Sera finished her sandwich and sat back in her chair. Some of the cafeteria windows were opened, letting in fresh air. Though it was still slightly cool, it looked like the overcast morning had given way to a beautiful day. Her gaze wandered to the slim, black-clad figure sitting alone on a bench in the adjacent quad.
Sera gestured toward her. “What’s with new girl? She was with you first period, right? Still angry at the world?”
“She’s okay,” Kyle mumbled, suddenly more interested in his nachos than talking.
Sera grinned, unable to resist teasing him. “Just okay?” Kyle looked up at her, his eyes sliding to Kira and then back to Sera. He looked so confused that she felt sorry for him. “Spit it out. I’m desperate to resume my best friend duties.”
His shoulders tensed for a second, but then he sighed. “She’s cool, but I don’t know how to act around her. It was really weird in class this morning. It’s like I can’t think when I’m near her. And it’s not as if she isn’t mortal or anything. I mean, she is, but she’s just so . . . there. Sorry, it’s TMI, I know.”
Sera couldn’t help laughing at his expression. “Maybe you should pace yourself, okay, lover boy? Don’t want to hurt yourself on the first day.”
“I’m trying. But I feel like a total loser.”
“You’re not.” Sera gave him a reassuring smile. “Is she into you?”
“I think so, unless I’m reading the signals wrong. Which is totally possible.” He paused, looking embarrassed. “I haven’t been into anyone since . . . um . . .” Going red, he trailed off and stuffed a handful of nachos into his mouth.
But Sera knew what he meant—since her.
Honestly, she was happy that Kyle was trying to move on. She adored him, but there was no doubt of her deep-rooted feelings for Dev. Those feelings surpassed anything she’d ever felt for anyone. Their bond, born of an eternal and immortal love, had transcended time, death, and rebirth. She belonged with him, much as he belonged with her. That was another thing she was still getting used to.
Sera’s gaze returned to the girl sitting outside as she thought about what Kyle had said. The emotions he’d described sounded like what she felt around Dev—tingling, hopeful, and weightless. She wanted Kyle to feel all those things and more—and if he was interested in this girl, who was she to stand in the way?
It was time for him to find his own happiness.
ROLL OF THE DICE
For the rest of the afternoon, Kyle heeded Sera’s advice and kept his eyes to himself. In chem, one of their few classes together, he sat next to Sera and stayed silent for the entire class—so much so that she kept shooting him worried looks. Kira sat in the front of the class, where he couldn’t see her face, but he could feel her presence as strongly as if she were sitting right next to him. He could hardly focus. Her magnetic pull was so unsettling that for the second time that day, he had to verify that she was human.
Once they got to their lockers, Sera was on him like a concerned mother hen. “Are you okay? What’s wrong? You were on edge for the whole class. Did you sense something?”
Kyle felt heat rise in his cheeks and wanted to kick himself. “No, it’s nothing.”
“Why are you all shaky? Demon stuff?”
“No, nothing like that. I was trying to . . . I’m just . . . never mind.” His voice trailed off as Kira approached them. “Hey.”
He cleared his throat and looked from one girl to the other. Sera had a few inches on Kira in height, but the other girl made up for it in sheer presence. They were both equally striking, but Kira’s beauty had an edge to it, something dangerous. She reminded him of a jungle cat—stunning and predatory.
“Sera, Kira,” he mumbled.
Sera smiled. “Nice to meet you.”
“So you’re Serjana,” Kira drawled, her eyes narrowing slightly as she looked Sera over.
“What?” Sera asked. Kyle was surprised, too, by the use of her full name. “How did you know that?”
“It’s on the class list,” Kira replied easily. “Nice to meet you, too. I’ll catch you both later,” she said with a wink, turning to saunter down the hallway. Kyle watched as several students stopped what they were doing to stare.
“What was that about?” Sera muttered.
“No idea,” Kyle said. He cleared his throat again, stuffing his hands in his pockets and studying Sera’s schedule taped inside her locker. “So, the only other class we have together today is study hall. Want to head over to the senior lounge?”
“Yeah. Let me just run to the bathroom.”
While he waited, Kyle nodded to a sandy-haired boy who gave him a respectful look but a wide berth as he walked past. Ryan Davenport was Beth’s brother, recently inducted into the ranks of the Ne’feri. Like his sister, Ryan didn’t much care for Kyle, and the look on his face was far from friendly.
“What’s wrong?” Sera asked, returning from the bathroom.
“Nothing. Ne’feri politics.”
Sera peered down the hallway, understanding dawning in her eyes as she caught sight of Ryan. “He’ll come around. They’re just—”
“Afraid of me.”
“Cautious,” Sera finished. “They don’t know you like I do. Give them time.”
“Whatever,” Kyle said, slinging his backpack over one shoulder. He didn’t need to prove himself to anyone—especially not an arrogant kid who’d never had it hard a day in his life. “Coming?”
In the senior lounge, Kyle and Sera found some space at a table off to the side, near one of the big bay windows. “Remind me again why we have to be here,” he grumbled, staring resentfully at the pile of textbooks he’d placed in front of him. “I can’t believe we have lab homework already. I’d take studying the Trimurtas tomes or Xibalba over this any day.”
He’d spent half the summer reading and learning the pages Samsar had given him that outlined the major and minor gods in the pantheon. It’d been like summer deity school from hell, but at least now he knew who was who. Barely.
“We need to be here to protect the innocent.” Sera leveled him with a ferocious look. “And no, you wouldn’t.”
He shook his head. “You’re wrong. I’d literally go day camping in the seventh dimension of hell if I had the choice between that and finishing this chem lab.”
“Don’t even joke about it.” Her look turned into a glare. “You’re not Ra’al’s son anymore, and you don’t belong there. You never did.”
“Tell that to everyone else,” he muttered. Kyle shrugged in a half-hearted apology and opened his chemistry textbook. He sighed. “I’d bet Ryan would give anything to banish me.”
“I’ll banish you in a second if you don’t stop your moping. The Ne’feri don’t even like me at the moment. So you’re not alone.”
“You’re not the progeny of the worst Demon Lord in Xibalba,” he said sourly.
She rolled her eyes. “For the bazillionth time, we are not having this conversation. When your pity party for one is done, let me know.”
They fell into an uncomfortable silence, and Kyle turned the pages of his book listlessly, watching Sera out of the corner of his eye and letting the drone of voices around him fill the troubled spaces in his mind. After a while, he turned away from his book and stared out the window at the dark, gloomy sky.
Kyle frowned. It’d been sunny an hour earlier, and the incoming clouds were thunderous and moving swiftly. It looked like a massive storm was brewing. His frown deepened as three shadows darted into the woods near the edge of the football field.
In the same breath, Kyle felt the tiny hairs on the nape of his neck stand at furious attention. The sensation of something otherworldly wound, snakelike, down his spine. He eyed Sera, who had gone rigid, her clear eyes darting to his. Her palms glowed a little and he tensed immediately. She could call forth weapons of fire from each hand at will—and if she was getting ready to do so, she must have sensed something, too. Something bad.
“You felt that?” he whispered.
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“Yes.” Sera slid her chair back, and Kyle followed suit. “This way.”
He followed her out of the lounge, ignoring a penetrating look from Ryan Davenport. As they walked along the outer corridor, the crawling sensation against his spine intensified until it felt like his back was covered in tiny leeches suctioned to his skin. The tug of it was vile.
“I can feel something, whatever it is,” he ground out as they pushed through the gym doors and walked onto the football field, resisting the urge to claw at his back. He jerked his head toward the woods, where he’d seen the shadows disappear before. “That way.”
His voice sounded strained, even to him, and Sera’s head whipped around. “Are you okay? You look really pale.”
“Demons everywhere,” he hissed through his teeth. “Can’t you tell? They’re pulling at me, devouring me.”
Once they’d reached the edge of the woods, Sera grabbed Kyle’s shoulders and shook him firmly. “Release your Azura energy. You control them, not the other way around. I can’t do this without you. You’re the only one who can separate any bonded rakshasas from their hosts. And I don’t want to hurt innocent kids.”
Lightning forked across the sky as Kyle sucked in a deep breath, pushing his energy toward the demonic beings he could feel pressing into him with invisible fingers. He closed his eyes until the flames of his dark nature flared to life inside him. As if by magic, a double-edged black sword with razor sharp teeth materialized in his hand. Its hot, red center pulsed with power, and Sera recoiled. Mordas—his father’s weapon—had stolen many lives: demon, human, and immortal alike. But the dark, sentient sword served Kyle now.
In an instant, the tingling stopped, and Kyle nodded to Sera. She had transformed, too. But instead of radiating darkness like Kyle knew he was, she glowed with a brilliant light. A blood-red, flaming rapier extended from one of her hands, its silvery-white twin from the other, and scarlet mehndi curled in scripted vines up her arms and across her forehead. Iridescent armor covered her body, and a fierce look burned in her eyes.
“Let’s go,” she said.
They plunged deeper into the woods, running until they came to a dark, empty clearing. “Where are they?” Kyle whispered, looking over his shoulder, his grip on Mordas tightening.
“Everywhere,” Sera said.
Her weapons flared brighter, and Kyle moved to stand back to back with her. That’s when the demons slunk from between the trees. Some had human hosts while others showed their true forms. But they all eyed Kyle and Sera with the same lascivious greed.
“How many?” Kyle said, watching as a sickly green demon with half a head of exposed brains slipped closer. A black demon the size of a bull elephant stood behind him, swaying back and forth, its gaze slitted and furious.
“Forty,” Sera said. “Maybe more. There are a lot of humans here. We can’t hurt them, Kyle.”
“I know.”
With shrieks of rage, the demons rushed toward them. Kyle and Sera struck together, their weapons flying. They were careful not to kill any of the mortals, but it was getting harder and harder to differentiate between human and rakshasa as fists flew and teeth snapped. Kyle dipped low to jab the hilt of Mordas into a boy’s head—he recognized the kid from biology—then jerked upward to slice through the guts of a scaled yellow demon with a mouth full of broken, blood-crusted teeth.
“There are so many of them,” he shouted to Sera as black ichor from a severed arm spurted into his face. Her arms were moving like liquid fire, dispatching and disarming.
“We’re nearly there, I think,” she said, panting from the exertion. Most of the humans lay unconscious and incapacitated, a result of their careful, non-lethal blows. Dead demons littered the earth in blackened clumps, reduced to bones and ash.
“I hope so, because I can’t tell humans from demons anymore,” Kyle shouted, slowing a kill strike as a girl’s face loomed in front of him, her eyes bulging.
“They’re all demons,” a terrible voice echoed from behind them. “And the sooner you see that, the better.”
As if by some unseen command, all the fighting stopped. The remaining demons fell, their bodies trembling and eyes rolling back in their heads. The possessed humans froze, rooted to the ground by some inexplicable force. Kyle met Sera’s shocked eyes and turned in slow motion, a familiar face coming into view.
“Kira,” he whispered.
She smiled, but there was no life in it—just cold fury. “One of my many names,” she said.
“But I read your aura,” Kyle blurted, his mind racing as Sera gasped beside him. “You’re mortal.”
“Again, one of my many avatars—Parvati, Durga, Kali.” She indicated her current body. “Kira.”
“Kali,” Sera said. “I should have known.”
Kyle swayed, the ground seeming to tilt beneath him as the realization struck. He’d made the exact same mistake with Sera. He had been so worried about her being a demon that he hadn’t considered that Kira could be something else. “You’re a goddess?”
Kira laughed, throwing her head back just like she had in their classroom. Kyle could see black tattoos undulating like vines on her skin, curling up her temples into a black crown of thorns across her brow. “I like this name—Kira,” she said, rolling the two syllables out on her tongue. “It means beam of light. Hopeful, really.”
Kyle’s breath caught. Kali, the goddess of freaking destruction, was here, and the last thing he felt was hope. He’d read about her during his brow-beating study of the Trimurtas texts. Neither Durga nor her berserker incarnation, Kali, had bothered with the happenings of the Mortal Realm for centuries—not since she’d killed a monstrous demon thousands of years ago.
According to the texts, every drop of that demon’s blood that had fallen to the earth had created another demon replica, making it invincible and deadly. When Durga appeared to fight the beast, she’d needed help from the gods, and Kali had sprouted from her brow to drink the demon’s blood. Kali had consumed the demon’s clones and saved all of mankind. Then she’d danced on the bones and blood of the dead—including those of her own consort, Lord Shiva.
Kyle shivered at the mental image. On the battlefield, Kali had hardly been a beam of freaking light. Kira was a terrible name for a berserker goddess.
“Why are you here?” Sera asked.
“Serjana,” Kira said with a slight nod of her head. “I was surprised by your choice to remain here on this diseased plane instead of returning to Illysia. Then again, darkness calls to darkness, doesn’t it?”
“What are you doing here?” Sera repeated.
Kira’s face hardened, but she covered it with an arrogant smirk. The air shimmered slightly around her as her body shifted, her skin going from bronzed brown to smoky black as a second pair of arms materialized out of her side. One held a bloodied sword, the other a trident. Her remaining hands were conspicuously empty. She waved them in a relaxed shrug, her eyes blazing from ebony to crimson.
“You already know why I’m here,” Kira said. “To restore the balance. Ashes to ashes, and all that.”
“But why?” Kyle said.
Kira bared blood-red lips, her teeth like sharp fangs, and she gestured toward the smoldering bodies before her. “Ignorance, decay, death, disease. I destroy only to re-create. The Mortal Realm must be flushed clean.”
“It will be,” Sera said slowly. “But there are innocent kids here. You don’t need to destroy them to restore the balance.”
“No one is innocent,” Kira countered. “Especially not your companion.”
Kyle bristled as those lightless eyes fastened on him. “I am an Azura Lord—a title granted by the gods you serve in Illysia.”
“I serve no one.”
Sera flashed him a look that said picking a fight with the goddess of destruction wasn’t the best idea. He took a deep breath and swallowed the biting retort that had risen to his lips.
“We can save the humans,” Sera interjected. “Kyle can release t
hem and banish the demons back to Xibalba.”
Kira propped one pair of hands on her hips, studying Kyle with her lower lip between her teeth. Even in goddess form, she made his thoughts fumble. To his dismay, he found his ears burning. A smile twitched at the corner of her mouth, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. He flushed more deeply, and her smile widened. Was her power over him that transparent?
“To what end?” Kira asked after a beat. “Those demons will only return, slinking out of whichever portal they’ve come from. No, this plane must be purged.”
Sera’s eyes flashed silvery fire, and her weapons flared. “I can’t let you do that.”
“You’re going to stop me?”
Kyle straightened, hefting Mordas in his palm. “No, she isn’t. We are.”
“Me, too.” Ryan Davenport walked into the clearing, a crossbow in his hands.
Kira rolled her eyes. “Mortals. You always think you’re more powerful than you are. What chance do you think you have, facing me? A child goddess who relinquishes her place in Illysia for this festering realm, a Ne’feri toddler still wet behind the ears, and a boy lord who doesn’t know whether he wants to defy me or date me,” she mocked. Kyle felt himself flushing, but he held his stance, gritting his teeth. Kira’s smile widened to a grimace. “So be it.”
The dark goddess moved swiftly then, demons scattering left and right as she cut a path through them to Kyle. She swung her sword to clash into Mordas, steel bearing down on steel, with gritted teeth. Kyle could feel her rage in the blow and it took almost all of his strength not to collapse beneath its weight. He swung back up, but Kira deflected his blow with her sword while thrusting her trident toward Sera’s stomach. Sera sidestepped, her red sword tracing a fiery trail down Kira’s back. She howled, a red tongue lolling from her mouth in rage, and kicked Ryan in the stomach just as he darted in. He went flying and slammed against a tree, crumpling to the earth and not moving again.
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