Lupi 08 - Death Magic

looked down what used to be a grassy field . . .
    The stage was gone. Weirdly, the Jumbotron screen still reared up, but it loomed over a rubble of broken boards. In front of that rubble, dozens of wolves fought.
    All of them, she realized as she looked around, a sudden, sick lurch of her heart making her squeeze her hands into fists. All of the demon wolves had congregated in that one spot. Where Rule was.
    The elementals were battling.
    The giant one had wrapped most of its length around the smallest one like an enormous boa constrictor. Neither made any sound, not a vocalization, anyway, but there was a dull grating of stone against stone. And while the giant one squeezed the smallest, the third elemental took the giant’s tail—or its far end, anyway—in its jaws and chomped.
    Stone crunched.
    “Oh, dear,” Deborah whispered.
    Earth elementals move slowly. That’s what Lily had been told. And the giant one had seemed to be especially slow. Managing that much bulk wouldn’t be easy, especially if you didn’t practice having a physical form very often. But it turned out that elementals could move fast—when they really, really wanted to.
    The coils wrapped around the smallest one loosened and the head—if that was a head—whipped around and around, unwrapping itself enough to lunge at the third elemental like a striking snake. Its jaws opened. And kept opening.
    Yeah, that was definitely the head. Eyeless and blind, and not that much like an earthworm after all. Not when most of that head became a gaping, tooth-lined maw. Rows of teeth, like a shark’s—not huge teeth, not for the size of that mouth, but there were a lot of them. It caught the other elemental’s head in its jaws . . . and crunched.
    The captive elemental shook. Its body began to crack, like rock struck by a hammer. Cracks, fissures, opened up in it—then all at once it exploded into dust, dust that hung in the air in a huge, dirty cloud.
    Twenty or thirty tiny figures dressed all in brown raced out of the dusty cloud, little legs pumping. Brownies could move amazingly fast. “Lily, Lily!” yelled the one in the lead. “Rule’s hurt! Cullen’s hurt! Everyone’s in trouble! Do you have the nasty thing?”
    “I—yes!” she called back. “But—”
    “You have to break it!” Harry screamed. “Make it not-be! You have to do it now!”
    “I can’t—it takes mage fire to—”
    “No!” He was still yelling at the top of his little lungs even as he came to a stop in front of her. “Give it to it! Hurry!”
    Do what?
    “To the Great It!” He pointed at the enormous elemental, which seemed to be considering renewing its attack on the other one. But that one was beginning to subside. To sink back into the earth. Slowly, but it was on its way out of here.
    “Are you nuts? You want me to feed an enraged giant elemental a colossal amount of death magic?”
    He rolled his eyes. “Stupid! Earth doesn’t cleanse as quick as fire, but it cleanses. Hurry!”
    Deborah spoke in her husky, damaged voice. “It’s too angry. I can feel how it rages . . . it will kill anything, anyone, that comes near.”
    Lily had promised Rule she wouldn’t die. But if the only way to save Rule was to break a promise—
    “Never mind. You’re too big and slow, anyway.”
    “I—hey!” she cried.
    The chain she’d been gripping dangled loose. The amulet wasn’t on it anymore.
    And a whole troop of brownies were running away—and they were amazingly fast. Running straight toward a giant, enraged earth elemental.
    “Lily?” Deborah said. “Who were we just talking to?”
    Lily turned her head, incredulous. “You didn’t see them?”
    “See who? I heard someone, but I didn’t see a thing.”
    “Brownies,” Lily said numbly as she turned back to watch the timid little brownies charge a creature as long as a football field. “A whole troop of brownies.”
    They pelted straight for it. It noticed them—apparently it didn’t need eyes all that much—and swung its head around, opening those jaws once more, lowering its head to the ground. They split into two streams, one group veering to each side of that enormous head—and scrambled up onto it.
    The head reared up. And up. They clung to it—its surface wasn’t smooth, after all, being full of stones and sticks and the occasional body part—and they were little and light. They clambered around on its head, then formed a chain, a brownie ladder. The ones at the top of the beast’s