Puck took a quick breath. “Yeah,” he said, giving Meghan a weak smile. “Yeah, she’s not getting rid of us that easily. If she thinks we’re not going to follow her to Evenfall, then she doesn’t know me well at all.” His smile turned into a somewhat evil smirk. “Besides, we have an appointment with royalty. I’m sure the Nightmare King will go back to his nappy time if we just reason with him.”
“You cannot reason with him,” said a new voice, as Grimalkin appeared, perched on a stone column several yards away. Anger stirred as the cat peered down at us. He had been there. He had been part of the ritual to close Evenfall. Maybe he hadn’t said the actual words, but he knew what was going on. Of course, by that time, the Nightmare King might have been on his way to destroy the Nevernever, so they hadn’t had much of a choice. But with all his knowledge, I was almost certain he could have come up with something, some other way, to appease the Nightmare King and save Evenfall.
Grimalkin met my stare with flat gold eyes and pinned his ears, as if he knew what I was thinking. “The Nightmare King cannot be reasoned with,” he said again. “He is not fey. Perhaps he was at one point, long ago, or perhaps he was some sort of ancient god. But now, he is a force of hunger, rage, and emotion. He is the darkness of the world given form, the shadow self of mankind and faery alike, and now that he has been sealed away for so long, he will know only two things—hunger and fury. You cannot reason with him. He will not hear you. If he is freed, if the Nightmare King wakes once more, not only will he destroy the Nevernever, he could very well move on to the rest of the world.”
Silence fell for a moment after that statement, the gravity of the situation weighing heavily on us all. We had been here before, facing down cataclysmic prophecies, fighting to save the Nevernever from certain doom, but this one...felt different. This one, as Meghan had stated once before, felt like the big one. The prophecy to end them all. Like we really were standing at the brink of The End, and if we didn’t succeed this time, that was it for everyone.
“So,” Meghan said quietly, “another End of the World situation, huh?”
Puck snorted. “Must be a Tuesday.”
A ripple of glamour hissed through the opening, furious and hungry, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. I could sense a tide rising from the pit, swelling and growing ever larger as it came toward us, a tsunami ready to break over us all.
“Heads up,” I warned, and raised my sword, feeling the violence and power of Winter course through me. “Something is coming.”
Puck and Meghan fell silent, listening, and for a moment, the stillness throbbed against my skin. Then, a new sound began emerging from the portal, a faint clicking, rustling sound. Like hundreds of feet or hands, moving toward us over the stones.
Meghan rose and came to stand beside me, sword at the ready. “Whatever comes out of there,” the Iron Queen said, “we can’t let them through. If they get past us into the Nevernever, it will be chaos. It’s up to us to hold them here.”
“Yeah, but for how long, princess?” Puck asked, and raised an arm, gesturing to the hole in reality. “That isn’t the entrance to a movie theater, you know. There’s a whole freaking world on the other side. How long do you expect us to hold the line?”
“Until they stop coming. Or until something arrives to close it.”
The clicking noise got louder. And then several large, bloated creatures crawled out of the opening, wincing as they came into the light. At first they looked like a huge half-spider creatures, with elven heads and torsos welded to an arachnid’s body. But then I saw that the spider’s “legs” weren’t legs at all, but long fleshy fingers, with jagged fingernails scraping against the stone as they crawled forward. A dozen hairless, eyeless heads turned toward us, circular mouths opening to bare dozens of hooked white teeth. They screeched and scuttled toward us over the floor, and Puck leaped to his feet with a curse.
“Oh, what the hell! Just when I thought spiders couldn’t get any worse!”
The spider creatures leaped at us, terrible mouths gaping to nearly cover their entire faces. I lashed out as one came at me and sliced its fleshy, shrieking head from its body. The creature collapsed to the stones, burst apart, and turned into swarms of real spiders that scrambled away in all directions.
Puck let out a vehement curse.
“Okay, I am officially done! No. No, no, no.” He leaped back, dancing around a trio of spider things that scurried toward him, hissing. “Nope, nuh-uh, no. Do not like. I hate this place. I hate this place, let’s kill everything and burn it to the ground so we don’t ever have to do this again.”
I sneered, slicing multiple legs from a creature’s twisted body. It collapsed to the ground, scrabbling with its remaining four, and I plunged my sword through its bloated thorax. “Scared, Goodfellow?”
“Of nightmare spider things with fingers for legs and giant lampreys for a face? Whatever gave you that idea, ice-boy?” A spider creature reared up, revealing a huge mouth on its stomach with a pair of curved black fangs waving in the light, and Puck gave a yelp that was higher-pitched than anything I’d ever heard from him.
Meghan’s sword came slashing down, cutting into the spider creature threatening Puck, splitting it in two. Raising her arm, she blasted another pair with lightning, and they reeled back, shrieking, before exploding into tiny spiders. “Get it together, Puck,” she ordered, raising her weapon as the rest swarmed in. “If you’re going to shriek at every nasty that jumps out and says ‘boo,’ you’ll be exhausted before the second wave ever gets here.”
“Ohohoho, touché, princess.” Puck grinned, a spark of defiance flickering to life in his eyes. And for a moment, despite the bleakness of the situation, it was like old times again: me, Meghan, and Puck facing unspeakable odds together. “You’ve been waiting years to say that, haven’t you?”
The spider creatures pressed forward, a hissing, scuttling swarm. Despite their horrific appearance, they died easily on my sword as I cut them from the air. Briefly, I wondered why so many had an almost crippling fear of spiders, to the point where giant spiders and spiderlike monsters showed up in almost every culture and stories across time. I supposed some fears were universal. Still, they died quickly, no match for the three of us. Even Puck got his act together, though he still complained every time a nightmare creature erupted into a spider swarm and skittered to all corners of the ruins.
But that was only the beginning. Just the first wave, as Meghan had said.
20
ENDLESS
I lost track of how long we stood against Evenfall. More creatures poured through the opening, monstrous and terrifying. Vipers with human hands that crawled toward us on pale fingers. Silent gray men with glowing white eyes, their feet never touching the ground as they floated forward. Huge crows with skulls for heads that reeked of death and carrion as they swooped through the opening. And the pit to Evenfall continued to widen.