by Sammie Joyce
Get Gavin! Jagger yelled to her. Grab him and get out.
It was as Rose suspected. The dragons and witches were merely causing a distraction so that they could escape.
“Gavin!” Rose knelt down next to him, tapping his face with her palm. He seemed only semi-conscious. “Gavin, wake up. We need to go. Please, Gavin.”
Rose could barely hear her own voice over the sounds of fighting. Hellith shrieked and Asher roared. The witches cast spells that erupted against Hellith’s hide with echoing bangs. Everyone was shouting instructions and warnings to each other. It was chaos.
“Gavin, come on!”
Gavin blinked blearily at her.
“That’s right, come on, we have to go.” Rose put an arm under his shoulders, helping him sit up. “Mace is waiting outside for us. We just need to get to him and then everyone can withdraw.”
Gavin nodded, staggering to his feet, leaning heavily on Rose’s shoulder. The two of them made their slow way toward the cave entrance, skirting the main fighting. Gavin’s feet didn’t seem to be working that well, but Rose managed to keep him upright.
The fight looked brutal. Hellith was bleeding black blood from a number of places, and several of the witches and dragons who had come to their rescue were unconscious or wounded. As bad as it looked, though, Rose knew that things were going largely as planned.
They were about halfway to the entrance when everything went wrong.
Hellith let out a particularly loud shriek, and some kind of forcefield blasted out from around her in all directions. Everyone was knocked down. Rose’s scream of pain was drowned out by the voices of all the other witches and dragons.
It felt like she’d been hit with a paralysis spell. Rose tried to move her limbs. She could do it, but it felt like she was impaling herself on knives as she did. Not a paralysis spell, then. Some mixture of a paralysis and pain spell.
How could Hellith do it, though? If she had powers like this, why would she not use them from the start?
A flash of red and gold caught Rose’s eye.
Of course.
Hellith was still holding her necklace. Hellith couldn’t use it—the necklace only worked for someone committed to unity between dragons and witches—but the necklace had always been a bit of a random factor. It reacted by itself, and no one could truly predict when it would do so.
Hellith had probably cast a normal paralysis spell, and the necklace had amplified it, possibly sensing that Rose was in distress, but not able to detect that Rose wasn’t in possession of it right now. After all, it was supposed to be impossible for anyone to remove it from her against her will.
Whoever had created the necklaces of power obviously hadn’t counted on Hellith.
Gavin groaned and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Hope flared in Rose’s mind. Her body had been shielding Gavin from Hellith as she pulled him toward the cave entrance. He wasn’t affected by the spell.
He quickly appraised the situation. Asher looked like he was unconscious, shifted back to his human form. Everyone else was on the ground. Hellith grinned over them, clearly preparing to deliver a fatal blow.
Gavin leapt into the air, shifting mid-leap. Rose ducked as one of his wings swung over her head.
“Gavin, no!”
He was flying straight for Hellith.
Gavin, get everyone out of here, don’t attack her!
He wasn’t listening to her. Rose was sure that he was trying to make up for his previous trust in Hellith, but he was going to get himself killed, attacking her directly like that when he was all on his own.
Hellith turned to the new threat. To Rose’s surprise, Gavin didn’t attack her directly. Instead, he swooped left, biting down on one of her many spindly protrusions that worked as arms. Hellith screamed in pain, but it was far from a debilitating wound.
Gavin’s intention soon became clear. He swung around and returned to Rose, dropping the arm at her feet. Rose saw her necklace safely dangling from the end.
Hellith didn’t waste the opportunity Gavin had given her. With his back turned away from the danger, she unleashed her full power on him.
A mighty blast threw Gavin forward. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he shifted back to human automatically, just in time for his body to smash against the wall.
It made a sickening crunch. Rose was sure it had broken every bone in his body.
“GAVIN!” Either Hellith’s spell had worn off, or she simply didn’t notice the pain anymore. She scrambled over to Gavin. His neck was bent at an odd angle. Blood ran from his nose. He was unnaturally still.
Gavin was dead.
“NO! GAVIN! Wake up, please, WAKE UP!” Rose shook him, desperate for some sign of life, but there was none.
She had been right before, when she’d theorized she would know if Gavin was dead. She knew now. She felt like a part of her heart had withered and died. An essential piece of her was missing. Rose didn’t know how to move or breathe without him.
Rose, get moving! Jagger’s mental voice was laced with pain and panic. Pain for his brother’s death, panic for Rose and all the rest of them.
Rose knew he was right. She couldn’t let any more of her dragons die protecting her. Her hands shook as she put her necklace on.
She gasped as a fizzle of power went through her whole body, ending in her fingers and toes. The necklace seemed to have accelerated her recharge time. Rose wasn’t going to waste it. The first spell she used was to make Gavin’s body light enough for her to carry easily.
Rose flinched as she picked him up, doing her best not to look at his too-still face. She wasn’t leaving him here. He deserved a proper burial, not to rot in Hellith’s lair. She cast a powerful shield around the two of them, walking almost untouched through the fight.
Hellith’s spell had worn off, and the witches and dragons were up and fighting again. Rose knew that the plan was to get in and out as quickly as possible. It had seemed a good plan before now.
It didn’t seem good now. Now, Rose’s blood pounded in her ears, threatening to boil over with rage. Rage was easier to feel than grief, and she let it take over.
Hellith had murdered Gavin. That would not go unpunished. Rose didn’t just want to escape. She wanted to send Hellith back to the depths of hell, where she belonged.
Rose staggered out of the cave, laying Gavin gently down between Mace’s feet. He was still in his dragon form. Rose could feel his pain through their mental link, but she didn’t stop to comfort him. There would be time for comfort later. Now, it was time for vengeance.
She turned back to the fight. “Everyone out! Now! Prepare to cast banishing spells.”
The coven had been working on a way to defeat Hellith for months. Nothing certain had been discovered, but their most promising line of research was a banishing spell. Spells like this had been used long ago to send monsters back to their home realms. No one had been able to determine for certain whether these accounts were true or mere myth, but most of the senior witches in the coven thought they were true.
Hellith may have been born on Earth, but she had mutated into a monster whose true realm was the pit of hell. If they could banish her back there, she would be trapped.
The problem was that if they did something wrong with the spell, it might leave a path for Hellith to escape again. For all the research they’d done, none of them had been able to practice the spell—they couldn’t, not without Hellith to practice it on. They had all agreed that until they knew more, it was too risky to try. They should wait until they were sure they could do it without allowing Hellith a way back.
Right now, Rose didn’t care about any of that. All she cared about was seeing Gavin’s murderer punished. She half-expected the other witches to argue with her, but they didn’t. They followed her order without question. She was the coven leader, after all, even if Maria was filling in for now.
The dragons fell back, Jagger dragging Asher along. They formed a protective line in front of th
e witches. Hellith took advantage of the retreat, lunging for one of the witches on the end of the line.
Rose ran forward, expanding her shield spell. The coven witches saw what she was doing and added their own power to it. Hellith was rebuffed by the shield, for now. It wouldn’t take long for her to break through it, though.
“NOW!” Rose didn’t wait to see if anyone else was following her order. She started chanting, relieved when she heard the voices of the rest of the coven join hers. She had to drop the shield to concentrate on the spell, but Jagger was ready. He shifted to his dragon form, putting himself between her and Hellith.
The incantation for the banishing spell was much longer than any spell Rose had ever cast. Almost all spells were one or two words. This one went on for a good paragraph. They all had it memorized, of course, but it still took time to say.
As one, the coven shouted the final line of the spell. Rose held her breath, waiting to see if it worked.
If it didn’t, then she had likely just sentenced her entire coven to die.
Hellith lunged once more for Jagger. Mid-lunge, something happened. Her form wavered, turning to smoke. The smoke shivered, then started being drawn downward, through the very rock itself.
Hellith’s last shriek turned into an unearthly wail as she was pulled down back into hell. The mountain shook as the spell let off a blast of excess power.
Hellith vanished.
There wasn’t any time to celebrate. The mountain was still shaking, and the shakes weren’t fading. They were getting worse.
“Everyone out!” Jagger grabbed Asher and dragged him out. Several dragons picked up unconscious witches, and some witches levitated injured dragons out through the entrance.
Rose ran alongside everyone else. They made it out just in time. Someone threw up a shield to protect them from falling rocks, which was a good decision. Mace was already pulling Gavin’s body further away. No one spoke as they all hurried away from the mountain, getting their wounded along as fast as possible.
They only stopped when they were over a mile from the swiftly collapsing mountain. Rose wondered if they should return to the coven, worrying that the ground itself might start sinking in, but Maria called a halt.
There were a number of badly wounded people who needed to be tended to immediately. Though she knew it was hopeless, Rose couldn’t help grabbing Maria’s arm. “Please, Gavin needs help.”
Maria followed her to where Mace was gently straightening Gavin’s limbs. Maria pressed a hand to the side of his neck.
She looked up at Rose. “I’m sorry, Rose. There’s nothing I can do. He’s dead.” She squeezed Rose’s arm and hurried off.
Rose wanted to shout at Maria for being so callous about Gavin’s precious life, but she bit her tongue to hold her unfair words in. There were people who would die without Maria’s immediate help. Rose had no right to ask for comfort in her grief at the expense of others’ lives.
She fell to her knees at his side, wiping blood off his face with her sleeve. “Please, Gavin,” she whispered. “Please, don’t leave me. I need you.”
Mace put an arm around her, but Rose barely felt it. Jagger and Asher came to join them. Asher looked a little beaten up, but he didn’t appear to be seriously injured.
Rose knew she should be relieved that three of her four dragons were safe, but all she could feel was overwhelming pain and grief. Tears fell freely from her cheeks onto Gavin’s chest. She would give anything for his chest to rise, for him to live.
Her necklace started glowing.
Rose clutched at it, suddenly alive with hope. “Yes, please.” She gripped the necklace with the strength of all her desperation and despair. “Please, take me instead. Let him live. Take me.”
She was vaguely aware of Asher, Jagger, and Mace making vehement objections to her words, but Rose was lost in a world of her own. The necklace’s magic swirled around and through her. It tugged at her, as though wanting her to go somewhere, but she didn’t know where.
Rose gripped Gavin’s hand in two of hers. Take me wherever he is. Let me bring him back.
There was a flash of blinding white light. The last thing Rose was aware of was a hand on her shoulder, gripping her like a vice.
The world around her vanished. She could feel her necklace pulsing with warmth. It felt like she was flying, but not like when she was on one of her dragons’ backs. This was different—dangerous, uncontrolled. Rose couldn’t make out any of the passing scenery.
The fingers of the hand dug painfully into her shoulder, but she didn’t try to loosen them. She was glad for the connection. It was the one thing that felt real.
Rose’s feet slammed into the ground. She blinked a few times, trying to get her vision to work. She realized then that her vision was working just fine.
It was the world around her that was wrong.
Everything was set in different shades of gray. The sky and ground were a uniform dark gray. The ground lay flat and featureless before her, stretching on forever.
Rose turned to find Jagger behind her, his hand still gripping her shoulder. “I couldn’t let you go after him alone,” he said softly.
“Where are we?”
Jagger swallowed as he looked around. “I believe we are in the world of the dead.”
Chapter Fourteen
“What?”
“The world of the dead. Or at least, the world all dead pass through before going to their final place of resting.”
Rose knew there were witches who dedicated their lives to trying to figure out what happened when they died. She now wished she had taken more of an interest in their studies. “I don’t understand. We know hell exists, but this certainly isn’t it. It doesn’t look like heaven either. Are we supposed to be in purgatory?”
Jagger sighed, staring around. “That depends who you ask. I can tell you what our clan believes happens after death, if you’d like.”
“Please.”
“All people earn their place in the afterlife through their actions in the world of life. We believe that there are many halls of being after death. Some are akin to the human description of heaven, others more like hell, but most are somewhere in between. This is the place in between. Anyone who dies waits here for an emissary of death to decide their place and bring them there.”
“An emissary of death? Death doesn’t come himself?”
“Do you have any idea how many people die every day? That’s way too much work for one being to handle.”
In any other context, Rose would have laughed, but this quiet, creepy world didn’t exactly encourage laughter. “So we need to find Gavin before an emissary does?”
“I guess so.” Jagger stared around, looking as unnerved as Rose felt. “I’m not sure how much good it’ll do, though. Even if we find him, how are we supposed to get him out? This isn’t a place people return from.”
“It’s not somewhere the living generally come either,” Rose pointed out. “The necklace brought us here; I can’t believe it was so that we could die with Gavin. We’re supposed to save him.”
“It brought you here. I don’t think I was part of the plan. I just couldn’t let you go alone.”
Rose took his hand and squeezed it. “I’m glad you didn’t. I’d hate to be here without you.” She looked around again, but couldn’t see anything except the endless, flat, gray landscape. “I guess we should start walking?”
Jagger didn’t have any better suggestions, so the two of them took off at a brisk walk. Nothing about the land around them seemed to change. Rose didn’t see anyone—no sign of death’s emissaries, or of any other souls waiting to depart.
“Wait. This can’t be right.”
Jagger came to a halt beside her. “Nothing about this is right.”
“No, I mean, where is everyone? As you pointed out, huge numbers of people die every day. We should at least have been able to see a few souls by now.”
“This place is endless. We could walk for years and no
t see anyone.”
Rose hoped he was wrong about that. “What if we can’t see them because we’re alive, and they’re dead? We’re here, but we don’t really belong here. What if the dead are on a different plane than us?”
“That could well be true, but I’m not sure what we can do about it if it is.”
“I think we should stop moving and try to call Gavin to us.” Can you hear me?
Jagger started slightly. I can hear you. I didn’t think our mental voices would work in here.
Me neither, but I figured it was worth a try. Let’s call him.
Gavin! Brother, we’re here to bring you home.
Gavin, it’s me, Rose. If you can hear us, please give us a sign.
There was no response. The silence was eerie. Rose closed her eyes, focusing on her love for Gavin, and her pain that he wasn’t with her. She put her hand on her necklace, hoping that it would react to her emotions as it did before.
Gavin, where are you?
The necklace started glowing red. It was the only color in this world apart from Rose and Jagger themselves, which made it all the more beautiful.
You should leave here.
Rose practically leapt in excitement at Gavin’s mental voice. GAVIN! Where are you? I can’t see you.
She and Jagger spun around like idiots, but the world around them was just as empty as it had been a moment ago.
Take the necklace and go.
We’re not leaving without you, Jagger said firmly. Show yourself, Gavin.
The necklace glowed brighter, and a form started to take shape. Gavin was wearing gray robes, and his skin, eyes, and hair were just as colorless.
“Gavin!” Rose leapt forward and tried to hug him, but her arms went right through him. Jagger caught her before she overbalanced.
“You should leave.” Gavin’s expression was disturbing. He didn’t look sad or like he was in pain. He seemed completely at peace.