Rise of the Night Witch

Chapter 4.7 - Death and Rebirth

Recap: Last time, Marissa almost got killed by Sluagh before Darcy came to the rescue.

My feet touched the ground. My blurry, color-muted vision struggled to create a sharp image of Darcy standing before me. Pictures in my mind failed to make sense as blood rolled down my cheek from sustained injuries.

At least I could make out Darcy's blue robe. She was unharmed.

She wasn't angry. She didn't even look at me.

Her gaze was entirely focused on the angelic monster above us and the ghostly swarm fluttering around it. She was motionless. From what Darcy told me last time, this kind of monster deprived her mother of magic and tore her family apart.

"Why did you come?" I asked.

"I already told you-"

"I don't want to know how you knew to come! I want to know why!"

"Because something told me you wouldn't know the rule about how people should stay indoors during the Wild Hunt!"

"I tried staying indoors. Didn't quite work out. My school's anti-supernatural threshold isn't what it used to be."

I pointed at the school building, showing her the battered parking lot, the blown-out door to the basement, and the broken windows glinting in the moonlight.

Normally, one of the rules of the Veil was that monsters, even if they somehow got out of the Otherworld, couldn't enter people's homes without being explicitly invited to come in. By having set up a Domain in our school's basement, the Erlking found a way to cleverly work around that rule.

"And unless there's some kind of glamour-hidden roof here that I can't see, smell, hear, or touch, you're outside, too!" I said.

"Yes," she said. "I'd like to protect my town while you stand behind cracking jokes, is that a fair deal?"

Just what did Darcy feel when she saw those monsters that had harmed her mother? If she felt sorrow or anguish, she was pretty good at masking it.

Unfortunately, neither of us had the tools to deal with swarms of small enemies. Maybe if Darcy formed a sympathetic link to the Sylph, she could shoot it down. If the storm stopped, we could get in the basement and find the portal that pumped new Sluagh into our schoolyard. We could close it or we could storm it to start a counterattack.

But it was hard to even walk in the wind. We had to duck under the Sluagh, hold onto benches for a stronger foothold, and clutch our robes to avoid losing them.

"Why is he so powerful?" Darcy yelled.

"He killed people!" I yelled back. "Read my messages!"

The Sylph hovered between the Sluagh. Even covered by their rotten, dead bodies, its radiant light made it impossible to overlook.

When the Sylph flapped its wings, it didn't produce a gale, nor a gust of wind, it was a hurricane. There was a good reason why people were advised to search storm shelters in such situations.

A hurricane wasn't just wind. Trees were bending, branches breaking off and dust and debris hitting me like knives.

The wind blew Darcy against me.

I felt the life drain away from me as the Unseelie Repellant Potion stopped working.

Before we hit the ground, Sluagh picked us up.

I kicked and thrashed. They had spread my arms out so that I couldn't grab my pendant while Siris was getting restrained by one of these bastards.

The swarm lifted me and Darcy off the ground, flying higher into the sky. We flew over the trees and the schoolyard shrank until we saw the school's roof.