Page 33 of Bright Soul

“Please,” he wheezed. “I’m not that much of an amateur. But…they might pick up my blood scent. I had to land a couple blocks away to avoid the attention of Myuna’s flying blobs.”

“I will handle it,” I stated. For a split second, I hesitated and warred with the desire to shake him down for all of his information, despite concern for his well-being. “Tell me the most pressing details of what you learned. Without jokes.”

“Yes, sir.” Grant didn’t have his mocking tone anymore. “Straight to the point…Myuna is making monsters of any animals that are brought to her and was consuming the souls and bodies of the people she gets her hands on until very recently. She’s successfully turned three people into white-eyed zombies, that I’ve seen, and…” He spent a few moments catching his breath. “Phaeron has switched sides. He’s started gathering people for Myuna to zombify.”

A sick feeling gathered in my chest. “You are certain? You have seen this for yourself?” I confirmed. Cress would be heartbroken. She’d been so certain the powercore had allowed her a connection with him to send him support. But even the greatest men broke under the right kind of pressure eventually,and we knew it couldn’t be easy to stand in a goddess’s presence unaffected.

“Yeah, I did. Hard to mistake a big scary shadow dude hauling a screaming woman toward Myuna.” He affected a shudder, which turned into a real, pained cough.

“Go seek healing. Don’t go back out again. There is no point in endangering yourself,” I said.

“Worried about me, huh? If you weren’t made of stone, I’d daresay you were getting soft,” he said with a hint of a fae’s musical, teasing laugh as he left me, finding the elevator and disappearing into the depths of the library.

Little did he know how right he’d been, and how annoyed I was that he taunted me for it.

Three doglike creatures followed the trail of Grant’s blood scent. I heard them snuffling and fired a quartz spike through one of their elongated skulls, killing it and sending the other two yipping away in fear.

Come morning, I went to retrieve my weapon and reabsorb it into my body and got a good look at it. Its eyes had glowed faintly with Myuna’s white power, making its head a target even in low lighting. The corpse, though…it was simply sad. It appeared that the goddess had stretched an already emaciated street dog, trying to form it into a doskalo. Fur and skin were split over joints not built for the sudden weight and size of its transformation.

“Rest in peace,” I rumbled. I would have to show the body to the rest of the group as an example of the unnaturals prowling the city streets.

When one of our remaining Crystal fae came up to swap places with me, he had his phone out. “We’re getting a resupply soon. Mind staying here just in case there’s trouble?”

I grinded a nod, and together we stepped outside. Cold wind and a bite of freezing rain hit us, and the fae shuddered. I scanned the drab gray of the skies, which were free of flying creatures, but a few of them lined up on the buildings around us, their glowing white eyes unblinking.

The unnatural birds were hulking, inflated in the chest with…muscle? Pus? Something of the sort. Their claws were transformed into oversized and gleaming talons.

“We are being spied on,” I said quietly to my fae companion, indicating the birds. If Myuna had even a smidge of tactical capability, she would have already corrupted and sent out a legion of these birds to have her eyes on every inch of Cerris City’s streets.

“Shit, yeah, they’re looking right at us,” he muttered back, scoffing. “Think the bounty hunters will come knock ’em down for imaginary points?”

“The endeavor may not be worth the reward,” I answered.

I did not have to explain further. Usually, I didn’t, but as the minutes rolled past and nothing else happened, I spoke up out of my usual turn, pitching my voice low so it might be chased away on the cold wind rather than reach the spying birds’ awareness. “I imagine they are newly installed spying units. Their job right now will be to watch us and see what we are doing. We can resupply in peace, or we can kill them and risk a hostile response in return.”

“I get it. I was just trying to make a joke, man,” he said through chattering teeth.

People and theirjokes,I thought with a thread of annoyance. I supposed it was asking a lot for a non-gargoyle to be as direct as I was.

A large truck rumbled down the street, its bed full of crates. A second, similarly laden vehicle followed. I noted my surprise. A lot more people piled out than were needed for a supply run. I helped heft more than a person’s share of the weight and fell into step with Madigan Ashbough carrying several crates too, her arms flexed with extra muscle from a guardian witch spell.

“Hello again, Geo,” she said cheerfully enough, her voice betraying a hint of strain.

I waited until we were in the library to say, “I was not expecting our leader to deliver supplies personally.”

We put the crates down and her muscles relaxed to their usual size slowly. She motioned for me to stand aside with her as the rest of the men and women took care of moving the crates deeper into the library. “That’s because we’ve had a change of strategy.”

“You are aware of Phaeron switching allegiances,” I surmised.

“Yes. We’ve always known it would happen, but not exactly when. Our seer allies are now certain that the library will be the subject of an assault with him as its head,” she said with a grim set of her lips.

“How long do we have?”

As we spoke, I noted the presence of her mates, the Crystal Court’s Prince Orthus and the twin guardian witches, Ajax and Aaron, identical save for their different tastes in dressing style. The blood witch Daire Grimsbane was also here, fully equipped for combat; despite being a politician, it seemed he was willing to get his hands dirty fighting with us. It also seemed he was friends with the other men now, carrying on with the twins as they worked.

Orthus placed Madigan’s massive geode-formed warhammer next to her, and she smiled prettily, reaching up to kiss his cheek in thanks.

“Days,” she answered me. “But it will depend on Cress and the powercore to trigger Myuna’s greed. We still have some agency to prepare with traps and spells.”

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