Zeph followed her lead, spreading her great golden wings and pushing off with her leonine back legs, propelling herself into the air to land on top of her side of the creature. Laying about with beak, four sets of claws, and that whipping tail, she shredded the thing.
With the creature’s tentacles all going to defending its core from Zeph and Gen, Jak had a breath of a moment to consider his own strategy on how to best assist them and get them all out of this.
“Jak!” Stella’s voice shouted in his mind, and he spun to look for her.
Lena had her daggers out, defending herself against the tentacles of another monster that had arrived behind them. But Stella… she couldn’t be seen for the mass of tentacles mummifying her. Terror striking his heart, he ran at the creature at full speed. Wading into the mass of tentacles, ignoring the ones that latched onto his legs, waist, and chest, he hacked away at the tentacles swathing Stella, feeling like he chased the tide, as more tentacles replaced the ones he sliced away. The creature began to move away, dragging its prize with it. Jak raced after it as it sped relentlessly into the night with surprising speed. Desperation and exhaustion sobbing through his chest, he searched frantically for something he could do.
“Stella!” he shouted. “Help me help you!”
“Jak!”
“Stella!” Stella’s voice in his head. He didn’t question it.
“Listen! The Star. I need the Star.”
But where in Danu was the Star? An image popped into his mind—his own memory or something Stella inserted there—of the Star rolling away across the dirty snow-rutted drive. To find it, though, he’d have to abandon Stella to the creature, leaving her to be dragged off while he essentially ran away. “I’m not leaving you!”
“I’m lost if you don’t. Please, Jak. I’m asking you to help me. This is how you can.”
“Fuck!” he shouted in pure frustrated rage, sheathing his daggers to run in the other direction.
~ 11 ~
Head down, freezing air burning his lungs, Jak did his best to maintain focus, to remember the direction so when he ran back into the now inky, snow-splattered night covering the featureless plain, he might have a fighting chance of finding her again. If the thing hadn’t already dragged Stella through a rift into the alter-realm.
He made it back to the torchlit circle of hell where the gríobhth and saber cat still battled the first tentacle monster. Unable to tell if they were winning or losing—at least they were still alive—he scrabbled around on hands and knees, searching for the blasted jewel. Glow, you fucker, he thought at it furiously.
“There.” Stella’s mental finger pointed him to a deep rut shrouded in darkness. Digging with his bare hands, he hissed at the bite of ice-sharp shards piercing under his nails. “I don’t see it,” he said aloud.
“Let me in.”
If Rhy could do it, he could. He pictured Stella, opening his arms to her. She stepped into his mind like a breeze on a tropical night. Of its own accord—seemingly—his hand reached forward, pushing into a clod of dirty snow… and closed around the Star. Without a pause to look at it, he was on his feet and running, almost blindly, into the whirling white and black infinity of the wintry plain.
Stella stayed with him—and drew him toward her at the same time. It wasn’t exactly the direction he’d have gone in on his own, but he threw his trust—and the last of his strength—into following her pull.
The tentacle monster had picked up speed, and had also jagged sideways. Jak was nearly on it before he skidded to a sliding stop on the icy snow. He pulled one dagger but had to use his other hand to hold the Star. “What now?” he shouted at the creature’s tentacle-wrapped lump as it moved along like an octopus on dry land, using some of its many tentacles for propulsion.
“I need to use the Star through you.”
“Do it.”
“You have to let me in Jak, all the way.”
“I am!” he snarled.
“You’re fighting me. Be still. Be calm.”
“Easy for you to say,” he muttered, but he tried.
“Clear your mind, Jak. Relax.”
“I’m a little stressed right now,” he ground out.
“Do Danu’s Dance.”
It seemed beyond absurd, an exercise in futility. A tentacle monster was dragging Stella away into the frozen tundra, and she wanted him to run forms?
“Do it, Jak.”
“I live to obey,” he snarled, and moved into the familiar steps of Danu’s Dance. The one blade fit snug into his grip, if sticky with fluids he didn’t want to contemplate, and in the other he balanced the Star on his palm. He wasn’t as practiced at that, as he rarely performed Danu’s Dance that way, though that was how it was sometimes done. The martial form was also an actual dance, performed with lit candles floating in saucers of water—or burning oil for the brave—cupped in the palms and balanced there with exquisite care. Keeping the Star perfectly balanced on his palm so it wouldn’t roll off into the snow again as he swept through the increasingly rigorous and acrobatic movements of the dance required utmost concentration.
And as the ritual of the form took over his body, his mind focused on the Star, Stella’s presence within him intensifying. Her magic, dark as fog on a moonless sea, swept into and around him, pouring into the Star.
It blazed into light, becoming like a small sun in his hand, and he nearly faltered in surprise.
“Keep going,” Stella murmured in his head. “You’re doing well. Yes, just like that.”
Her praise stroked him like an intimate caress, and he strove to continue through the form, beginning Danu’s Dance for the third time, distantly aware of his exhaustion and growing weakness. More than a few flesh wounds this time.
The Star grew brighter until it illuminated the landscape bright as full day, the snowscape nearly blinding in its stark whiteness. And the creature stood out, black and phenomenally bizarre. Its bulging, pulsating core burbled with shifting pustules, tentacles bristling in all directions. A grizzly roared from not far away. Astar on his way, thank Danu.
The screech of a gríobhth from above and the roar of a saber cat followed. The Star grew impossibly brighter, pulsing with such fire that Jak expected it to burn.
With a massive flare, sound boomed out, almost knocking him over—though he managed to land on his feet. The creature dissolved so abruptly that Stella went rolling over the snow like a discarded toy.
Jak ran to Stella. Her occupation of his mind was quickly fading, and her white fur cloak was tarred with black fluids. When he fell to his knees by her side, his head swam with dizziness so extreme he nearly keeled over. He rolled her limp body into his arms, but when he went to stand, his legs failed him, leaving him kneeling in the bitter snow, Stella a boneless weight.
“Let me have her, Jak.” Astar had a hand on his shoulder, clamping hard and shaking him a little.
Jak blinked at Astar, in his shirtsleeves in the raging blizzard, and held Stella tighter. “She’s hurt.”
“I know. So are you. Let me help you both.”
A draft horse pranced up behind Astar. Gen?
Astar let go of Jak’s shoulder and slid his hands under Stella, tugging when Jak held on. “Jak.” Astar met and held his gaze. “It’s all right. We’re putting you both up on Gen’s back to take you to the inn. We’ll freeze out here.”