by Jessica Gunn
The screaming had stopped, the cianza having killed him.
Mason’s body fell into the chasm.
“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Jerrick said.
I turned, my neck muscles screaming with the effort, and saw Jerrick standing not far from Kian and me, a sword in one hand and Brian at his feet… covered in blood.
Chapter 22
“No!” I screamed as I turned my earth shards on Jerrick. They sprung from the barrier around me and leaped across the distance between me and him as though bullets shot from a gun.
Jerrick deflected one with his sword and let the other two sink in deep into his chest. Then he grinned as blood seeped from the wounds, but only for a moment before stopping entirely.
My eyes widened. “Shit.”
Kian rushed forward, either not seeing what I did or deciding not to care, stopping to grab a discarded sword from one of the dead Talon soldiers along the way. He raised it and lunged for Jerrick, who kicked Brian aside and met Kian swing for swing.
The echoes of metal clashing against metal rang out. I waited for the right moment before flinging another shard their way. Jerrick ducked at the last second, trading another piercing strike from one of my shards for a slash across his own sword arm. He went to strike back, but Kian parried the blow and stepped back out of his range for a moment. I sent another shard on its way. It lodged itself solidly between two of Jerrick’s ribs. And still again, he didn’t appear as impacted by it as he should have been. He bled, but it stopped within seconds.
We’ve never seen Jerrick’s magik.
Not the first time we went to Landshaft and not this last time. He’d not once needed to use it, but rather commanded a different type of power in his own way. And now I understood.
Jerrick hadn’t needed to show his magik because no one would ever be stupid enough to attack him, least of all while inside Talon’s Drum in Landshaft.
He must have been some sort of ether-user, like a healer but twisted in a different way. Almost like…
My eyebrows rose. Only a handful of demons were actually immortal, and they all belonged to Darkness’s Court. They could still be killed, given the right circumstances, but otherwise, they just regenerated and lived forever.
Aloysius was one. His children. Kinder, the Fire Circle’s most-wanted criminal and Aloysius’s once-wife. And, apparently, Jerrick.
He’s closer to Cinaed than we thought. Only a child of Aloysius, another immortal, could have granted him this power.
Which meant everything the Rebel Darkness Faction had said about Jerrick aiming to get into Darkness’s Court and maybe overthrow it entirely was indeed true.
Kian’s eyes widened as he watched Jerrick rapidly heal from the barrage of attacks. “Fuck!” he shouted as he went to swing again.
Over my shoulder shot a flash of blue ether magik. It sailed past me and looped around Kian, avoiding him, and instead heading right for Jerrick. The Neuian ether slammed into him and sent him flying backward through the air a good twenty feet. Jerrick’s body slammed into the ground and skidded on the stone for another yard.
I looked back over my shoulder at the Neuian soldier who’d launched the attack. He readied another and aimed it at me.
Shit! I tried to dodge out of the way and throw up a shield of stone between us, but every part of my body still screamed in agony from the platypus venom. Blue ether came careening toward me like a massive arrow shot from an expert archer’s bow, so fast and with so much force behind it, I was sure my stone shield wouldn’t hold up.
At the very last second before impact, a shock of white ether slammed into it, unmoving, but holding the Neuian’s magik off. I watched as Krystin and Shawn, their hands held together, lifted a foot off the ground and encased themselves in the white ether.
Their power from Alzan.
They each lifted a hand and sent more power into the attack, but the Neuian did the same, and soon they were locked in a battle, each pushing harder back against the other.
I scampered out of the way, biting back the pain that was—somehow—getting easier and easier to ignore. Though I wasn’t so sure that was a good thing.
“Not so fast.” Jerrick, looking not at all battered, stepped into my line of vision.
Before I could react, he sent a closed fist at my face. The impact connected like a ton of bricks and sent me colliding with the stone ground. Pain throbbed in my knees and my wrists bent weirdly as they stopped me from slamming my face into the ground.
A coppery taste filled my mouth. I wiped blood off my lips. “Well, aren’t you an undying bastard.”
Jerrick grinned and lifted his arms in a wide show. “Mostly. It pays to be close to the Prince of Darkness.”
The air shifted. I wasn’t entirely sure where the air shifted past all the throbbing, aching pain sweeping across my body and back again. But I felt the teleportante trail seconds before Jerrick turned a few inches. Whoever it was compensated, because in the very next second a sword tip appeared through Jerrick’s chest and jacket. Blood seeped out of his mouth for a second before drying up.
Kian appeared on one side. “Stop. Hurting. Her.” He pulled back on the sword and stabbed it through Jerrick again.
I pushed myself off the ground and, through the pain still screeching through every bit of my being, collected stone again, ripping it from the road and sending it to wrap around Jerrick’s ankles, up his legs, until he was fully encased in the black stone. All the while, Kian kept stabbing him again and again.
Jerrick only laughed, more manically as the attack continued. But almost as soon as the wounds were made, they began healing again.
“I don’t understand,” Kian said, then grunted again as he ran Jerrick through with the sword.
“Cinaed made him immortal,” I said, my voice low, almost inaudible.
“He can still die, though,” Kian said. He kept stabbing even as Jerrick’s eyes didn’t carry quite the same life anymore. But Kian had been screwed over and destroy by Talon and Landshaft so many times now, I didn’t blame him for not stopping. Besides, if it kept Jerrick unable to break out, it was fine with me. I wasn’t sure even a requirem would do anything to Jerrick, not when his connection to his magik was the very thing that kept him alive in this specific, healing ether magik way.
Another flash of the cianza’s core zipped through my vision. On the edges of my awareness, I felt the earth beneath us shift and split again, another fissure erupting deep within the earth and riding its way on up to the surface. Headed right for where Jerrick and Kian were.
And I had an awful thought. Normal things alone couldn’t kill Jerrick, not while he had this healing magik and was given immortality.
But a cianza’s magik might be able to…
“Kian, move!” I shouted, running toward him. Every step sent splinters of pain ricocheting throughout my body, even as in my mind’s eye I saw the cianza’s magik racing up through the earth. I leaped, soaring from the ground with my arms out, trying to reach for Kian, to push him out of the way.
There was something different about this wave of magik. It didn’t just burrow through the earth, it was slamming its way out, forcibly destroying section by section faster than any wave I’d sensed so far.
This was it. The cianza was going to blow.
My body slammed into Kian’s and we tumbled painfully to the stone and away from where Jerrick was currently pinned. The ground beneath him erupted in a shocking explosion of stone, earth, and multicolored magik that engulfed and incinerated him as it shot up into the sky like a volcanic eruption. Beneath us, the ground shook even harder, an actual earthquake triggering this time. Kian’s and my bodies bounced along the stone, each impact setting off my already-fried platypus-venom-impacted nerves.
Kian reached a hand out to me, grabbed my arm, and looked around. Everywhere people fell to their feet or leaned against a buckling structure. Brian wasn’t far away, currently on his knees and holding his ribs. But at least he was up—it
meant he was alive. For the moment at least.
I drew in a huge, aching breath and screamed, “Get out of here! The cianza is going to explode!”
I couldn’t help the people in this city. I wasn’t entirely sure I could get Kian and Brian back to our plane. But maybe, at the very least, Krystin and Shawn could get back and tell the Fire Circle what had happened here today.
Over the sound of erupting earth, I heard some muffled responses, but as the ground began shaking even harder, all I could do was hold on to Kian and bury my head in his chest.
This is the end. And if it was the end, then I wanted to be with him.
For a brief moment, I felt his arms wrap around my body as the explosions continued. In the distance, a building collapsed, sending shockwaves against the ground and a massive crash into the air. Kian held me tighter.
I tried thinking of home. Of Fire Circle Headquarters. Hell, even Will’s parents. I willed the teleportante word-magik to my lips, felt the pull of it in my own magik. But teleportante didn’t work across planes.
Then another hand touched my shoulder and my body felt light, moved. When I opened my eyes and looked up, I saw Krystin and Shawn had collected all the living members of our party, including Brian and the rest of their team, into a circle.
“Join hands! Hurry!” Shawn said as he took his Fire Circle knife and ran it across his palm. Krystin did the same.
What in the hell?
We all joined hands despite the confusion. As soon as everyone was connected, Krystin and Shawn joined their bloody hands and looked up at the sky. White Alzanian ether enveloped them, then slid along the human chain to the rest of us. It tickled with warmth as it hit my skin. But in the distance, over their arms, I saw the cianza’s eruption sending a tidal wave of magikal energy and destroyed stone and earth our way.
Just as the explosion reached us, Krystin and Shawn’s magik pulsated brightly, increasing the speed at which the cianza was exploding and sending the tsunami at us, but also moving us.
An insane light flashed before my eyes, and the next thing I knew, we were standing in the center of a big, open, marble-laden room, looking up at a pointed pyramid ceiling.
Then Krystin dropped to the ground, convulsing from head to toe.
Chapter 23
Kian held me—mostly to keep me standing while also keeping me calm—as Ben and Ryan, one of their other teammates, knelt down beside Krystin on a brilliant marble floor.
“Shit,” Ryan said as he brought ether to his palms. He hovered them over the length of her body and back again. “This can’t keep happening, Ben. She can’t handle it.”
“It was the only way,” Shawn said, then he stood and started running down a corridor leading off to the right. “Keep her there. Areus!” His voice echoed off the walls.
“Where are we?” I asked Kian.
“I’m not sure.”
“Alzan,” Rachel said as she appeared beside us. “Ava, you need to lie down.”
I shook my head. Compared to Krystin, I was fine. Or at least I was awake and conscious.
“Ava,” Kian warned.
“Fine.” Kian helped ease me to the floor. The coolness of the marble actually felt good on my heated, pained skin. Brian was lain down next to me, still bleeding and holding his side. I reached for his hand with mine and gave it a little squeeze. He squeezed back.
Footsteps sounded down the corridor, the echo of sandals against the marble echoing as Shawn and another man returned to this area.
“What happened?” The man gasped. He had a vial of some sort of multicolored liquid hanging like a lava lamp in his hand. He looked between Shawn and Ben with his lit-up Neuian eye tattoos.
Ben began channeling Neuian ether into his hands and touched them to Krystin. “We didn’t have a choice. We all would have died. All of us.” His eyes were tight and filling with tears.
The man, Areus, nodded and knelt down beside Krystin as well. He lifted her head and poured the vial into her mouth. “This should help, but, Ben, this can’t happen again. It can’t.”
Areus brushed the back of his hand against Krystin’s face, where lines of white magik, almost looking like veins, had started growing on her skin.
Ryan got to work, too, using his ether-shaper abilities with Ben’s magik to do something I didn’t understand the mechanics of. But it seemed like this was whatever they had done the first time to neutralize Krystin’s magik after the battle for Alzan. I hadn’t exactly watched what Karen had done for Will, but this looked similar. Ben was pouring in his Neuian ether magik, a neutralizer in its own right, while Ryan sought to balance it out with her Alzanian magik.
It took several long minutes, but finally, Krystin’s body stopped convulsing and she settled down.
Areus nodded, his lips pressed together tightly. “You should get her to a healer on your plane.”
“Not sure it’s any safer,” Ben said.
Areus raised an eyebrow.
“Jerrick took us and his Ember witch army to the Neuian plane,” Ben answered. “They didn’t manage to kill a whole lot of Neuians, but…”
Kian filled in when Ben’s words trailed off. “The cianza explosion did.”
Areus’s face paled considerably. “You caused a cianza to explode.”
“Jerrick did,” Ben said. “Put us on that plane. Basically forced use of our powers not only to trigger the damn thing, but also to balance it out. It was so perfectly planned. But he’s dead. It’s over. And Talon lost its army.”
“A good deal of damage to Landshaft,” Areus said.
“And to Darkness as a whole,” Ryan added.
Areus nodded for a moment. “Get Krystin back to your plane. Rest. I will see what the High Council says about this and bring their word to you myself.”
“You can get back and forth between the planes?” Ben asked him.
Areus smiled sadly. “I’ve been around a great many centuries, young Neuian. It is my duty, my life, and my honor to serve the Son and Daughter, and for that I have been given certain abilities. Moving between planes is one of them now, luckily for you. Come.” He waved everyone over to the same area. “I will transport you back now.”
And so Areus did.
Bria and the other healer set Brian, Krystin, and me up in a singular room to make it easier to monitor all of us. I refused direct healing until Krystin and Brian were taken care of, though. I’d felt this pain before, and even if they gave me something to stop the venom from working, I knew I’d be feeling it for weeks yet. Eventually, though, Bria got to me and began healing me too.
It wasn’t until a few hours later that Brian and Krystin had woken up, both wondering exactly what the hell had happened at the end.
Krystin groaned and put her face in her hands. “I shouldn’t be allowed to cheat death this many times.”
“Stop that,” I said. “All of us in this room have cheated death at least once.”
Both Brian and Kian, who hadn’t left my side once, laughed.
“I guess you’re right,” she said, then sighed.
A knock sounded on the door and Ben poked his head in. “Hey. Is Krystin awake yet?”
Her bed was farthest from the door, so hard to see from this angle.
I nodded and waved him inside. “Yup.”
“Good,” he said as he entered. His expression was drawn and he had bags under his eyes.
Krystin’s own face fell when she saw this. “What now?”
Ben hurried to her side and sat on the edge of her bed. He took her hand in his. “Karen just got into contact with us. Well, me.”
“Oh, good,” Krystin said. “Good news, I hope?” The tone of her voice said she knew it’d be anything but.
Ben shook his head. “Even if she’s willing to accept that we were brought to the Neuian plane against our will and therefore had no part in Jerrick’s plan besides being the exact pawns he wanted us to be, the Neuian ruling body doesn’t. We were all there. We were all fighting each other, every si
de. Their major city was leveled and thousands of people died in that cianza’s explosion. Karen says an alliance is impossible now.”
Krystin’s eyes narrowed. “But I’m sure she still wants you and Rachel to come home and fight alongside her.”
Ben nodded.
“Naturally.” Krystin sighed into her hands again. “Fuck.”
Basically. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Chapter 24
Two Weeks Later
“Are you really sure you want to do this?” I asked Will as we made our way down into the training rooms in the basement of Fire Circle Headquarters. Each step sent pain radiating out from my shoulder, but I ignored it as best I could. I’d be feeling pain for months from this last batch of twisted platypus venom.
Will nodded, a hard expression on his face. “I’m done running or being a victim. As long as it means I can see my family again, I’ll do anything to fight for the Fire Circle. Despite it kind of fucking up our lives, it sounds like they’ll be needing all the help they can get.”
I smiled warmly at him as he fixed the polo he was wearing. “You don’t have to finish your training just because the Fire Circle will be ramping up recruitment. I think the Command would understand.”
Will stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned back to me. “I’m not leaving you in this war alone, Ava. Even if you’ve got Kian. I’ve seen what my powers can do now and what we’re going to be up against. I’m in.”
I climbed down the rest of the stairs and pulled Will in for a hug. “I love you, you know that? You’ll always be my best friend.”
He squeezed me tighter for a moment and then pulled away. “Right back atcha. But right now, I need you to be my sparring partner.”
I chuckled and shook my head. “If you insist.”
“No magik,” he said as he stepped away from the stairs and towards the first empty mat. Most of them were empty, though, given the announcement last night. Many of the Hunters had taken to going on a quick vacation or retreating to their houses and apartments to be with their teams.