by Jessica Gunn
And given the civil war the Neuians had supposedly had…
“What the hell did you do?” Ben screamed at Mason.
“What I asked.” Jerrick emerged from the group of witches. I hadn’t seen him hiding amongst them before, but I’d been too busy realizing how screwed we’d all just gotten. “Disperse!” Jerrick shouted at the Ember witches, his soldiers, and they did so, running through streets.
It was only then, as the witches began attacking people, that I realized we weren’t alone. Neuians with bags and bikes and all manner of normal, everyday things stopped dead in their tracks. Only when the Ember witches charged did they begin running.
I slammed my head back against the face of the soldier who was holding me captive now. The others did the same with varying degrees of success. The thing was, the soldiers weren’t the real problem here. The Ember witches were.
“You idiot!” Ben called as he charged, lightning in his palm.
“Ben, don’t!” Krystin screamed.
I turned, jabbing an elbow into the second demon, then slamming my fist down into his face. He wore a sword at his side, which I grabbed and swung at the woman demon who’d held me.
“Minimal magik!” Krystin called out, presumably to everyone, but only our party listened.
Kian appeared beside me, a knife in his hand. turned and placed my back to him to keep an eye out for more enemies even as the ground beneath us started rumbling.
My eyes widened. No, no, no. “Shit!”
“The cianza,” Kian said as he cased the area.
“Yup.”
Even our very presence here had probably awoken it. But as the Ember witches ran into the Neuian population and began attacking them with their magik, the rumbling got heavier and heavier.
Jerrick laughed before drawing his own sword and coming straight for Kian and me. “Soon we’ll have this plane under our control!”
You know. Until it explodes.
“We have to take them out,” I said to Kian, then grabbed his arm and turned from Jerrick to run toward the Ember witches. Victims or not, they were going to take out an entire plane of existence if we didn’t stop them. Possibly even the world as we know it if Jerrick was wrong about these cianzas being isolated rather than connected.
I raised my sword, readying to swing at the first Ember witch I ran into. My feet carried me across the smooth dark stone ground, past the innocent Neuians just going about their day, and into the thick of where the Ember witches now began attacking. The slightest bit of hesitation hit me.
They’re still witches. They’re on our side.
But here they were, attacking innocents.
My moment of hesitation wasn’t wasted. The Ember witch spun on me—a tall, lanky man—and he swung with an open, ether-enveloped palm for my chest. I jumped back, then swung with the sword, slashing across his shoulders. He snarled and the ether flames flicking around him grew along with the red orange glow in his eyes. He brought up both hands this time and shot a wave of the Ember ether at me. I brought up my free hand and blocked most of it with a shield made of the stone below us, barely able to hide my body behind it as the ether shot past.
Shit. That was close.
I dropped the stone shield and stabbed forward again, this time the blade sinking in. The Ember witch’s eyes went wide as I pulled the sword out from his gut.
“Run!” I told the woman and her child as I spun and lifted my sword again, ever ready. As I scanned the unfolding battle, I pulled up stone and used what concentration I could spare to keep it spinning around my middle. Hopefully, it’d be easier to keep the stone ready as a shield by doing so.
The rest of our party wasn’t moving any faster than me, which shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. Brian and Kian had paired off to take care of Ember witches together, one by one, while Ben and his team tried to keep their magik to a minimum like me. I knew the preference was to not use it at all, but had I not, I probably wouldn’t have survived that blast.
Jerrick and Mason were shouting orders at the witches, standing back. They’d let us escape so easily from our captors. Too easily.
The ground beneath my feet began shaking, as if to emphasize my fear. The cianza. Jerrick had brought us right on top of one, and even with the minimal amount of magik used, it was already reacting.
From what little I’d heard about the battle at Alzan, the few Neuians they’d had there at the time were enough, with Shawn and Krystin’s magik, to keep Cianza Alzan neutralized. I wondered how many of us it’d take to send this cianza exploding.
Red orange ether shot past my shoulder. I gasped and spun around, bringing up my sword right as another force-changed Ember witch charged me. I pressed the edge of the sword against them, trying to give myself space, then kicked against their shins. They backed up a foot, giving me an opening to remove the sword and slash back with it. Then I lunged forward, aiming to pierce their chest with the blade and instead stabbing just below their shoulder.
The witch cried out and reached for me, her hand lit with Ember ether. But with the position we’d ended up in, I couldn’t dodge it. The ether slid along my bare arm, searing my skin and sending twisted magik into my veins. I waited for it, for the flare to start, but when she pulled back, there was no blood.
I swallowed down the burning pain and lashed out with my blade. She caught the weapon in one hand and sent ether spiraling down it in wispy, transparent flames. I held on with both hands and willed some of the stone flying up around me to knock her in the temple. It followed the command, but the moment the stone hit her head, the shaking underneath us grew stronger.
I glanced again at the battle and saw Ben’s now cobalt blue lightning—Neuian ether—zapping across the streets of this Neuian city. His cousin Rachel’s water magik was the same, now tinted sapphire inside the city. But it was Shawn and the white ether magik from Alzan that surprised me. He dodged left and right around the witches, using it liberally.
So much for the minimal magik rule.
Many of us could fight without it… just not against Jerrick’s army. Which, I supposed, was the point.
Someone tapped my shoulder. I spun, expecting an ally, and instead found Mason waiting with a blade tipped with… a dreadfully familiar tan liquid.
My eyes widened and as I went to step back, Mason grabbed my shoulder and shoved the knife into the other. Into the same spot where I already had a scar from another incident with Veynix’s damn platypus venom. The agony was instant, locking up my muscles and my thoughts as I squeezed my eyes shut and dropped to my knees. I gasped for breath as my entire awareness was reduced to a tiny pinpoint of light.
This version was stronger, more immediate, and debilitating. I couldn’t even feel the stab wound I knew existed past the haze of constant, unyielding pain twisting its way from my shoulder down my arm to my fingers, then back up again and throughout my entire nervous system.
With my eyes nearly squeezed shut, I watched as a dark shadow knelt down in front of me. The shadow grew teeth that widened into a grin.
“Kind of poetic, no?” the shadow asked. I barely recognized the voice as Mason’s. “That you should die here under the same circumstances in which this all began?”
Unlike Kian and his experience with Demon’s Blood, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t bounce back right away from this. No tolerance in the world would save me from Mason’s twisted version of Veynix’s masterpiece. Instead, I ground down on my teeth, locked my jaw, and forced myself to move.
I leapt forward, reaching my arms out to grab Mason’s shoulders and force him backwards, off balance. We both tumbled in that direction until I landed on top of him. I reeled back my fist and slammed him once, twice, three times in the face before he grabbed both of my hands and lit them both up with his ether magik.
My vision doubled with this new onslaught of pain. My head felt suddenly weightless, as though I were flying high above the clouds.
Mason grinned up at me, his teeth now red
thanks to the blood pouring from his broken nose. And yet, despite the burning in my hands, he hadn’t triggered a flare yet. Mason wasn’t burning his own flesh yet, just mine.
“End… it…” I ground out. I didn’t want to die, not even right now when my muscles and brain had locked up in so much pain that I wasn’t sure if, at the end of all of this, there’d be anything left of me. But neither did I want this song and dance with Mason to go on forever either. I just wanted him to kill me and be done with it if that was the end goal.
But demons loved to torture us humans. Especially those who’d grown up under Talon’s watch.
“He’ll take it all, you know,” Mason said. “The Neuians first. Then the Hunter Circles. Then Darkness. He’s got a plan for a whole new world.”
“They… all do.” Jerrick wasn’t the first. But depending on how today went, maybe he could be the last.
A prickling started on the edges of my awareness. As if that last thought had given something inside me—I wasn’t sure what—enough hope to recognize the magik around me, the amount of stone. All the weapons at my disposal.
Mason hasn’t used requirem on me yet. They wanted us to use our magik.
Then I guess I should deliver.
With Mason’s hands still clamped around my wrists, I gave my best shot at a smile with every inch of me in pain and said, “Teleportante.”
Mason’s eyes went wide before we teleported from where we were on the ground in front of what looked like a café to right beside where Brian and Kian were dealing a finishing blow to an Ember witch.
“Shit!” Kian shouted as we appeared, then he took a second to see what had happened. He bent down and slammed a fist into Mason’s head.
Still, Mason held on to me, the momentary confusion from before washing from his face as Kian’s fist connected. Before Kian could hit him again, Mason let go of me and reached for Kian’s hands.
I knocked them away and rolled off him to gain some space between us.
“Ava!” Brian called, following me as I lay out flat on my back, gasping as my lungs screamed with every inhale. Brian looked me over, his eyes narrowing in on the stab wound on my shoulder. Realization crossed his features and he frowned.
Another shadow appeared behind him. My eyes widened, my lips moved to warn him of it, but no words came out. I tried to lift up off the ground and agony screamed through my abdomen and shoulder.
Brian must have caught the meaning, though, because he spun fast, his knife up. Brian grabbed the demon’s magik hand, lifting it up and away from him, and thrust a knife into the demon’s side at the same time. The demon cried out despite it not being a killing blow.
Kian turned at that exact moment and shoved a knife through the demon’s heart.
“Thanks,” Brian said, his breathing heavy and exerted, before turning back to me. “How are you doing?”
I rolled my eyes. It was all I could manage. Brian knew just as well as I did what Veynix’s platypus venom felt like. The fact that I was this far gone should have been enough to let him know how bad the dose had been.
A loud cracking sounded next to my ear, followed by an odd feeling in my magik. Like my magik itself was cracking. My brow furrowed as I turned, my eyes nearly level with the ground, and I watched as a giant split in the earth crackled toward me from a point in the distance. Small at first, then larger the closer it got.
Someone—I wasn’t sure if it was Brian or Kian—hauled me up off the ground and out of the way. I couldn’t stop the scream that tore from my lips with the sudden, harsh movement and pain it triggered thanks to the venom. But one look back revealed that had they not moved me, I’d be halfway into a veritable chasm right now.
“Dammit!” someone called, one of the freelancers, just before a wave of navy blue ether energy swept the entire area.
When it was gone, a small army of Neuians in cobalt blue uniforms stood in its wake. And in front was a familiar, blonde-haired face.
“Enough!” Karen shouted as her angry glare cut across the battlefield before settling on Ben. “I thought we had an agreement. Instead, you bring these filthy creatures here and start an attack. May this small war be enough to teach you all that fighting with us is not the answer.”
She lifted her hand, ether gathering in her palm. For a moment, it was like no one so much as dared to breathe. The silence made the cracking in the earth as new chasms split the stone just that much louder. Then, with an angry snarl twisting her lips, Karen dropped her hand… and the Neuian army charged.
Chapter 21
Panic swept through me until Kian’s face appeared near mine. Relief flooded me just seeing his familiar, reassuring brown eyes. “Can you walk?” He reached for my hands at the same time.
I groaned as Kian began pulling me up. “Maybe.”
“Good enough for now. Come on.”
Kian pulled me up off the ground, then lifted me into his arms and began retreating from the oncoming Neuians. I cried out with every jostle, every movement, which sent pain searing up my spine to burst brightly in my mind.
Kian winced. “Sorry.”
I gripped his shoulder, hoping he’d read it as, “It’s fine, keep going.” But before being able to attempt to explain further, a red orange wave of ether came soaring towards us.
“Kian, duck!” Brian yelled.
The ether moved too fast. Before Kian could move, it swallowed us, dragging us to the ground. We tumbled, end over end, pain screaming all over my body. I couldn’t think, couldn’t process. Somehow we ended up on the ground, colliding with Brian—or at least a man I thought was Brian. I squeezed my eyes shut and curled up into a ball of nerve endings on fire, incapable of processing anything happening around me.
The stone beneath me rumbled. I felt the fissures deeper in the earth despite my magik being muffled and dulled by pain. A quarter mile down, the deep earth was splitting. Upset. Being torn apart by forces beyond its control.
That was when the bright light touched my mind. It sat below the surface, miles down, swirling and spinning and pulsating. White light. Black. All the colors of the rainbow in between. Spinning like a top, burning like a sun.
Tendrils of its magik reached out to the earth around it, snapping against the earth like a whip. Creating a new fissure that rose through the earth, mile by mile, to the surface at the speed of light. I felt the crack on the surface as though it’d occurred right beneath my hand that I now had pressed against the stone ground.
The spinning top of magik called me. Its power sang in my veins. The vision of the spinning top, clear as day, made me want to dig into the earth right down to it.
The cianza.
The realization came over me like the goosebumps caused by a huge thunderstorm. I could see the actual cianza buried deep inside the earth. Every angry groan as it released a new tendril of magik that split the earth, making its rage and imbalanced state known. The core of it seemed to have a constant blue hue to it, but then red would wash over it, then orange. White and green. Then back to a deep darkness that had a burgundy tint to it.
All those stories… all those warnings and lessons. About cianzas. About the balance they kept. About how easy it was to shift them.
They were true. The hue at the core changed so fast that I could almost see how every use of magik around me shifted this cianza. And right now, the demons were winning. Because at their core, even if the Ember witches still had their souls and good magik intact, their magik had been tainted by their demonic bloodline. Their demonic origins.
Kian’s voice came swimming into my awareness, slowly and muffled, as though I was hearing it through ears filled with cotton. “Ava…”
I lifted my eyelids and saw him wrestling with Mason. Brian tried to help, but every time he got close, Mason sent ether around his ankles and pulled him to the ground.
Kian landed a punch to Mason’s head. “Requi—”
His attempt to cut off Mason’s magik was halted by Mason sending a wave of ether betw
een them, knocking Kian’s arm away. Kian made a noise that vaguely sounded like a growl and launched another volley of punches, his knife apparently gone in the scuffle.
The cianza is going to explode soon. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I felt it in the very core of my being. I’d seen it shifting colors, shifting from good to evil magik and back again. I’d seen it splitting the earth every single second.
We need to stop. Or at the very least, tilt the balance back to a more neutral status. Which I supposed was why the Neuians had decided to appear rather than let us fight this out and imprison or kill the victors. But something, a sneaking suspicious rooted in my vision of the cianza, told me that Neuian magik alone wouldn’t be enough now.
I pushed myself up off the ground, grimacing every millimeter of the way, and called stone around me. It answered the command without hesitation. Avoiding as much physical movement as I could, I willed the stone to form a barrier around me, then shot out shards from it at Mason and any of the demons or witches nearby. Mason caught one in his chest, his eyes widening.
“Nice trick,” he said, but the compliment lost its effect due to the dried blood on his face. He summoned more ether around him.
Another crack split my consciousness. I knew where the next chasm would open.
Stepping to the side, I swept my foot along the ground and pulled tight on my power. A bit of earth shot up next to Mason’s feet, and I commanded it to push Mason over into the chasm the moment it split open the surface stone. Mason gasped, stopping his ether attack, to turn and fall across the chasm, holding himself up by his hands and feet like a cat bridging buildings in the city.
“I think… this trick… was better,” I said as I moved earth again to push him in. Mason’s eyes widened again, not at my attack, but at something else. I wasn’t sure what until magik shot up through his head, a multicolored tendril exploding like lava from a volcano.
Mason screamed like I’d never heard someone scream before, but through the magik, I couldn’t see what was happening. Then the magik dissipated and fell back into the earth, leaving behind a burned, magik-seared husk of a head behind.