by Jessica Gunn
My stomach dropped. Kian had said he was done with that crap. Although now that I was out of commission and so was Will, maybe… maybe I didn’t have the strength to be mad at him for it anymore.
As long as it didn’t kill him.
“Here,” Brian said, handing me something from the floor. He pressed the hilt of a short sword into my palm. “Thought you could use a weapon.”
I lifted it and inspected the metal. It was old, but it’d have to do. “Thanks.” My chest still heaved with every breath. But if we didn’t get back into this fight and at the very least get Will, Kian, and Veres out, we’d all die here today.
I already almost had.
“These are innocents, Brian,” I said. “Try not to kill them if you don’t have to.”
Brian nodded and threw himself into the fray, another short sword in his own hand. He swung it at the witches, using it to put distance between him and them, and knocking them out with a hit to the temple of the hilt whenever possible.
I let him be and focused on where Kian was dodging Will’s attacks while also fending off witches trying to get to him. Gripping the handle of the sword tighter, I made my way through. Mason’s guards, who’d accompanied him here but had remained quiet since, cut me off.
These guys I could kill.
A flurry of slashes and blows followed, including the very end of a dagger catching my ether-burned shoulder. I yelped, jumping back and dropping my guard just long enough for one of the Talon soldiers to take a swipe at my stomach. As he did so, a rush of warmth ran over me and all at once I felt the ground and every piece of metal in the room. In my attempt to pull back and dodge the demon’s attack, I also pulled my short sword from my hand, through the air, and hovered it there in time to block the demon’s attack.
My magik was back, the requirem gone.
“There we go,” Mason said, coming from out of nowhere. He raised one of his hands that was already growing a large ether-flame of Ember magik.
I squeezed my fists tight and pulled my elbows against my abdomen. A few sections of the floor broke off and floated upward at my command. “I’m not going to let you walk out of here alive, Mason.”
Mason hurled the glowing orb of Ember ether directly at my head. I blocked it by swinging my arm up, but only a small, two-inch-wide section of floor followed. It diffused Mason’s attack but enough ether escaped out the sides to burn into the air around me.
Damn this magik. Why wouldn’t it just work?
Mason hurled another glowing orb my way, then a full wave of energy. I swung like a boxer, trying to pull the scraps of metal and cement with me, but every shot only barely deflected the full force of Mason’s attacks.
My injured shoulder ached with every punch I threw at the air. Somehow it felt more painful to swing at nothing than to land a blow. But Mason was too quick, too fluid in his motions for me to keep matching him. Eventually, one of us would slip, and I had a sickening feeling it’d be me first.
I threw up my arms and pushed my palms out, commanding the metal shards to fly directly at Mason as I backed up a few paces. He drew his magik around himself as a shield.
“You can’t win,” he mocked. “The numbers aren’t on your side.”
“Why won’t you just teleportante away?!” Kian shouted at a group of Ember witches. Some of them had just stopped, watching the battle.
Mason’s control is dwindling. Maybe my potshots were having an effect after all.
“They’re innocents!” I yelled to Kian. “They were stolen from hospitals and brought to Landshaft. They don’t know what a word-magik is!”
Kian’s red face paled. Was he already coming down off his Demon’s Blood high?
“Gotcha,” Mason said as he grabbed a fistful of my hair. He yanked backward, dragging me with him. “I don’t really understand my master’s obsession with you, but I don’t share the same affliction.” He drew a knife from somewhere on his person and held it up to my throat.
Another blaze of red-orange energy careened our way. Veres stood on the other side of the room, fending off Ember witches with little success. Her power was waning—Will’s power was leaving her system. Already?
Her shot soared toward Mason and me. I twisted like I had before, but this time put Mason in the line of fire. I felt the cool metal of his blade slide along my throat, not deep enough to damage as intended.
When the blast hit him, I pushed him farther into it. His body convulsed, his chest smoking as the ether burned into him. His shirt tore, falling to pieces on the ground.
Revealing older burns… and carvings of his own.
Just like the kind Kian had.
I blinked, staring at them. If the Hunter Circles were the ones who’d given him those scars, that’d explain his vendetta against them. But if Kian bore the same, then…
Will screamed, his voice tearing through the chaos and boring straight into my consciousness. I’d hear that scream anywhere, recognize his voice in the thickest of fogs.
I spun, ignoring Mason, and rose to my tiptoes to see over the fighting. Kian had backed Will up behind him, and Will’s eyes were no longer two glowing orbs of red-orange energy. But Will’s hands had been tied before him, bound from movement or attacks. Kian had gotten to him, saved him from hurting everyone.
But Will had also been hit in the neck and collarbone by Ember ether. An angry burn spread across his skin, flickering with ether energy.
Kian turned, his eyes wide, as though he hadn’t seen the attack even coming, and dropped to the ground with Will. He pressed his hands against the wound, trying to stem the bleeding. It wasn’t gushing out of him. I didn’t think it had hit anything vital. But vital was relative when regarding a wound on the neck.
Beside them, a pair of Ember witches charged them, ether still swirling in their palms. One of them had attacked Will.
A rage bubbled within me, rising to the surface on the heels of fear and guilt and desperation.
“Will!” I screamed and began running toward him. Sprinting. Leaping over bodies of the fallen and ignoring Mason’s wails. For the moment, he was as incapacitated as Will. “Will, no!”
My best friend’s eyes were losing their light, even with Kian’s help.
“Don’t do this!” Kian shouted at him. He even slapped Will across the face.
The two Ember witches were closing in fast. I kicked at the floor, shooting a slab of cement at them with minimal effort. As if something had clicked on when rage flourished inside me.
Another trio of witches, seeing what had happened to their brethren, turned on me. A flick of my wrist sent metal shards from the door’s explosion right into their hearts.
Something hot wrapped around my ankles as I sprinted. It pulled my ankles together and I lost my balance, falling through the air and slamming hard, face-first, on the ground. Darkness danced along my vision, but I held it off, staring straight ahead at Will. Always watching him. Watching out for him. Wishing he’d never gotten involved in this at all.
But Kian was still over him, pressing his hands against Will’s wound. Talking to him.
Will had to be still alive, right?
The warm ether ropes around my ankles dragged me along the floor, back in the direction I’d come from. I wiggled, rolling over onto my back to look at my captor. Mason towered over me, a furious look on his face. His chest was still smoking from Veres’s attack. But even she now seemed to be standing still, watching in horror as the battle continued. Her eyes flitted from Mason to the open wall behind him.
Would she run?
“You killed him!” I screamed at Mason. The floor beneath me trembled with my magik as Mason drew me in closer to him. I kicked up, commanding the cement near me to fly from the area of my feet up to Mason’s face.
Another Ember witch knocked the cement out of the way for him. He hadn’t lifted so much as a finger from the ether ropes around my ankles. The same ones that were now snaking up my torso and arms.
“Let me go!” I sho
uted.
“Not likely,” he literally spat at me. Wetness slicked my face. “You’ve ruined enough. You can’t tell me you honestly want the Neuians to win so badly as to not let me build my army?”
Was he serious?
“You’re a fucking monster!” I yelled. “Just like Veynix. Just like all of Talon. You demons aren’t worth shit.”
Tremors shook the ground beneath us. The ceiling and walls followed suit. Debris fell from above. My magik.
Mason smiled cruelly, but his expression turned giddy. “This is what my master wanted.”
My heart wrenched. I was over this talking. Over being unable to help Will. “Just kill me if that’s what you’re going to do, or let me go so we can keep fighting.”
So I can teleportante to Will and get out of here.
I wriggled, trying to break free of the ether ropes. Trying to send metal or cement through to slice them. But nothing cut through ether except for more ether. And if Veres’s last attack was any indication, and her hesitation for more, her control over Will’s power was gone. And Will was too far gone to use his.
I swallowed hard, watching Mason’s face as he realized what I had.
This was indeed over. But at least we’d put a sizable dent in his plan, a temporary hold, which the rest of the Hunter Circles could use to their advantage.
You know, if anyone survived this long enough to tell them about what had happened here.
A war cry sounded—feminine and raw. I looked to where Veres had been standing, but only a shimmer in the air remained.
She’d gone.
But then the air shimmered behind Mason and she reappeared from her teleportante, a shard of metal in her hands. Mason dropped the ropes around me to grab her wrist to stop the attack.
Veres grinned and Mason realized his mistake too late. Her eyes glowed a rainbow of colors and she began to siphon Mason’s magik from his system. I wriggled, hoping to loosen the ropes now that Mason wasn’t concentrating on them anymore. The ether ropes dissipated as soon as Veres started to gain some of Mason’s magik.
The lights above us, flickering as they were, caught a flash of metal. Mason drew another knife lightning quick.
“Veres!” I shouted.
But it was too late—he was quicker than any other demon I’d seen before. Whatever Talon had done to him as a kid, they’d made him a grade higher than the rest of their soldiers.
Mason slashed the long knife over Veres’s wrist. The sharp blade slid through skin and muscle, down to her bones and through it. Blood spurted from the wound and she screamed, grabbing her lobbed-off wrist with her other hand. Her eyes flashed again, and Mason brought up a glowing orb of Ember witch ether.
“Good try, you filthy excuse for a human,” he spat at her. “Your kind has always been and will always be monstrosities of magik. Nothing but remnants of the Neuians.”
Tears streamed down Veres’s red face. Blood seeped through her fingers as she clutched her wound to her chest. The sight of so much crimson pouring out of her churned my stomach, and the vomit I’d been holding back minutes before poured out of me. My stomach convulsed with each wave.
“Get it together, Ava!” Kian’s words soared through the air.
I spared him and Will a glance where they rested. Brian was there, assisting them, though Will’s face had paled considerably, but the witches around them had stopped altogether. None of their eyes glowed with Ember ether anymore.
Mason had lost control.
He was wearing out.
I stood and swung at Mason, not bothering to reach for my magik. The blow connected. He’d been so focused on Veres that he hadn’t seen it or the follow-up coming. The uppercut landed and set his head flying backward.
Veres backed up to Will and Kian, sidestepping the confused, scared Ember witches. I barely heard her say, “Go” to Kian as Mason turned again on me.
I straightened, my chin held high. “You’re not winning this.”
“Two of your friends will bleed out before you can test that hypothesis,” Mason said. His chest heaved and sweat slicked his brow. The burn on his chest had turned an angry shade of reddish-purple.
“Looks like you’re not going to be far behind,” I said.
Something akin to pure evil washed over his expression. A look so dark, I hadn’t even seen it on Veynix. “You’re right,” Mason said. “Then we let them all burn.”
A mass of red-orange ether grew in his palms, then bridged the space between them. Growing and growing, expanding to the size of a basketball, then bigger.
My brow furrowed. What the hell was he doing?
Then Mason turned and pointed it at the biggest collection of Ember witches in the room—where Will, Brian, and Veres happened to be.
I screamed, my body and magik reacting while my mind was still panicking. I shifted my feet and stomped at the ground, channeling my fury at Mason into a single point beneath my feet. Just as he was about to shoot off the massive Ember ether attack, a pillar of earth sprung up from beneath him. A mass of cement and metal and dirt, all mixed together, launching him into the air and up against the ceiling. His attack dissipated as his focus was shifted from his ether to the floor when his back slammed against the cement.
He sucked in a ragged breath, sounding for all the world as if his ribs had broken and pierced several organs.
The air shimmered beside him and Kian appeared with something shiny in hand. He knelt, jabbing it against Mason’s burned chest.
The other syringe. Kian still had it!
Mason’s entire body convulsed, arching off the ground and back down again. His eyes rolled back into his head.
“Enjoy that, you fucker,” Kian said before punching him across the face. But with Kian’s strength magnified by the Demon’s Blood still in his system, Mason’s nose snapped with the hit. Now it was all jagged and crooked with blood pouring out of it.
“Kian! Leave him!” I said.
“He’ll be dead in a few minutes,” Brian called. “We need to get these people out of here.”
And by people, he definitely, absolutely meant Will, who was now shaking.
“Go,” I said to Brian. “Take Will and Veres with you. Kian and I can handle this.”
Brian glanced across Will’s body to Veres. “But you’re a demon.”
“She’s a friend. From Topaz,” I said. “Go!”
Brian was gone without another word, taking Veres and Will with him on his teleportante back to Headquarters. I didn’t even worry about leaving a trail this time. It was obvious who we were; Jerrick even knew we were here and who I was. If they were going to follow us, they’d do it with or without a teleportante trail to Headquarters.
“Everyone gather around!” I called to the witches. “We’re going to take you to safety, but you have to trust us.”
They looked at each other. Some seemed more convinced than others, nodding and hurrying to Kian and me. They didn’t even know how we’d be saving them.
“No.” Mason groaned from the floor. His usually well-kept black hair had now fallen into his face. Only now did he appear the young teen he should have been had Veynix and Talon not gotten in the way. Only now did he look like he could be one of the innocents on the Fire Circle’s missing children’s board.
Good thing I knew it was all a lie.
The ground rumbled beneath my feet, but I only vaguely recognized it as feeling the footfalls of a coming platoon of guards. “We need to go. Reinforcements are coming.”
Kian grabbed my arm. “We can end him.”
I shook my head. “We don’t have time. You and I can’t take this many people on a teleportante. It’s going to take several trips.”
“Ava,” Kian growled. “We came here to kill him.”
I glared at Kian. “No, we came here to stop him. He’ll be dead by the time they realize what’s happened to him. And we’ve saved a ton of his witches. Talon’s plan is halted and Mason will be dead.”
That was what Hydron�
��s version of the venom was meant to do, right? I’d felt it almost kill me inside a couple minutes. Mason would be dead before I got to the Infirmary to check on Will.
“Let’s go,” I ground out through clenched teeth. Turning to the witches, I said, “We’ll have to take you in smaller groups. Hang in there. Get to the back of the room.”
I touched hands with several witches and brought us to Headquarters. They all jumped back from me, scared, once we landed in the lobby. Lissandra stood from her desk, her mouth hanging open, but I just shook my head and returned to Mason’s lab in Landshaft.
Kian did the same, and on the second trip back, we found Veres, still bleeding, and Brian also ferrying the dozens of witches. All the while, Mason laid writhing and dying on the floor.
As we gathered the last of them, Kian approached me. “We should just end him.”
“No,” I said, watching his convulsing slowly stop until he was simply shaking, his eyes closed, face pale. “For everything he’s done, he deserves to suffer.”
And for everything he helped Veynix do, may he suffer for eternity.
Because for six months before I’d gotten my revenge on Veynix, it had felt like suffering for my own eternity.
I turned from Mason and joined hands with the remaining group of witches. “He deserves it.”
Chapter 30
I waded through the mass of people in the lobby of Fire Circle Headquarters. I’d never seen it so full of Hunters, let alone people who hadn’t any idea what was going on. Most of the forced-changed Ember witches that we’d rescued shied away from anyone who got too close. Surprisingly, no one seemed to be headed for the front door.
My eyes flitted over everyone, stopping only long enough to confirm they weren’t Will. My breath quickened the more people I passed who weren’t him. Brian found me in the middle of the crowd and pulled me aside.
“He’s upstairs already,” he said. “Bria, the healer, is working on him.” He dug something out of his pocket, producing a handful of tiny vials with a familiar liquid. The Ember witch poison. “Hopefully these will help. I took a few souvenirs when I went to rescue Kian. Hydron should be able to make a cure out of this.”