Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

still fighting, dripping with her own blood. No, Owen decided. He wasn’t going to turn and run. He sighed regretfully. Time to play his last trump card, and hope it was good enough. “Shut the door!” he yelled.
    And turned back to face the enemy. He reached inside himself, diving deep into his mind, through the undermind to the back brain, and tapped into the power that lived there. He threw back his head and howled the old war cry of his Clan—Shandrakor! Shandrakor!—and all his rage and frustration and need to defend the lepers of the Mission came roaring up through him and burst out into the material world, beating on the air like the wings of a huge and powerful bird. The Grendels sensed that something new had entered the battle, and looked about them, confused. The ground shook under their feet, throwing them off balance. A great wind roared across what was left of the compound, scattering the Grendels like leaves in a hurricane. Owen looked about him, smiled once, and let loose his anger on the Grendels.
    Those aliens nearest him blew apart in sudden explosions of blood and guts and shattered armor. Owen stalked unsteadily forward, his eyes wide and unblinking, his rage beating on the air in time to his heartbeat, his face grim and relentless. He had given himself up to his power as never before. He turned his head, and Grendels died where he looked. His boots hit the ground, and earthquakes split apart the cratered earth of the compound. The Deathstalker had released his rage, and the Grendels could not stand against it. They blew apart or were blown away, and not one of them could get close enough to touch him. Owen knew the power was killing him. He could feel things tearing apart, breaking down, inside him. He knew he should shut the power down while he still could. That mortal man was not meant to burn so very brightly. But he couldn’t, not while the innocent still needed him. So he walked slowly on, killing Grendels, dying inside a little more with every step, killing himself as he killed his enemy.
    Deathstalker.
    But all too quickly there came a time when even need and determination couldn’t drive him forward another step. His mortal frame had never been meant to channel so much power for so long, and finally it had nothing left to give. Owen fell to his knees. He felt very tired. He’d done so much. Maybe he could sleep now, and if he was lucky, he wouldn’t dream. He fell forward, and his face slammed into the blood-soaked ground. The winds shut down, the ground stopped shaking, and the rage of the Deathstalker no longer beat upon the air. Hazel d’Ark saw his last moment of glory and saw him fall.
    She’d watched in awe as his anger swept aside the Grendels, but now she cried out and ran to him. She put a hand on his shoulder, but there was no response. Hazel cried out again, in shock and horror and the pain of a heart breaking at last. She would have cried, but she didn’t know how. She never had.
    She looked up and saw the remaining Grendels reforming. Owen had killed a lot of them, but there were still a hell of a lot left. More than enough to tear down the communications hall and kill every living thing within it. They moved slowly forward, baring their steel teeth, flexing steel claws, and Hazel looked at them and smiled the coldest smile of her life. They were going to pay for what they had done. All of them.
    She’d tried to tell herself that her particular power wasn’t needed. That the Mission already had enough defenders. That she didn’t need to call up alternates of herself, and see them die over and over again.
    Bonnie and Midnight had made her alternates real to her as never before. But she needed them now, and so she called on them, not in her own name but in Owen’s. Called them forth to avenge the Deathstalker.
    And they came.
    Suddenly the compound was full of Hazel d’Arks, screaming in rage and loss. And all the Grendels who hadn’t died under Owen’s attack suddenly found themselves facing an army of warrior women, of varying faces and forms, but all of them united in pain and sorrow. There was a moment as both sides looked at each other and recognized a worthy adversary, and then the two sides surged forward and clashed together, and the dying began. Guns roared and steel flashed, and metal teeth and claws tore human flesh, but for every Hazel that fell another appeared to take her place. Hazel d’Ark had made herself a doorway through which an endless