Hexed

hand and looking like she’d just had fabulous sex somehow on her way up. She raised her right arm above her head—a gesture that seemed to precede most of the spells her coven cast in combat—and said, » Zorya Vechernyaya ch roñ mnie od z³ a. « The immediate effect was a cone of purple light sheathing her form, much like Bogumila’s, but perhaps a bit more solid looking. The charging hexen pulled up and redirected their attention to Klaudia, whom they recognized as one of their old enemies. Two of them let loose with hellfire that bloomed from their arms like time-lapse orchids, and Klaudia calmly ignored them as it washed up against the purple light and found no passage through. The other two kept coming with a physical attack, and those received her special attention.
    Her languid manner sloughed off, and suddenly she moved with liquid grace, crouching and then pivoting on her right foot as she swept the blade of her dagger across the eyes of the leader. She crossed her left foot in front of her right, then spun on it and leapt around in a sort of Chun-Li move, delivering first a right boot, then a left to the head of the second witch. Both hexen were down inside of two seconds, though I doubted they were dead. Their demon spawn would heal them up in no time.
    Still, I admit that I gawked; I gaped, even. Malina had told me that her coven wasn’t trained for combat, yet Klaudia had just displayed stark evidence to the contrary. But then I thought she must be the exception to the rule; if the dark side of her coven had fought so well at Tony Cabin, more than two werewolves would have perished that night.
    Shaking off my astonishment, I advanced to help, as the two downed hexen clambered to their feet and the flamethrowers were finally registering that nothing was burning inside that purple cone.
    The answer to enemies who heal annoyingly fast is always, always decapitation. That is why swords will never go out of style. Fragarach sang through the neck of one of the flamethrowers, and I added a stab for Junior in the gut before the body fell. That reminded the remaining three that I was still around. Their minds and their jaws became unhinged as they bellowed hot roars of red ass-breath and charged me all at once, forgetting entirely about Klaudia. She hadn’t killed any of them yet, after all, while I’d been responsible for quite a number so far.
    These last three had very little of their humanity left. They were old, old witches, and they’d been selling wee parcels of their souls to hell for so long that nothing but a single forlorn box of humanity was left in what was once a full warehouse. Something else occupied their skins now, something that made their eyes burn in their heads and black claws grow from their fingers.
    I gave ground before the charge, whirling the blade in front of me in a defensive pattern. One, then two of their cursed faces dropped out of my vision, due no doubt to some guerrilla effort of Klaudia’s, but I still had one more to deal with—and she was faster than me.
    Perhaps I’d slowed down. The pain of my injuries was building, for I’d done no real healing to any of them; I’d just continued fighting and probably exacerbated them in the process. The witch lost her left hand to Fragarach in order to get a good shot at me with her right. Her claws tore down through my flak vest at my left shoulder, ripping not only through it but also through my pectoralis muscles. I fell backward and she clung to me on the way down, trying to dig in farther with her nails, attempting to turn the claws up under my rib cage and do serious damage to my organs. Her left side, however, was unguarded and vulnerable. I shoved Fragarach sideways through her guts as she straddled me, twisting it madly to make sure the demon felt the blade. She convulsed spastically and vomited blood before her eyes finally cooled and she fell still. On top of me.
    My left arm didn’t want to move. I tried and it hammered me with pain. I used the last of my stored magic to shut it off; I couldn’t think in a cloud of agony. I yanked Fragarach out of the witch—a messy business—then put it down long enough to shove her off me with my right hand. I sat up to see if any hexen were left.
    There weren’t. Klaudia had eviscerated the last two, killing the demon spawn first, and then she’d slashed their throats for good measure. Now that the battle was over, her purple wards were gone and her waifish charisma