wanted to leave it behind, you should never have left the door open."
Then, unable to resist a dramatic flourish, Conan Doyle passed one hand across his face, disrupting the glamour that had hidden his true countenance.
A spell struck Ceridwen on her left side, her face taking the brunt of the magick. Instantly her flesh began to soften, to melt. She felt her cheek droop, strings of skin dangling from her jawbone like tree sap. Morrigan had the advantage, and now her eyes blazed with malice. All of her fanaticism pulsed just beneath her features, but for the moment it had been usurped by her disdain for her family, for her people, for her land. The Fey witch rose off the ground, floating several inches from the wood floor, and she threw her arms wide. Streaks of oily black energy darted back and forth in front of her, dancing from finger to finger, from hand to hand, as though she were knitting some web of darkness.
"Stupid little girl," Morrigan sneered.
The sensation of her flesh sliding from her skull was the most dreadful thing Ceridwen had ever experienced. She wanted to scream, but could not control the muscles in her jaw. Panic set in, her gaze locked on Morrigan, and she watched as her aunt raised her hands and prepared to hurl that web of black magick at her, to entangle her, to destroy her.
Morrigan attacked. With the crack of a bullwhip, the black net whistled toward Ceridwen. She had expended the power she had borrowed from Sweetblood and knew that if Morrigan meant to kill her now, she would not be able to defend herself.
With a grunt, Ceridwen clacked the base of her elemental staff against the floor. A mystical breeze gusted around her, a traveling wind that lifted her in half an eyeblink from the path of Morrigan's attack, and set her down again just behind her mad aunt.
Fear gave way to rage. Ceridwen pressed the ice sphere at the top of her elemental staff against her face and felt the warmth of its energies spread through her. This was her magick, a simple object to channel her own innate power and to help her focus her rapport with the elements. Morrigan was Fey. She was family. Ceridwen easily countered the spell her aunt had cast, restoring her flesh, healing her face.
"You think you can run away from me?" Morrigan asked. Still floating, she spun in the air, glaring down at her niece. "From me?"
And for the first time, Ceridwen really saw the familial resemblance between herself and her aunt. The nose, the eyes, the lips
… it made her feel sick.
"I have never run from you," Ceridwen replied.
With a flutter of her eyelids and a tugging deep inside her, an ache in her loins, she reached into the wood floor and drew it to life again. Vines burst from the floor and twined around Morrigan's legs, reaching up to encircle her arms, trapping them against her body. Thorns pushed out from the vines, slicing her flesh. It would not hold her for long.
Ceridwen heard Conan Doyle scream Danny's name. She turned her gaze for just a moment from her conflict with Morrigan. In horror, she watched the demon boy impaled and then cast aside. She saw Arthur, grimly determined, bathe himself in the magicks spilling from Sweetblood's chrysalis. As Morrigan struggled to be free of her bonds, Ceridwen saw Conan Doyle passed a hand across his face.
His features shimmered, a glamour dissipating, and Ceridwen felt a stab of despair in her heart as she saw what he had done. Gore streaked the left side of Conan Doyle's face, dried and crusted there. Where his left eye had been there was now a small silver orb that crackled with magick.
The Eye of Eogain.
Conan Doyle had torn out his left eye and replaced it with a magickal construct, with the weapon he would need. Had he brought it into the house in his pocket, or in Eogain's yellowed skull, Morrigan might have gotten hold of it. But now it was his, rooted into his mind, into his brain.
He threw his arms out, let the power of Sweetblood wash over him, and the light around that magickal eye began to pulse, to churn.
"Noooo!" Morrigan screamed.
Ceridwen turned in time to see the Fey witch tear herself loose from those mystical vines, their thorns cutting her flesh to the bone. Morrigan seemed not to notice the pain of those wounds, nor even to remember that she had been fighting Ceridwen moments before.