by Abigail Owen
“Why does Belial want me?” he asked.
“You’re the leader of all mages and extremely powerful.” Hazah’s voice sounded like sandpaper had been taken to her larynx. “They have seen your future as part of their plan, whatever it may be.”
I need to go. Now.
But he was trapped here, in this Christmas Carol catastrophe, while the world was falling apart, and Delilah’s pale face and the way she wouldn’t look at him was making his heart wrench.
He held out his hand. “Come with me.”
Her eyes went wide, and she gave her head the slightest shake. “I can’t—”
He jerked his gaze to her mother. “Release us from the visions,” he demanded.
“Watch how you address her,” Delilah’s father said. Quietly, but no doubt that was an order.
Alasdair didn’t have time to ask nicely. “The Syndicate has already fallen. I have to save my people.”
The demoness closed her eyes, then frowned, shaking her head. “I am too weak to see if the future has changed. I can’t see…anything.” She opened her eyes. “But I won’t hold you now. The legions are coming.”
Legions? Icy claws of fear raked through him. “Why?”
Hazah’s smile took visible effort. “If you were trapped in hell and possession was your only way to get out and stay out, you’d do it. You’d do anything, try anything, kill anything you had to after long enough. But demons’ attempts to break their eternal bonds have been thwarted too many times by powerful creatures up here. Taking over mages not only to keep those people from sending them back, but to use those powers for their own purposes is…brilliant.”
She was right. If he’d been trapped down there, he would do anything to get out. With that kind of motivation against him, could he even stop this?
“I hope what you’ve seen is enough to get you through.” Hazah waved her hand.
A flash of darkness, like power flickering off and on, and, immediately, a sharp pain, like a hot poker jammed into his skin and melting through to the bone, flashed across his chest. With a hiss, he yanked back his shirt to find that spider mark from Hazah gone.
His Christmas Carol was over. They were done. He had no doubt. But they weren’t nearly finished with what was to come.
He lifted his gaze, offering his hand again to the woman still sitting in a heap on the floor beside her mother, and froze halfway there at the sight of her expression, gone so blank, so uncaring, she might as well have punched him in the face.
“Delilah?”
She rose to her feet slowly, chin tipped up at that haughty angle that used to make him so damn frustrated. Still did. Anger stirred in his breast, swirling with a hurt betrayal that was worse by far. After all this…was she going to let him face this alone?
He could see the truth of it in her eyes before she spoke.
“I can’t go,” she said.
“Why?” he snapped the word.
She shook her head. Was she refusing to tell him? “Just go. You can’t—”
Her mother cut her off. “When my daughter was born, both factions—angels and demons—feared the power a child of both could hold over them. Neither angels nor demons can affect our daughter. But with the blood of both in her veins, she could destroy an entire species if she wished. At least, that was the concern.”
Dread dropped over him like a blanket woven of lead. He turned his gaze on Delilah. “Was the concern?”
She glanced away, then back, then shook her head.
“The binding won’t let her speak of it,” her father said quietly.
Alasdair looked over her shoulder to find a man tormented by the actions he’d taken against his own daughter.
Every horror of that decision written plainly in the lines of his face, the deep regret in his eyes. “That spell that bound her powers was an unbreakable oath. She can’t help or harm either side. Anything to do with angels or demons and she must stay out of it.”
Alasdair dropped his gaze to Delilah’s face, finding…nothing. She watched him carefully. Held herself carefully. And he had no fucking clue what to say to this. “Or what?” he asked.
She shrugged, still distant. “I’ve never tested the limits of the consequences.”
Why was she acting like this? Every duty, every fear, the weight of his people and possibly the world, rested on what happened next, and he found that he wanted…needed…her at his side. What were consequences in the face of annihilation? “Come with me anyway. Do what you can.”
Delilah stilled like a doe in the forest with a hunter’s bow trained on her heart. And, for half a second, he thought she was going to reach for his hand. But then she drew herself to her full height, hands fisted at her sides. “No.”
The single hard word, uttered in cool control she’d perfected, dropped between them, seeming to thud on the ground like a dead body dropped from a great height.
After a long beat full of disbelief and betrayal, Alasdair shook his head. She couldn’t mean it. The woman he’d come to know today, hell the woman he’d learned of this past year and in that alley, wouldn’t walk away from someone facing supernatural peril.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, slowly. Softly. “What aren’t you telling me?”
She tipped up her chin. “It doesn’t matter if you believe me. I’m not coming with you, and you’re out of time.”
She glanced at her father, who, after a pause, waved a hand, and without a will of his own, Alasdair was sent away.
Chapter Eight
He hates me.
His expression as he disappeared told her that much. She’d made him hate her so that he could go. So that he would go.
The series of emotions that had crossed his face when he’d learned of her binding had moved too fast for her to catch every nuance. She’d expected the worst. Accusations. Incriminations. Instead, what she’d seen was the one she’d secretly, selfishly been hoping for.
Understanding.
Even though he no doubt blamed her for the entire fiasco of a day, he’d understood and wanted her with him anyway.
I would push the limits and risk any pain, for you. The words had hovered on her lips, feathering through her soul as though sewn into the fabric of her very makeup. But she’d held back.
He’d given her an orgasm. He’d fought beside her against the windigo. He’d comforted her in the worst moment of her life.
That was it. So small in the scheme of things, and yet cataclysmic to her personally.
Every part of her had focused on not giving away how that understanding, from Alasdair in particular, with his own history, made her want…things.
Things he couldn’t give her.
Not with his past—his father’s possession and what that had made Alasdair do as a child—and the blood in her veins. Worse, was something she knew that he did not. What always ended up being the point of the visits to the past, present, and future.
The future visions always—always—showed how trying to ignore or test her binding was the worst possible thing Delilah could do.
After her mother clawed her way out of the hells and discovered her daughter’s powers constricted, Hazah had used these lessons to instill blinding fear into Delilah about the consequences. That unbreakable oath—to neither harm nor help either side with her powers—had bound her with magical shackles for the rest of her immortal life.
She’d found ways around her limitation. Helping others who needed her. As long as her actions had nothing to do with angels or demons, she was fine. No bone-deep agony and no potentially world obliterating outcomes. That’s what every other future vision her mother had sent her to had shown previously.
As much as her heart wanted Alasdair, her mind knew that whatever he felt for her, as chained as she was, she was worthless to him. If anything, she would be in the way.
&nbs
p; She’d only make things worse.
I made the right choice, sending him away. For the first time in her life, she lifted her gaze to heaven and prayed.
Prayed that he survived. That he triumphed. Because God help them all if he failed.
Her mother suddenly made a small sound. A whimper. A noise Delilah never in a thousand millennia thought she would hear her strong fighter of a parent make.
“What?” Delilah and her father demanded at the same time.
“What’s coming,” her mother said, voice turning more thready with each syllable uttered. “It’s worse…”
Her mother could see the future? Wasn’t she too weak? If she went any paler, Hazah would pass out.
Her father clutched her mother’s hand, anguish crossing his features. “Semie? Don’t do this. You don’t have the strength.”
“Do what?” Delilah demanded, glancing between them. What was happening?
They both looked at her. Why did she suddenly feel like the little girl she’d once been, looking for approval from both her parents and never quite finding it. Their natures were too opposite to allow for that, even if they both loved her more than anything, and still loved each other. In their own way.
“I have to—” Her mother waved her hand.
The darkness of yet another vision dropped over Delilah like the harbinger of doom.
…
Even in the void of nothing, before landing at her destination, the pulse of magic sent the pressure around her climbing, pushing down on Delilah, making her ears feel like they might pop and bleed any second, just to relieve it.
Then the darkness lifted and she stood at the edge of a massive crater, debris from what, at a guess, used to be the Syndicate’s headquarters littered the ground in chunks of white cement and twisted metal, the stench of ozone all around, and dust clogging the air. Alasdair’s people lay dead or dying in the rubble. White sparks of…whatever had blown the structure to kingdom come…continued to ignite, like a glittering pantheon of fist-sized fireflies that would flare to life and burn out in a blink.
Incongruously, snow lightly fell over the scene, pristine and clean, like some horrible cosmic joke.
She closed her eyes against the sight. How far into the future was this? Was Alasdair too late? Had he already failed?
I’m sorry.
She wanted to go after him now. Warn him before this happened. Before it was too late. Only she was trapped here, in a future that would come to pass if she didn’t figure out how to change it.
The future. Always the crux of her mother’s lessons.
So pay attention, she told herself.
A boom echoed off the mountain peaks in the darkness, followed by a red flashing glow and several screams. Another boom, and something dark whisked past her in the darkness, sending a spiderweb of shivers over her skin.
Demon.
A huge blast from the direction of the crater practically shook the mountain under her feet and her vision blacked again only to come back so fast, she would’ve wondered if she’d blinked if she wasn’t looking at a different scene. Still in the wooded mountains surrounding the area where the Syndicate’s headquarters had once stood, she stared at the bald side of a mountain.
This area was worse than the last.
Bodies littered the boulders and ledges of the mountain, strewn about like tissue paper after a child’s birthday party, limp and lifeless. Only, as she watched, darkness appeared to leak from each like liquid smoke dripping out of every orifice and pooling on the ground before reshaping and reforming. Another hundred demons at least.
“Merciful heavens,” she whispered.
Horror clawed at her insides like a trapped feral cat, and she could do nothing. Impotent in this scene. Unable to help even if she were not in a vision. Damn her oath.
With another flash, she appeared in the bottom of the crater. Whatever had blown this had to have been massive because she stood at least a hundred feet below the top. As though the explosion not only took out the structure but disintegrated the giant flat-topped mountain of pure granite the structure had been built upon. The area was glittering. Not from the firefly-like sparks, which still popped up all over the place. Now, the sky was lit by a strand of lightning stretched overhead, but frozen there, blinding to look at directly, casting a blueish flickering glow over everything.
Just enough to see Alasdair—the future Alasdair—facing off against a legion of demons, some inhabiting bodies of witches and warlocks. His people. Some still in shadow form. Black eyes flashed at him in the spitting, hissing light of the electric bolt she had no doubt he’d put in the sky.
“Teleport,” she whispered. Urging him with her entire being to get out of there. Forget horror—fear clawed her raw from the inside out. “Get out of there.”
She was practically rocking as she willed him to listen, despite knowing he couldn’t hear or see her.
But he didn’t leave. Of course he didn’t. This was Alasdair.
Something—she wasn’t sure what—caught his attention and he lifted his gaze up, way up. She turned her head, following his eyeline. Over the lip of the crater, a pair of red glowing eyes appeared, seeming to hover in the blackness, beyond the reach of the lightning bolt. Only after staring hard did a faint outline make itself clearer.
Hellhound.
Then another set of eyes, and another.
Three hellhounds.
Seven hells. These demons weren’t fucking around. Even her mother knew better than to mess with those dogs. Unpredictable and able to kill with one bite, injecting poison into their victim that slowly ate them from the inside out.
Suddenly, one shadow broke from the others and sprinted toward him so fast it blurred with the speed. Without a word, Alasdair reached into the sky and formed a glowing energy orb, purple and brilliant. The demon backpedaled but not fast enough. Hurling the orb, Alasdair smashed it into the shadow, which disintegrated on the spot.
Then another came at him, smashed the same way. And another, and another, until the hoard overwhelmed him, and he went down under a pile of shadow demons, his face a mask of determination even as he disappeared from her view.
Everything inside her body cried out, convulsed with emotions she hadn’t allowed herself to access in ages. For Alasdair.
Delilah took jerking steps forward, desperate to dig him out from under, an impotent fury joining the fear. These fuckers—no matter if she carried their blood in her veins—dared to touch him.
A glow penetrated through the nooks and crannies of the pile of bodies and then burst outward, an explosion that sent every demon flying, leaving Alasdair standing by himself. Not for long, as they regrouped and came back at him. With a whispered spell, he drew more electricity from his body, stretching it out into a whip. Grasping one end, he flicked it at one, then another. Then he spun it so fast, it blurred, like the propeller of a plane. Turning in place, he took out every shadow demon that came at him.
Why weren’t they using the hellhounds or the demon-possessed bodies yet?
Almost as soon as she had the thought, all three massive black dogs charged down the embankment of the crater with deep, scratchy howls that put the fear of the hells into her.
“Alasdair!” she screamed. Not that his future self could hear her.
Even so, he jerked his head up, tracked the hounds, and then muttered another spell. His body lifted into the air, wind whipping around his form as he gained the pinnacle. He lifted a hand and a bolt of electricity shot from the sky to his body, as though he were a lightning rod. Then he dropped to the ground and punched that charged fist into the rock.
A blinding flash of light followed immediately by a sizzling boom, and even Delilah’s ears in her protected vision reacted with ringing. After several shakes of her head, her vision and hearing cleared only to find the shadow demons and all three he
llhounds now piles of ash at Alasdair’s feet.
A shout of challenge rose up from the possessed, a rumble of sound, like a storm over the ocean. In a wall of movement, they rushed him. Only, he didn’t use the lightning now. Not against his people. Kill the demon, kill the human it inhabited. She knew that he’d learned that the hard way with his father.
Choices and consequences. Stepping-stones to this moment. Even without witnessing the aftermath again today, a lesson he wasn’t likely to ever forget.
At first, spell after spell tumbled from his lips, clearly doing his best to take them out with other means. Some dropped to the ground in a deep sleep, some flew away or disappeared, some froze in place as though bound by an invisible force.
But mages got their power from within, and he had to be running low by now, risking his life to continue using magic.
Each spell affected fewer and fewer until the numbers swelled over him like a tidal wave and he went under. She waited. Waited for him to get out from under it like he had only moments ago. For him to fry the demons. But he didn’t. He wasn’t coming back up.
Delilah, heedless of how this was only a vision, sprinted toward him. Before she reached him, though, the bodies suddenly flew away, as though one of the gods had reached down from the heavens with his great fist, scooped them up, and tossed them away.
Thank the gods—
The thought stopped stone-cold inside her mind as she caught sight of him. Delilah tripped and fell to her knees. Heedless of the rocky ground, she gaped at the man now standing at the center of the demon horde. Pitch-black eyes in a chiseled face now as familiar to her and dear to her as her own.
Alasdair. But not.
He’d been possessed. The red glowing mark on his forehead, turning brighter by the second, told her what had him in its thrall. That same fucker who’d been after him all along. The world was fucked.
She had enough time to suck in an audible, painful gasp before her vision went black.