by Ember Hollis
The thrill that realization wakens in me makes me reckless. I lean in and kiss him fully on the lips, glorying in how he returns it, heedless to who might see us.
“Everything worth having is worth fighting for,” I tell him when I pull back. Malek’s eyes burn even brighter at my words, but he doesn’t object. And when I stride down the hall, I feel both Christian and Malek’s gaze following my every move.
Chapter 16: Heaven
Eventually, classes come to an end and twilight falls. The castle grows quiet and still, as if it’s holding its breath as those of us who have been chosen for the Sacrifice are led down into the depths of the academy, along with the visitors and teachers.
Mindful of Madam Hinako’s threat not to allow me to participate today, I don one of Sybil’s hooded cloaks before I join them. I don’t know if the witch has changed her mind about allowing me to participate in the ritual tonight, but I don’t want to risk her preventing me.
I make it all the way down the stairs with the rest, to a level even deeper beneath the castle than the Ballroom. The ancient passageways are narrow and lit only occasionally by ghostly green torchlight that flickers in the windless air of the stairwell.
After some time, the light brightens and I see the end of the hallway over the heads of the other students. It seems to end in a circular cavern with multiple tiers of galleries overlooking a yawning chasm. I raise myself up on tip toe and catch a glimpse of a deep pool at the bottom of the chasm, it’s waters glowing with a radiant, luminous off-white glow that reminds me of the moon. As we near the cavern, the air around us seems to grow denser, hotter and more moist, which feels odd considering how deep we are below ground.
My curiosity to see what lies within the pool makes me careless, and I don’t notice until too late that there’s an inspection going on in front of me. By the time I notice, Madam Hinako’s already got her wand out and used it to knock my hood back.
“Miss Ramsey,” she says, her voice irritated. “I thought I told you not to come. We can’t afford any errors tonight, and you weren’t strong enough to participate in this ritual the last time I checked.”
I blush as faces turn to stare at me and whispers rise. By now, everyone’s heard of how I’d interrupted the circle to close the portal. Many of the students gaze at me scornfully, while others look nervous and worried, as if my mere presence is a guarantee that something will go wrong.
“Actually, you said you’d check again today,” I remind her, trying to keep my uncertainty from my voice. I have no intention of putting the ritual at risk. But at the same time, I’m determined to participate and contribute my energy to the Dome to help heal the students still ensconced in their cocoons. I also owe it to Sybil to try my hardest to fulfill her wish on her behalf. It’s the least I can do after she stood up for me during the Hunt. “So please do. If my energy really isn’t enough, I’ll turn back.”
“Oh great,” someone whispers. “Are we so desperate that we’ll allow losers to jeopardize us all?”
“Hush,” someone says harshly, and I turn to see Meg and Amelie standing a little way ahead.
The sight of them fills me with renewed confidence, and I close my eyes, willing all my energy to answer to me as I repeat the incantation to manifest my energy, and Madam Hinako runs her wand up and down my body.
After a moment, the murmurs die down, and I open my eyes to see that my whole body is glowing. It’s so bright, I’m illuminating the entire darkened hall, and from the surprised look Madam Hinako is giving me, I know it’s more than enough for me to qualify tonight.
“I guess all that training and rest worked,” I tell her, with a cheeky smile.
The witch just closes her eyes slowly and waves me in, her lips pinched into a tight line. “Just don’t continue if you feel anything strange,” she warns me. “It’s not worth risking everything just to prove something, Heaven.”
I frown at her strange words but hurry into the cavern before she can change her mind.
Once inside, I get caught up in a strange beat that seems to pulse around us, threading through the walls and air. It throbs in my ears, making my body gradually sync to it. My steps echo in time with it as I join the throng descending from the other stairwells surrounding the pit. After a while, even my breath rises and falls to its rhythm, and I think, so does my heartbeat.
Nobody says a word as we gather in a spiral formation around the chasm. I’m too high up to make out much detail, but when I look down into the milky pool below, I seem to make out the figure of a person, curled up in a fetal position. Then the water ripples and I wonder if I just imagined it when it smooths out without any sign of anything within it.
It takes a while for everyone to take their place around the cavern. Then, when everyone is accounted for, Madam Wilkins gives a signal, and we all begin to chant. The incantation is a simple one, and we don’t even have to remember it. It’s etched in the stone railing before us, the words glowing as we repeat them.
As I chant, energy streams out of me appearing as a pink glow around me. The drain is stronger than it had been when I’d joined the spell circle to help close the portal to the underworld, and after a half hour, I feel myself growing a little light-headed on my feet and have to stop myself from falling as I list to the side.
I look up and around careful to keep repeating the spell I’ve memorized by now. I’m worried someone’s noticed my fatigue and will call me out. But to my astonishment, more than half the magic-casters are already slumped over the railings, too tired to even stand straight. The rest show signs of fatigue too, with more than one voice quavering as they repeat the chant.
Standing tall in contrast are our teachers and professors, some of the students from Ever After Prep, and the Horsemen. I fix my eyes on the Four, trying to draw strength from the fact that they’re still going strong.
Bane is the nearest and I smile at him, glad when he finally notices and gives me a nod of acknowledgment, which is barely visible under the purple blaze of power surrounding him. Knox is by his side, similarly glowing a bright green. On the opposite side of the chasm is Malek, appearing like a red comet, with red and gold light spiking from around him. Finally, directly opposite me, Christian’s blue-green coils quiver, lashing out like whips at the people on either side of him as he stares straight at me.
The challenge in his eyes is rousing, and my energy answers in kind. I grow more alert as it floods my body, renewed as if I’ve downed several cups of coffee.
I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me back down.
I don’t want any of them to see me be weak. Not Christian, who I know will take it as a personal victory of some sort, even though we’re not even fighting each other directly. Not Malek, who’s looking at me as if he still wishes I weren’t there. Not Bane, who’s energy is the strongest and brightest of them all, nor Knox, whose eyes dart over the circle as if he’s measuring everyone on a scale that only he can see.
I grip the railing in front of me and grind my teeth together, willing my body to hold on. I don’t know if any of us will earn the gift of magic Pandora promised if we don’t manage to recharge the Dome. But if anyone does, I want it to be me. Even if it means I have to kill myself, trying to outlast everyone else to get it.
More bodies start to droop, and I track them as they fall to the ground. Genies. Some dragon bloods. More magic-casters. Even Alya and the other valkyries look tired. Madam Hinako is one of the only teachers still on her feet, along with Pandora and Madam Wilkins. Even Chiros had fallen, the human half of his body slumped over the railing beside Madam Hinako, appearing almost as if he’s about to fall down into the chasm below.
Sweat drips from my brow into my eyes and I blink the stinging moisture away. I don’t know how I’m still managing to keep myself going. All I know is that whenever I feel myself flagging, a glance at Bane, or a look from Christian gives me the boost I need.
Until it doesn’t.
At some point, I becom
e so tired that I stop chanting, unable to even form the words with my mouth, though the spell keeps going even without it. My wings, which had emerged when I began the spell, disappear and my back starts to ache from standing for so long. The temptation to sink to my knees and rest my flushed cheek against the stone floor is irresistible and my head starts to droop as flashes of light spark in my peripheral vision.
Then a jolting pain slices through me, and my knees suddenly give way. I try to grip the railing to force myself to stay upright, remembering that I need to hang on for Sybil’s sake. But the metal slips right past me, my fingers barely brushing against it, and all the bright colors in the room swirl together until they finally bleed to black.
Chapter 17: Heaven
I wake to the sound of a kettle whistling on a stove. Bright beams of sunlight streams through the windows onto my face and the sheets beneath me feel softer and smoother than the ones on my dorm bed.
But it’s not the unfamiliar sounds and sensations that most unnerve me as I wake. It’s the sound of a voice, humming a song I’d almost forgotten. One I haven’t heard since I was a young child, sick in my bed from fever, with my mother hovering anxiously over me.
I open my eyes as a chair creaks beside me and a woman gets to her feet. I’m in a shop, lying on a pallet of velvet and silk cloth. Around me are dressmaker mannequins. A black and gold sewing machine sits close by, it’s needle threaded with green. The skirt of my school uniform sits on the table beside it, inside out, with a strange little pocket sewn into the middle of its back panel.
“Ugh,” I moan as I sit up. “What am I doing here?”
The woman comes back with a steaming cup of tea in her hand. She’s backlit by sunlight that obscures her face, and I squint at her until she sits down and I finally get a good look at her.
“Madam Hina—” I start to speak, at the sight of her familiar updo and spectacles. But the face beneath the makeup and the hair isn’t that of the stern witch. It’s more beautiful and familiar than that, with lovely emerald eyes that shine out from within a delicate, heart-shaped face.
“M-m-mom?” I stammer, completely floored. I clap a hand to my mouth so hard, my dry lips split against the hardness of my teeth. I lick at the coppery blood, the pain of the injury nothing compared to the renewed ache in my heart.
Am I dreaming? Is this real? It can’t be…
And yet, here she is, staring at me with eyes filled with her own unique combination of love, impatience, and long-suffering annoyance.
“Yes, Heaven,” she says. “It’s me.”
“B-but you died,” I whisper. “I saw you… you were—”
Naked. With the bellboy on top of you. With bullet holes through your body and blood soaking the bed…
“I’m sure it looked that way,” she sighs. “And it definitely hurt as much as if I’d really died. But… as I’m sure you’ve learned,” her eyes trace over my body in an assessing way, “The women in our family are very resilient. It takes more than a few bullet wounds to get rid of us.”
I gape at her, still confused. “So you’re an angel-blood too?”
Does that mean I have divine blood on both sides of the family?
“Oh, no, no, no,” Mom chuckles, raising a hand to sweep it elegantly through the air. “Goodness gracious! Me, with angel blood?” her laugh is so bright and filled with humor that it brings tears to my eyes to hear it. “No, nothing as prim as that.”
“Then how?” I ask. “And why?”
“The how is what I’m about to tell you. As to the why, well… you know why,” she says, frowning. “I was shot. It was unfortunate, but accidents happen and I can die though it’s rare. I tried to shield you from it when you were younger, but I was careless this time because you made me angry, and—”
“No, why did you let me believe you were dead?” I scream at her, suddenly fueled to anger by her words. Trust Mom to rise from the dead and immediately start blaming things on me! “Where have you been all this time? How did you survive? Why are you here now!”
I stop to pant, glaring at the woman who’s supposed to be my mother. The one looking at me, shocked that I dare speak to her like this, when she’d given birth to me and brought me up on her own, as a single mother.
I know I should apologize. I’m actually overcome with joy that she’s alive and seemingly well. But at the same time, I feel so hurt, so angry at what I’ve had to go through without her, that I can’t even voice my happiness that she’s alive. That is, until a tear runs down her face and she draws in a shuddering breath.
“I’ve only just come because it took me this long to heal and to get here… but I tried as hard as I could because I had to get to you, because—”
I throw myself into her arms.
“I’m sorry!” I cry. “I’m so sorry, Mom,” I choke out. “I’m so glad you’re alive, and I didn’t mean to yell. I just, it’s been so hard!”
She pats the back of my head as we both cry, mumbling incoherently. As hard as it is to get along, it’s impossible for us not to love each other. The hard part is expressing and showing it. And given how out of practice we are, it takes a while before we manage to do a proper job of it.
“I’m sorry, Heaven,” she says eventually, when we’ve both calmed down. “This is all happening because I kept so many secrets from you. I never told you who I really am, or who your father was. I was so busy running from my life in this world that I never considered that one day, you’d need to learn how to survive in it.”
“It’s okay,” I reassure her. “Just tell me everything now.”
Mom nods and starts talking. She tells me everything that’s happened. How she woke up in a morgue, stone cold, but alive. How she’d attended her own funeral and learned what had happened to Martin and that I was missing. How she’d entered the supernatural world and found out about a new angel blood attending Pandorax, then figured out it had to be me.
“I could only heal so fast,” she told me, “Without employing my uh, usual methods. I could not proceed as I normally do and remain undetected at the same time.”
“What do you mean,” I frown. “What are your usual methods? Aren’t you a magic caster?”
I’d assumed that’s what she was, considering that I had magic and she had no outward signs of being supernatural. It would also explain how she’d met my father, and also how she’s survived for so long in Terra undetected. A little magic could go a long way towards fooling human eyes.
But Mom shakes her head. “No Heaven,” she tells me. “Other than the innate allure of our kind, I don’t have any magic to give to you. My abilities aren’t the same as your father’s. In a way, it’s better and yet worse, because I can have all the power in the world, but only so long as it comes from someone else.”
“I don’t understand,” I groan, gritting my teeth in frustration. Why can’t she just speak plainly?
“It’s easier to just show you what you are first, my dear. The rest will come later, with experience.” Mom eyes are impatient as she lifts one of the pieces of cloth lying over my legs, then pulls something long and dark out from under it and onto her lap. A strange sensation runs through me as I stare at the tail for a fraction of a second. Then I jump out of my covers, wondering what creature has climbed into bed with me, only to scream with pain as something pulls at my lower back.
“It’s okay, Heaven,” Mom let’s go of the tail, and it coils in the air, closer to me, even as I jump back. I knock it back, causing pain to spark where I’d hit it. “It’s yours. I have it too. It’s something unique to our heritage, which is much older and more illustrious than those of the magic-casters.”
“W-what?” I gasp. With shaking hands, I reach out to touch my back, then flinch back when I feel something poking out of it. Something sinuous and long… and furry. “What’s going on? What the hell am I!”
“You’re half-succubus,” Mom answers, an amused glint in her eyes. “And you’re finally growing into your powers.”
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“A w-what?” I gasp, unable to believe my ears. “What do you mean? I’m half-angel!”
The tail lashes agitatedly, echoing my distress. I stare at it as if it’s a snake, noting its forked ending covered by a tuft of black fur.
“You’re a child of two worlds, Heaven,” Mom sighs. “Descended from heaven and hell, born of both an angel and a demon. It’s why I took you away to grow up in the human world. You’re one of the few beings since Lucifer who can rise high to heaven or fall to the depths of hell as you wish, with nothing to stand in your way. You have absolute free will but also tremendous power, if you can learn to use it. That’s why you have to leave this world and come back to Terra with me. There are too many beings here who would use and manipulate your abilities to suit their purposes.
I shake my head, unable to understand. “I don’t understand. How is this possible?”
Mom sighs. “A long time ago, I defied my mother’s orders and left the underworld to study magic here in Pandorax among Terran’s supernaturals. Soon after graduating, I took on a job as a doppelganger in Terra, standing in for the rich and powerful whenever they needed my unique talents,” she points to her face, as her nose takes on a flatter shape and her eyes turn a black. “That’s how I ended up meeting an angel. We fell in love and for a while, we were happy.”
“But… as you now know, I’m a succubus. Our kinda weren’t made to be with only one man. I need energy to live on, and sex is how I get it. It’s why I slept with so many men. It’s also why I have to move on so often, because mortal men can’t survive feeing me for long. Anyway, your father couldn’t accept my lifestyle. He couldn’t accept me. So we separated. Then, I had you.”