They Who from the Heavens Came (The Wisdom, #1)

Oz and Seth’s sudden reappearance in the room was enough to give them the element of surprise. Oz watched his friend’s hands whirl with wizardry. A series of steel spikes slammed into the ground, creating a circle of prison bars around Horace and Loki.

Loki gave them a hideous grin and melted into a gelatinous substance that slipped eel-like through the bars and reformed into a man on the other side.

The man seemed to stretch sideways, the skin going dark, dark, darker still, until it was the colour of Horace’s eyes. His arms multiplied until there were eight of them, some long and spindly like those of a spider, but some thicker. Two in the front ended in threatening pincers. Overall, it looked like someone had crossed a spider with a crab with something altogether else. It wasn’t pretty.

The pincers darted at them. Seth whipped his hand in the air and made himself and Oz disappear from their place, reappearing across the room. Another dash of his hands and a long sword sprang into Seth’s hand. The hilt was plain and black, the blade four inches thick and a metre long, ending in the unmistakeable point of death.

‘Just so you know,’ Seth threw over his shoulder at Oz, ‘I haven’t the foggiest how to wield this thing.’

Oz grabbed it from his hand. ‘I took fencing lessons as a kid.’

‘Not quite the same thing,’ Seth pointed out, but Oz was already stepping bravely – or insanely – forward to meet the nightmarish spider-crab.

The claws dove for him. He jumped aside and slashed the sword in the direction of the legs. He missed by maybe an inch and found himself already sweating. He realised Seth was right; this was nothing like fencing. For one thing, in fencing, he’d worn a protective mask – and his opponents had only ever been after trophies.

The legs crawled across the lounge, driving him backward. He thought maybe it would get stuck in the kitchen – the beast was so wide – but it contorted itself and slipped through as he threw open the front door and ran outside where there was more open ground for them to fight. Seth and Horace chased after them to watch, each undoubtedly hoping for the opposite side’s demise.

A fresh crowd of humans thronged outside. When they saw the spider-crab, they screamed – but they didn’t go inside. Some of them even took out their mobile phones to take photos and video what was happening.

Perhaps Horace was right, Oz thought grimly. Humanity was pathetic.

Oz had no idea where the skeletons had gone. They seemed to have run off to terrorise some other neighbourhood. Seth’s wall remained as a divider between the two halves of the street, so if Oz wanted to run, he only had one direction to go.

The spider-crab lunged for him, and he cut the sword with an involuntary growl, thinking himself very Bruce Lee for it. The creature lurched backward, wincing at the wound Oz had managed to draw from one of its thinner legs. But the wound didn’t seem to slow the thing down.

It came for him again, and he jumped over its leg as it dashed at his feet. It was like skipping rope – which he’d never been very good at, now that he thought of it.

The next time the leg came for him, he slammed the sword down, slicing the leg in half. Black spurted from the gash and the severed leg lay twitching on the road like a fish gasping for water. Some of the black ink spattered across Oz’s face, like his hair had leaked down his head. He wiped away as much as he could with the back of one of his shaking hands. He felt sick.

But the spider kept coming for him. It had eight legs; losing one wouldn’t stop it from its task.

One of the pincers clipped Oz’s arm, and he screamed at the sudden burning sensation. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been in so much pain. He threw his hand to his arm and watched as his own blood slid between his fingers.

He blinked away a wave of dizziness. The spider doubled in his vision, gaining legs. He ran in the direction he thought was right and plunged the sword into the spider’s flank. It let out a satisfying yowl that shuddered through Oz’s chest, before the creature dissolved.

And disappeared.

Which Oz didn’t trust at all.

‘Is that it?’ Seth shouted from his viewing place outside their house.

Oz was about to say he doubted that very much, when he felt something crawling on him. He looked down and saw small lumps wriggling their way up his legs, under his jeans.

The sickness inside him grew. He shook out his legs and slapped at them like he’d been struck with a terrible case of St Vitus’ Dance. At last, he tripped over his own feet and landed on the road, scratching and pulling at his own body.

He felt tiny sets of teeth pierce the flesh under his clothes and he started shrieking, not caring how unmanly it was. If anything, Oz was distantly impressed with himself for not falling entirely to pieces.

Meanwhile, their neighbours adjusted the zoom on their cameras, trying to get a better angle on what was happening to him. Maybe this would end up on YouTube, when it was over, and Oz would become an internet phenomenon.

Then water rushed over him, over all his body below the neck.

No, not water. Something else. Something like….

He thrashed on the ground and clawed at his own clothes, ready to throw them off and reveal whatever was devouring him. Maybe there was some way to destroy it, yet.

Except he was so weak. He didn’t think he had the energy anymore to fight off what was killing him. All around him, everything was growing dark. In the sky, he noticed the moon was disappearing.

This is it, he thought.

He suddenly found himself unable to move. He looked down at his body and saw it was coated in a thin layer of silver. The wriggling had stopped. The biting had stopped.

He dropped his head to the road. His chest heaved in and out.

Thank God for Seth and his quick-fire imagination, he thought.

Maybe he now looked like the Tin Man, but at least there was nothing for the monsters to eat.

Snap, snap, went the camera phones.

His eyes shut in exhaustion. Whatever else happened, Seth would have to do it on his own.

* * *

Forgetting he was supposed to be afraid of the Ancients, Seth stormed furiously over to Horace. His hands squeezed into fists that itched to hit the giant.

‘How can you do this?’ he shouted. ‘Make it stop! We’re the same!’

Horace glanced down at him and gave him a dark, dangerous look filled with hate. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘We are not the same. You may have our blood running through your veins, but it’s been contaminated with human weakness. That’s why you die so easily, while we remain to this day.’

Seth threw him a haughty stare. ‘You remain because you ran.’

He left the stunned Ancient and rushed into the street himself. He knew it was up to him now. He just wished he had any idea what he was doing. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could make things up as he went along.

Desperately, he wished Itzy were there to write them all a happy ending.

He was vaguely aware that above them, the sky was darkening. All the illumination he had thrown into the air was fading. It didn’t sit well with him, but he didn’t have time to think why.

Loki had reassembled himself into a bat. Its wing was gashed, a leftover from the damage Oz had done to the spider leg, but not enough to throw it off. And it wasn’t a regular bat, but ten feet wide when it spread its wings, of course.

Nothing was ever simple, was it? What crypto-zoological wonder would be next? A Mongolian death worm, maybe?

The bat flew in great dips, like a huge black ice cream scooper in the sky, taking a chunk out of one flavour and then another. It swooped down over Seth’s head. He ducked just as its claws teased his hair.

It bounced back up, high in the air. When it came again, he boxed himself in to avoid it. His chest pounded with adrenalin. The bat danced off the top of the box and Seth made himself visible once again. He wracked his brain for some idea how to fight this latest incarnation of horror.

Then it screeched, a frequency so piercing that only other bats should have felt or heard it, and yet it resonated in Seth’s head – in everyone’s heads. As if moving to the choreography of the darkest ballet ever designed, humans and Descendants alike dropped in unison to the ground, clutching their ears. Seth’s chest felt like it might explode.

I can’t do this, Seth thought. Whoever’s watching…I tried.

And he waited to die.