The Fell of Dark

by Caleb Roehrig

  The Northern Wolf minion is still in midair when I raise his blood, speeding its atoms, until he erupts; he bursts into flames as he passes over the chain-link fence and crashes hard to the pavement, dead before he hits the ground. His body shrivels, burns, and disarticulates so fast that Hope still hasn’t even made it to the main road before he’s nothing but ash and bone—before I swivel and shout, “STOP!”

  She stumbles to a halt and spins around, our eyes connecting. This time, I know she hears what I’m thinking. The telepathic connection linking vampires to their progeny means that the second his outrider spotted us, Rasputin knew where we were as well. And now he’s coming, abandoning the battlefield, and bringing his remaining minions with him.

  Hope and I sprint together, colliding in the cold shadow of the building, wrapping our arms around one another as tight as we can. Rasputin knows I’m dangerous now, that I have the power to kill, and yet he’s still headed this way. Either he has a strategy to subdue me until the Ascension can take place … or he has no strategy at all—and I’m not sure which is scarier. That hairline fracture between me and the Corrupter is spreading wider by the moment, and I’m not sure how much longer I have.

  Taking a breath, I reach for the magic I felt on Tuesday night—when Jude, Gunnar, and I floated together. I’ve practiced this trick since then, but our conditions are worsening fast. Hope and I rise slowly, bubbles pushing up through heavy fathoms of water, lifting past the barricaded entry points of the crime scene’s first floor. One story up, most of the glass is still missing from the windows Rasputin’s crew used to crash the party, and my head aches with the effort to propel us closer.

  We reach one of the openings, sweat matting the hair at my temples again, and we’ve just passed through when something inside of me lurches. The hairline fracture widens abruptly, and we plunge through five feet of thin air before I can catch us again, our bodies twirling madly in the fragmented moonlight. Hope’s arms dig into my ribs, her breathing frantic in my ear, and panic overwhelms me, gravity forcing our erratic descent.

  Eight feet up from the concrete floor, I lose hold of this power entirely, and we crash down hard, sprawling. My ankle twists, a firestorm of pain shooting through me before it goes numb. Gasping, eyes bulging, I can already tell it’s broken, a dull throb setting in.

  “A-Auggie?” Hope is white as a sheet in the shifting darkness that surrounds us, struggling up onto all fours. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fi-ine,” I wheeze through my teeth. It’s a lie, but it’ll be the truth soon enough. Even before the numbness has a chance to wear off, the heat and pressure begin to recede, vampire blood pulling me back together. “Don’t worry about me … just hide!”

  My undead radar is starting to shrink, the picnic grounds out of reach, the signals from Jude and Gunnar too hazy for me to interpret. But Rasputin and his backup will be arriving any second.

  Hope hesitates, but she must still hear my thoughts, because we both look up at once. Jumping to her feet, she races for the devouring shadows at the edge of the room, and not a second after she’s vanished from sight, two figures soar in through the shattered windows on opposite sides of the building.

  White-robed henchmen drop from two stories up and slam to the concrete with an echoing boom, one landing on either side of me. Their eyes burning, their claws trailing tendrils of smoke that drift in the moonlight, they hang back at a wary distance. My heart hammers my temples. I don’t know if I can take both of them—I don’t even know if I can still take them at all—but when one darts a glance in the direction Hope just ran, I know I’m going to find out.

  With everything I’ve got, I fling my influence at him, whipping his blood into a frenzy. His muscles seize as the heat rises, his golden eyes going round; but a moment later, he slips from my grasp. His blood slows and settles, and I dig deeper, trying again … but nothing happens. I can’t get back in. Cold sweat limps down my spine, and another lurching sensation rocks me, stealing the breath from my lungs.

  A muscle twitches in my hand, my fingers jumping, and I gape as it dances. I’m not the one making it move. Azazel is growing more defined by the second, his presence separating from mine like oil in water—and he’s starting to figure out how to make this body work. Horror turns my stomach, bile singeing my throat. It’s happening. All my dreams, all the moments I haven’t lived yet, rush at me with terminal speed. No matter how many plans I laid for this moment, I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready.

  The Ascension is beginning.

  Finally, at long last, I’ve got no time left.

  “Oh my.” The vampire I failed to kill splits his face in a monstrous, knife-toothed smile. “It looks like the vessel just might be full.”

  “The hour is at hand.” The other intones his agreement.

  The air crackles, and unpleasant sensations shiver through my body, more muscles twitching against my will. Desperately, gulping air, I sputter, “N-now. It’s happening now.”

  “The Master will be pleased…” The vampire on my left giggles, a sound like a fork caught in a garbage disposal, and he spreads his arms to the heavens. My body jerks, my lungs burn, and hairs rise along my arms—and from high above us, another figure comes soaring through the windows and into the upper reaches of the warehouse. Embroidered robes flapping, his face carved in a maniacal grin, Rasputin has finally made his entrance.

  36

  He plunges with graceful precision, knees flexed, his clawed fingers trailing hellish, otherworldly smoke that shreds in the updraft. His minions exalt his glory, and I try to scramble backward—even as one of my hands lifts from the floor on its own, my head getting lighter. Rasputin’s eyes streak through the darkness, meteorites blazing their way to Earth.

  When he’s only fifteen feet from landing right on top of me, however, the air wobbles suddenly … and he slams, hard, against an unseen barrier. Stunned and flung off-course, Rasputin crashes to the floor and tumbles away, while the shadows behind me swim and unfold—to reveal Ket. Her hand outstretched, the alchemical symbol for air is chalked beneath her feet.

  “You are unwelcome here, Grigori Rasputin,” she states without any particular emotion.

  The Mad Monk glares up at her as he pushes into a crouch, his face twisted with rage. Over his shoulder, he barks an order to his disciples. “Kill her!”

  They both charge at once, snarling, but Ket doesn’t even flinch. Her hand twists, flicking one direction and then the other, waves of visible distortion hurtling outward and knocking both vampires off their feet.

  The one to my left rockets backward, and when he crashes to the floor, the gloom where he lands unstitches to reveal Lydia Fitzroy—the metal sorceress—standing over him. She claps her hands together, sparks dancing to life between her fingers, building into a furious storm of snapping electricity that she flings downward. It surges through the vampire’s body, his frame convulsing and smoking … until he bursts into flame.

  Simultaneously, when the minion on my right hits the ground and rolls to a stop, the emptiness beside him swirls and fills with the figure of Ximena Rosales. I didn’t come prepared to give a demonstration, she’d said the morning I met the coven, but earth witches possess great strength. I see what she meant at last when she squeezes one bejeweled hand into a fist, sucks in a breath, and then brings it down on the vampire’s head with so much force his skull literally explodes. The floor trembles, bone fragments and brain matter scattering everywhere like the contents of a revolting piñata.

  Adriana’s grandmother, a woman who doesn’t even like to step on bugs, rises back to her feet, flicking clumps of undead gore off her fingers. “I really hate doing that.”

  My ankle is healed now—and I only know it because my leg twists suddenly, and I barely catch myself before I’m sent face-first to the floor when my body weight shifts on its own. Pressure builds in my head, my clothes stuck to me with sweat, and I struggle to make my vocal cords move. “It’s … happening! You n-need to … hur
ry!”

  Ket sweeps her hands out in another fluid motion, and the rest of the coven is unveiled around me—Sulis, Brixia, and Marcus Cheng, all standing over chalk symbols reflecting their elements. They’ve been here all along, waiting for this moment, hidden by the camouflage of Ket’s magic: disapparition and the control of unseen matter. Hope needed to be close to the picnic grounds, the coven needed space to perform their ritual, and the glassworks factory met all the requirements. In a brief phone call with Ximena on Wednesday morning, I’d formally accepted the witches’ offer to exorcise Azazel, and this was the location we’d settled on to see things through. They wouldn’t help me with my half-cocked rescue, or with the deadfall I was arranging for my enemies in Colgate Woods … but they’d at least agreed not to get in my way.

  Rasputin scrambles to his feet just as Sulis launches a ball of swirling fire his way. He blinks out of its path, reappearing several feet over, but the sorceress seems to have anticipated the move. Like a boomerang, the miniature comet suddenly redirects, unfurling into a rope of flame—catching the edge of Rasputin’s robes just as he resolidifies. The magical blaze spreads fast, leaping hungrily up his sleeve, and the undead cleric frantically tears the garment from his body.

  “Forget him, sister,” Brixia interjects calmly. “He’s about to become quite too busy to bother us.”

  As she speaks, a small shadow darts silently into the moonlit reaches of the upper story, and then dives—dropping like a stone at Rasputin’s head. Only when its wings snap wide to catch the air, two feet from its mark, do I realize it’s a familiar owl. Bursting into an expanding plume of smoke, it catches the cleric’s attention at last, and he whirls just as Viviane Duclos leaps from the twisting cloud, already lunging into an attack. Immediately, he reverts to his trusty disappear-reappear trick, but she’s done pretending to be fooled.

  Viviane’s body moves in a way I can’t comprehend, faster than should be possible. Her hips rotate, her spine bends, and her foot catches Rasputin in the chest before her hands have even cleared the space where he was standing a moment earlier. The cleric’s body launches back as if blown from a cannon, smashing into an outside wall hard enough to break through. Bricks fly apart as he ejects from the warehouse, exposing a slice of night sky, demolished mortar dusting the air.

  Swiveling around, Viviane meets my eye for just a moment. At the center of a magic circle, ringed by powerful witches, I sway to my feet—my body acting of its own accord. I’m a hostage in my skin, the Corrupter pressing upward with an ineluctable force, and terror washes my skin in a cold sweat. Viviane hesitates, her transformed face hard to read—but past the fangs and sharpened cheekbones, the golden eyes and angled brows, I catch a glimpse of Daphne Banks.

  And then she whirls around, springing for the hole in the outer wall. Smoke trails behind her as she makes her choice—leaving behind the Dark Star and her vision for the future in order to chase after Rasputin. In order to protect me.

  She isn’t even out of sight before Azazel turns my head, directing my attention, using my eyes to examine the witches around us. He recognizes Brixia, Ket, and Sulis, and his sense of alarm sends adrenaline pumping through me. A memory that isn’t mine disrupts my scattered thoughts—six witches, a barren landscape, unendurable pain—and I feel the moment that he steps over me.

  I feel the moment that he Rises, at last.

  I’m pushed down, sinking in my own body, a bit of flotsam caught in the swell of a bottomless ocean. The Corrupter opens my mouth to draw his first breath—the one that will end me, the one that will end the world … and then, as one, the coven speaks.

  “Kulamāje maljo draugo!”

  Instantly, my body is pinioned, magic snapping fast around me. Muscles lock in my legs and arms, my chest constricting so tightly my lungs can’t expand. Azazel fights back, electricity licking the underside of my skin, and my heart thunders.

  “Skaro anmenndho draugo!” the witches chant together, and my insides give a violent twist. Pain shears through me, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It’s a blade slamming through my neck, fire eating my flesh—a hundred gruesome deaths at once. My immobilized lungs burn and Azazel rages … we’re trapped together, he and I.

  “Steigoawa nāmante draugo!” Their eyes closed, the coven lift their arms, and sparks tear through me. The circle sputters to life with a gas-blue shimmer, flickering, pulsing, growing stronger. My body still can’t breathe, and the lack of oxygen sends panicked signals on a cannonball run through my nervous system. Dark spots freckle my vision, and it takes a moment for me to realize the unearthly glow is coming from me.

  From us.

  “Kulamāje maljo draugo!” the witches repeat, the air beginning to stir in the gutted factory, moving in a lazy spiral. “Skaro anmenndho draugo!”

  Something intangible at my center wrenches apart, searing heat cauterizing my insides; but I stop sinking. The great ocean of the Corrupter froths and surges, but within him, my consciousness reverses course. The pressure in my chest is suffocating, and my heartbeat strobes behind my eyes … but now, suddenly, I’m the one who’s Rising.

  “Steigoawa nāmante draugo!” Those sparks break the surface of my skin in a rush, bursting into the air, and the glow around me intensifies. Pins and needles stab my fingertips, pressure mounting behind my eyes, and my chest burns like it’s filled with hot coals. Just as I fear I’m going to black out, there’s another vicious tug at that unseen part of me, and the force compressing my lungs lets go.

  I suck down air in ragged gulps, my head spins … but it’s me breathing, not Azazel. My arms and legs are still frozen, and I feel him clinging to me—but the spell is working.

  “Kulamāje maljo draugo. Skaro anmenndho draugo. Steigoawa nāmante draugo!”

  My head snaps back, jaws open, and sparks geyser from my throat, the air filling with the odor of brimstone and burnt hair. Memories that aren’t mine blitz through me—an armored king felled in battle, a queen paraded to the guillotine, a girl trapped in a basement stinking of gunpowder—and I gasp for oxygen. Inside myself, I begin to expand.

  The air swirls faster, dust and paper scraps dancing as the witches chant louder, their expressions taut. Azazel is pulled further away, but he pours his visions into my mind. I see my parents huddled in the back of Hope’s car, Adriana behind the wheel, terrified, wondering where her girlfriend is. I see Jude and Gunnar sprinting back to the battlefield, racing each other, their relationship more complicated than ever.

  “Kulamāje maljo draugo, skaro anmenndho draugo, steigoawa nāmante draugo!”

  His consciousness is crushing, too great for me to process. I relive dozens of lives in a single moment; I see countless potential futures. In one, Azazel presides as emperor of a scorched planet, hordes of emaciated undead crawling its surface; in another, mankind ruins the Earth with no help at all; but in yet another, Viviane’s dream comes true—we save ourselves and prosper. We all become Chosen Ones. We all rise to the challenge.

  “Kulamāje maljo draugo, skaro anmenndho draugo, steigoawa nāmante draugo!”

  The light around me is nearly blinding now, density gathering in its shifting center as the witches continue to chant. With a ripping sensation, my tongue is freed from its paralysis. I realize in amazement that this is the Corrupter—this thrashing, spectral glow leaving my body in increments is the very enemy I’ve been fighting. Sucking in another breath, I start chanting as well, pushing against Azazel with everything I’ve got.

  “No!” The panicked cry resonates through the factory, echoing over the swirling wind. Rasputin is scrabbling back through the hole his body made in the outer wall, his flaming eyes wide and stricken. “The Ascension must proceed!”

  His face is a mask of undiluted hysteria, and the blue light arches sharply above me, twisting and spiking. I can feel Azazel’s own anger and despair, his roots being torn out, and I shout at the top of my lungs. “Kulamāje maljo draugo!”

  I don’t know what it means, but th
e pressure in my head lifts with each word, my body casting out its unwanted passenger.

  “No, no, no!” The bearded vampire leaps and vanishes, smearing across the space between the wall and the magic circle, materializing again behind Brixia. Her eyes shut, her focus is on the spell when he grabs her head and twists, all in one swift motion.

  Still frozen in place, I hear the hollow pop of her neck breaking, and can do nothing but watch as the ancient water sorceress—a witch who sacrificed her humanity for the chance at seeing this moment through—topples to the ground. Lifeless.

  The Corrupter’s light surges wildly, flinging sparks in all directions as the elements are unbalanced, and a percussive blast catapults Rasputin across the room again. The wind races around the circle, my temperature climbing as Azazel starts to reach his way back inside; I fight as hard as I can, but I’ve got no magic of my own now.

  The floor shakes, cracks spreading through the concrete and up the walls, and the remaining witches struggle to maintain the chant. Their faces shining with sweat, their eyes closed in concentration, their hands tremble with effort as they reach for the sky … but still the rollicking blue fire shrinks as it eats its way back into my body.

  Witnessing the chaos, Rasputin’s greed for more is written on his face as he regains his feet; but just as he starts forward, a column of smoke twists into the air before him. A hand reaches out, ivory claws snapping closed around the cleric’s throat, and Viviane Duclos takes shape. Her face carved in deadly angles, she growls, “Not so fast, mon biquet—we’re not done yet!”

  She whirls, flinging him into the darkness on the far side of the factory … but the tide has already turned. The pressure in my head intensifies, squeezing my thoughts sideways, and the human witches are starting to go pale from the relentless drain on their energy. Azazel’s memory pours back into my brain—a confrontation from eons ago, when he faced this same peril and killed one of the witches to escape. All he needs is to gain control of me long enough to draw his first breath, and this battle is over. With Brixia dead, the circle is incomplete … it’s only a matter of time.