by Jessica Gunn
Krystin’s eyes met mine and her face paled. Sweat beaded along her brow as her eyes grew drawn. She swayed, letting go of the counter she’d pinned herself to, and started to fall. I let go of Rachel and dove to catch Krystin before she hit the trembling ground, cradling her head in my arm as my knees hit the wooden floor.
“Krystin?” I brushed hair out of her face and placed my palm on her forehead. She was burning up, sick all of a sudden.
My stomach dropped. No. Already? I looked up. Shawn was bent over the table and Nate had his hand on Shawn’s back. Oh god. “The cianza. It’s reacting to them already.”
Rachel’s eyes widened as the tremors got worse. She white-knuckled the bar’s counter, but even that started to buckle. “We’re not on top of it.”
“No. But we’re damn close. A lot closer than we normally go.” Which meant we were way closer to Cianza Boston than Krystin should be. Shawn too, now that his powers were unbound.
“We need to get them out of here,” she said, bending down to help me with Krystin. We lifted her and threw each of her arms over our shoulders and made our way over to Nate and Shawn.
“There’s no way it’s just the demons,” Nate said as he propped Shawn up against him. Shawn didn’t look much better than Krystin, with his eyes closed and mouth hanging open slightly. Sweat dripped down the side of his head.
“What do you mean?” Rachel asked.
“We’re not affected,” Nate said. “We normally aren’t. And neither are the demons. Which means it’s something with the cianza and Shawn’s and Krystin’s Alzanian magik. But they’ve both been close to the cianza before and nothing’s happened. Someone else is here—a lot of someones.”
My eyes narrowed. “Kinder.”
The shadow of a figure fell into the bar next to us—a quick, errant teleportante. A man appeared it its place, taller than Nate and me and dressed in a long, burgundy coat that matched his eyes. He slammed his palm onto Krystin’s chest and a red glow emanated from it before he looked up at me with wide, genuine eyes.
“Put aside our differences if you expect any of us to survive this,” Giyano said.
My blood ran ice cold and my fists balled at my sides. Rachel held on to my swinging arm before I attacked. Lightning sparked along my fingertips, waiting for my command. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing to her?” Nate asked, his eyes wide too. “I can feel it—the ether inside of her. You’re turning her.”
Giyano grunted, his face a grimace. His footing slipped as the tremors stopped, as if he’d braced himself too well. “Your world is too black and white.”
I lunged, grabbing on to Giyano’s shoulders and ripping him from Krystin as the sounds of falling, breaking glass finally subsided.
Any demons that remained in the room now stopped, staring at Giyano and the presence he commanded, even as I threw him to the ground. He was either scared of me—unlikely—or suddenly too exhausted to fight, because all he did was stand and brush dust off his coat.
“Stay the hell away from her,” I shouted.
A wry, painful smile twisted across Giyano’s lips. “You need to get her out of here right now. Both of them.” He cast a wary glance at Shawn, his gaze lingering, though his expression was unreadable. I was a single breath away from making an unreadable face a permanent feature for him.
Shawn’s eyes fluttered opened and he looked around, eyes settling on Giyano. “What?”
“Go,” Giyano said.
Shawn’s jaw worked and it appeared as though some kind of silent conversation passed between him and Giyano, but then Shawn brushed off Nate’s hold on him. Shawn used the chair next to him as a crutch and forced steps toward Krystin. He turned to Rachel. “Give her to me.”
The demons inside the bar screamed as a wave of fire suddenly scorched the air, filling the space in a swarm of flames. Giyano jumped in front of us and threw up his hands, forming an invisible barrier shielding us from the wave of fire. He grunted with effort and closed his eyes.
Giyano… just saved us? What kind of upside-down world had we fallen into?
Krystin’s hand, still marked by Giyano from weeks ago, glowed red as Shawn propped her on his shoulder. The fire wave died down and Giyano dropped his hands.
“Who’s here?” Giyano asked.
With an entrance like that, I almost expected it to be Aloysius himself. But when the fire and smoke cleared, burned bodies and wooden furniture sizzling in the fire’s wake, it wasn’t Aloysius who stood there. It was Kinder.
Her eyes glowed red, her hands too, and she stood with them held out, like she was feeding off the very magik she’d thrown our way. A shiver ran down my spine all the way to my toes. If I couldn’t understand Kinder’s power, how could I help Riley with his?
The shiver unleashed a cold sweat as it hit me. Kinder was the only one who understood. And if we killed her…
“You cannot have them,” Giyano said, standing tall in the face of Kinder’s fury.
“Then get them off this cianza,” she spat back. “I’m not here for you, traitor.”
“Traitor, really?” Giyano nearly laughed. “At least I didn’t turn my back on everything I stood for.”
The ground began to shake again, as though each word these relative titans were saying spawned new tremors. Except they weren’t titans. And the more I ran into Giyano, the more I realized he was nothing but a normal man who’d been turned into a demon. He might be an Old One by definition, but his power wasn’t that much greater than mine or Krystin’s.
The glowing in Kinder’s eyes and hands grew alongside a fireball that appeared in the air before her. Shit, that was new. Even Giyano had never made fire in the air before—he’d always wielded it from his hands.
“I’m not after the girl,” Kinder spat. “You can rest assured your continued fascination with her remains safe.”
The walls buckled, ceiling shaking. The earthquake that had subsided returned with a vengeance even as sirens wailed outside the bar. I hadn’t been in enough earthquakes to know what kind of damage to expect outside, but that the building we were in still stood was reassuring.
The verbal sparring match going on inside the bar, however…
“Go,” Giyano said, his gaze never leaving Kinder. “Get Krystin out of here.”
I wasn’t sure who his words were for, but Shawn touched a hand to Krystin’s shoulder and used teleportante to move them elsewhere. The earthquake subsided the smallest bit in their absence.
I stepped forward. “Can we take this elsewhere?”
“The cianza won’t react to us alone,” Giyano said. “Kinder, however—”
Kinder laughed. “What do you know about—?”
Giyano threw up his hand, a trail of fire burning blue as it flew across the room directly at Kinder. She deflected easily enough, which Giyano must have expected because he followed it up with more waves of fire and the drawing of a sword that seemed to come from nowhere.
Lightning flickered to life in my palm and I forced it into a sword shape, too, and lunged for anyone who wasn’t a member of my team.
Kinder, Giyano, and I fought a three-way sword fight, ensconced by Rachel’s wall of water that kept Giyano’s and Kinder’s damaging flames from burning down the rest of the building even as the ground kept shaking. Nate jumped in, slamming ether block after ether block into Kinder between Rachel’s ice missile strikes.
All of a sudden, Kinder froze, then whipped her hand out and latched on to Giyano’s wrist without any effort at all. Her eyes flashed white—so did Giyano’s—then Giyano fell, landing on his knees.
I took the chance while she was distracted and slammed my open palm into her back. “Requirem!”
She turned to me, mirth lighting her face, and laughed. “That was funny. To think those words matter to me.” Kinder bent over and scooped Giyano up, then disappeared in a teleportante without another word.
The tremors waned and the walls stopped buckling as soon as Kin
der left with Giyano in her hands. I didn’t have it in me to worry about him, not in the face of realizing that Kinder stepping nearly directly on top of the cianza… she was that powerful that her magik had tipped it.
The smell of burned meat filled my nostrils, roiling my stomach as I looked around at what remained: not much.
“Ben…” Rachel said, her voice quiet.
I turned to her and she was shaking. I was too. “It was just an earthquake.”
Nate shook his head. “Not an earthquake, Ben. I felt the cianza swelling. Any longer… Krystin and Shawn, with Kinder, too… I had no idea they would be enough to tip the balance.”
“Me either.” My phone rang, the tone piercing the relative silence after the earthquakes. I slid it out of my pocket, my hands still shaking and my breath hitched. Please let it be Krystin saying where she and Shawn were.
No luck. It was a text message from Jaffrin: Headquarters. Now.
“Guess Jaffrin knows,” I told the group.
Rachel winced. “Fantastic.”
We teleported to Fire Circle Headquarters and landed in the lobby. Derek stood behind his admin desk, the phones ringing insanely.
“What happened?”
“Down the hall,” Derek said without bothering to look up from the phones. “Jaffrin wants you three present for the meeting, since you, and I quote, ‘deigned yourselves in charge of the place.’” Derek winced at his own words. “I’d get in there right now if I were you.”
Air whooshed out my lungs, my stomach churning. Shit.
Still, I led Nate and Rachel into the grand hall, the one part of Fire Circle Headquarters I could never figure out from the outside of the building. That was the magik hiding it from normal human eyes, the parts of the illusion that made the building look like a skyscraper instead of a few-stories-tall structure made from wood.
The grand hall, where Jaffrin held Circle-wide meetings on rare occasion, and where new Hunters were officially inducted into the Fire Circle, was a wide, half-circle amphitheater room with rows of seating made from marble benches, all leading down to a platform with a podium at the bottom.
It was there, at the other end of the room, that I saw Jaffrin standing with a group of people dressed in pale yellow robes. Ether Head Circle robes.
“Oh, shit,” I said under my breath.
Loud enough, I guessed, because Rachel smacked my shoulder. “Shut it before they hear you.”
“This isn’t good,” Nate said, slowing his steps down the stairs toward the platform. “What is the Ether Head Circle doing here?”
Jaffrin looked up, as if on cue, with a stern look on his stern face. He waved us over. “Here they are. Come.”
I really, really did not want to. The Ether Head Circle never sent representatives to the other Circles. Ever. They ruled from afar and everyone listened to them without question. It had been that way for thousands of years, or so I was told during my training period. I’d never once seen any of them here at Headquarters, only watched or listened to Jaffrin call them.
And yet there they stood, two women and a man all in yellow robes that covered their entire bodies except for their heads. Heavy talismans hung off roped belts at their middle, symbols of ether and power carved into the medallions.
Jaffrin stood next to them, now with both hands behind him, right hand clasped over left. Military style. His back was rigid, his focus entirely on the representatives.
He’s scared. And if he is, you need to be, too.
When the three of us finally made it to the platform, no matter how slowly we dragged our feet, Jaffrin made a sweeping gesture again. “May I introduce Ben Hallen, Rachel Rhodes, and Nate Rosen.” He looked at me with a question in his eyes, likely about where the other half of my team was. “Ben, these are members of the Ether Head Circle’s Magik Protection Council. They arrived when the cianza shifted.”
Shifted? The balance had tipped. Nothing had moved. “What do you mean by ‘shifted’?”
The man turned to me. He had a long, pointed nose, pale blue eyes, and a hard face. “We believe Cianza Boston grew in size, moving slightly in a westerly direction, during this event.”
“I agree,” Nate chimed in. He hesitated, then cleared his throat. “What I mean is, I felt the growth. I didn’t know cianzas changed like that.”
“It is alarming,” said the man.
Jaffrin’s lips thinned. He must have known we were part of the so-called ‘event’ that had happened.
It was entirely possible that Kinder was solely to blame, what with the amount of powers she’d stolen and hosted in her immortal lifetime. Or maybe the cianza had reacted to her immortality in general, since that was different than being an ageless demon. Her immortality in combination with Krystin and Shawn’s Alzanian power, as representatives of Good, might have been enough to trigger everything. Then add in the demons in the area, the three of us, and Giyano… Boom. A recipe for an explosion.
Jaffrin shifted his stance. “Kinder’s reappearance in Boston is cause for many a concern, especially with Krystin and Shawn being involved with the Alzan prophecy.”
One of the women, shorter and with a darker complexion, looked directly at me. “And, one might imagine, with a resurgence of the Power.”
My blood ran cold as I looked to Jaffrin. No one who hadn’t been at Headquarters that day was supposed to know about Riley and his magik. No one.
The man lifted his hand. “We can speak of that another time. The delegation is due to arrive soon. It is best we not speak of the Power in front of them.”
Delegation?
Jaffrin sent a pointed look my way. “You may wish to sit for this. There, in the front row. Do not speak unless spoken to.” His hard stare lingered on me a lot longer than expected.
Fine, asshole. I get it. Mouth shut.
The three of us sat, perched at the literal edges of our seats, and waited. One minute. Five. Finally, the walls of the grand hall shimmered and in teleported four individuals—with deep red eyes. Demons.
My fingers tensed around the edge of the marble bench beneath me. Something solid formed in front of my chest, holding me still. I looked to Nate, who shook his head almost imperceptibly.
Jaffrin stood back as the Ether Head Circle addressed the newcomers. The four demons were dressed in what looked like white leather from head to toe, white shirts beneath their vests. Pretty medieval if you asked me. They wore stiff faces, each graced with a tattoo on their right temple. A tattoo of the alchemical symbol for fire.
My breath hitched. Oh, shit. White Flame.
Where Lady Azar had control of Landshaft and her Shadow Crest organization, her brother Cinead, third in line to the throne of Darkness, had White Flame. He led this elite group that served as the royal guard to Aloysius and the royal family.
And if they were here, inside of Fire Circle Headquarters, that meant one of two things: Aloysius himself was about to appear—the fear of which narrowed my vision to pinpricks—or the cianza’s tilt had scared White Flame and Aloysius nearly as bad as it had the Ether Head Circle.
I’d heard of these mediation talks. They didn’t happen often, and when conversations between the Hunter Circles and Darkness happened directly, they usually took place at Hunter’s Guild. The neutral point.
But with the Guild a recent target, and Boston the home of the cianza in question, they must have to decided to come here. White Flame had agreed to meet on our turf.
I gulped. Krystin was missing this. Actually—it was probably best she wasn’t here. I was surprised Jaffrin even let us stay.
One of the demons stepped forward, greeting not the Ether Head Circle representatives but Jaffrin himself. He bowed his head slightly. “Our prince sends his regrets concerning his sister’s meddling in the Fire Circle’s affairs. He’s expressed hope that her agenda will not affect our conversation here today.”
Jaffrin bowed back, a slight motion, but one that spoke volumes. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Cianza Boston affects a
ll of us, as we learned here today.”
“We will forcibly remove any demons near the city’s center until the cianza settles,” said the demon. He paused, seemingly for effect, before adding, “Assuming, of course, that your agents will be similarly removed.”
Jaffrin nodded. “I’ve already received word that the Son and Daughter of Alzan have left the city for the time being. Our other Hunters don’t collectively pose much of a threat, but we will stay out of the city’s center as well.”
The demon nodded deeply. “Good. Then we have but one other glaring problem. One that has been a thorn in both of our sides for many centuries now.”
“Indeed, we do.” Jaffrin finally glanced our way, showing us to the demons. “These Hunters tried today to take Kinder out. They are powerful in their own right, but I do not think we can remove Kinder on our own.”
The demon grinned evilly, looking us over. Then he returned his gaze to Jaffrin with a hard stare. “Then in the name of the cianza, as well as the interest our emperor possesses in seeing the Betrayer deceased, we will work with you on an… agreeable solution.”
His words promised compromise, but the way his tone shifted on ‘agreeable’ told me even the Ether Head Circle might not like what White Flame had in mind.
Chapter 16
Krystin
Sound filtered in slowly at first. Movement. Footsteps. A male voice. I lay on something soft, my head supported. I blinked, trying to wade through the fog in my head, thick as a day on the coast of Maine. “What… happened?”
I didn’t expect anyone to actually respond, but Shawn’s voice called to me from the kitchen in our team’s house. “Same thing that’s been happening for days now, Krystin.” He appeared in my line of vision, a phone pressed to his ear.
“She’s awake now. We’ll get out of here soon and let you know where we are, Ben. Okay. Gotcha.” Shawn hung up the call. “Ben and the others are tied up at Headquarters with some epic Darkness business that Jaffrin doesn’t want us anywhere near.”