Bastet examined me from where she stood, as if she were sizing me up. “Go on?” she asked.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Darkshard is dead.”
“I did hear, as it happens. I also heard that his circus was attacked and set ablaze. Your doing?”
“Yes. I was the one who killed Darkshard. I cut his arm off and watched him bleed to death in front of me.”
“You fought in the Arena?”
“I did. Killing him didn’t bring me any kind of enjoyment, but we can all sleep a little easier knowing he isn’t around. But he said something to me before he died… something about you.”
Bastet stiffened up, a cat with her hackles raised. “What did that snake say about me?”
I paused, watching her. “He told me you knew more than you were letting on… about the rifts. Now, I don’t know if you are or if you aren’t keeping something from me, but there’s a very real chance I won’t make it out of this alive tonight, so I’m asking you to tell me what you know.”
She walked out of her small kitchenette and went around her couch, watching me the whole time. “You believe him?” she asked.
“I don’t know… but I wouldn’t be being true to myself if I didn’t ask you.”
“True. You had to ask me, otherwise the question would’ve sat inside of you like a hairball that needs to come out. I can’t have that kind of thing damaging our relationship.”
“So… do you know something you haven’t told me yet?”
I watched her jaw clench. Her dark, sharp features accentuated by the dim light in her apartment. “I might.”
My heart started to thump against my chest. “What do you know?”
She pointed a finger as she circled me, like a big cat about to pounce on smaller prey. “You have somewhere to be.”
“Yes, I do, but I need to know what you know about the rifts. If you don’t, you’d owe me.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Would I? How so?”
“If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll take that as a sign that you don’t value our friendship enough to trust me with it. I’d be willing to let that slide, though, if you come with me tonight and help me fight Valoel. So, you have a choice. Tell me, and stay here, or don’t tell me… and get ready to fight.”
Bastet considered my words carefully, though she continued to walk around me, forcing me to turn to meet her eyes. She scratched under her chin with her fingernails, narrowed her eyes, and finally stopped.
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll tell you.”
That was the better of the two choices she could’ve made, but her decision didn’t make my heart stop racing. If anything, it sped up with the anticipation of what was about to come next. “So?”
She took a deep breath. “What I’m about to tell you was something I was planning on taking to my grave. There are only a small handful of people who know. Some of them are dead, some of them are still alive today. It’s a source of… great shame for me. I can call it one of the, if not the, worst failing of my life.”
I was starting to wonder if I really wanted to know or not, but I needed her to continue. I nodded.
“I know how the rift that swallowed you up and spat you out here opened. I know how it opened, I know why it opened, and I know who opened it.”
I swallowed hard. “What?” I asked, because a more intelligent question didn’t make itself readily available. It was like my brain couldn’t process what I was being told.
“Ten years ago,” she said, “I started out as a student at a magic Academy called Dark Willow. It’s a place where only mages go to learn the art of magic, the Magus Codice, and all the other stuff us wise guys need to know to be good, responsible mages. While I was there, I uncovered a conspiracy to open portals to different realms… this kind of thing wasn’t forbidden, but special permissions needed to be taken before it could be done. The people doing it were trying to keep their deeds a secret, but I found out. I knew what they were trying to do, I knew where they might want to go with these portals, and I couldn’t let them go through with it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Are you saying mages opened the rift that brought me here?”
“I’ve been to realms besides this one, there’s a reason opening portals requires consent from the Magistrate. It’s dangerous. And the way these people were doing it was… reckless. Undisciplined.” She paused. “I tried to stop them. Twelve portals were going to be opened. I shut them all down except one… the one to your world.”
“Bastet… what are you… you’re telling me you were there the day it happened?”
“I may have seen you fall; I don’t know. It was a long time ago, and so much was happening… I know you’re gonna want to sharpen your claws and go and find the people responsible, but trust me, they’ve been dealt with.”
She glanced over at her soul cabinet, leaving me to wonder if she’d stolen the souls of the mages who opened the rift that brought me here. The rift that stole me from my world. The rift that… probably saved my life. That was one of the first thoughts that came to my mind. I wasn’t angry at Bastet. She’d tried to stop it from happening. If it weren’t for the rift, though… I wouldn’t be the woman I was today.
I walked over to her, but she backed off like I was about to attack. “Wait, no,” I said.
“Sorry…” she said, watching me from behind razor sharp eyes. “Instinct…”
I shook my head. “What you just told me… why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“I didn’t know how you’d react. Sure, you’re being cool about it right now, but you’ve been through a ton of shit. You’ve grown up from when I first met you.”
“You tried to stop the people who wanted to open those rifts. You didn’t open them yourself. I can’t be pissed at you for that. I should be thanking you. You almost pulled it off.”
“If I had, you wouldn’t have fallen.”
“Pretty sure I’d have kept falling… I would’ve just hit the ground somewhere miles below my city and been forced to live the rest of my life a wingless Aevian. That is, if Valoel and his men didn’t feel like following me and finishing the job… and if the blood loss didn’t get me first. If I hadn’t fallen, I wouldn’t have met Felice, Ness, or the Obsidian Order.”
“Or me?”
I smiled. “Or you. The House of Night would’ve destroyed my city regardless. My coming here after it all happened was probably the best outcome. Besides…”
I rolled my shoulders and extended my kithe from behind my back. They were too large to fit in the room comfortably, their tops just about touched the ceiling, but I’d gotten the point across. Bastet’s eyes never did relax. She approached, now, examining my wings from a distance.
“How?” she asked.
I showed her the stones. “These? It’s a long story, one I don’t have time for right now. Anyway, you’re off the hook. You can stay here while we go out and deal with Valoel.”
Bastet frowned. “You’re making it sound like I’m some kind of scaredy cat. I’m not.”
“I don’t mean to make it sound like that.” I headed for the door to her apartment. “I get that you have a thing about using magic, and I’m not going to be the person who forces you to break that rule.”
She took a deep breath, then lowered her head. “I’ll help,” she said, “After everything that’s just gone down, I can’t sit on my paws and pretend like tonight is any different to any other night. I owe it to you to help.”
“You don’t owe me anything, just so we’re clear… but thank you.” Bastet marched toward the door to her apartment, but I stopped her just before she reached it. “Aren’t you forgetting your canopic jar?”
“I’m not gonna need it tonight. When we get rid of him, he’s gone for good.”
I’d never seen so many people spill out of a blue portal at the same time before. Back at the fortress, when I’d been addressing the crowd, it had looked like a huge gathering of ea
ger faces. Here, as I watched the Obsidian Order move through the portal and into the neighborhood we’d come to, it looked like an entire army.
They marched two by two, blue light enveloping them as they stepped through the wormhole that connected two places in space and time. They were all armed, many of them were wearing armor of some kind—all of them were clad in our Order’s black jumpsuits. I could feel a sense of pride welling up inside me, especially once Fate, Felice, Ness, and Six made their way through the crackling portal.
We’d all come a long way. The longest way. And now we were here, together, getting ready to stare down the mouth of a dragon and shove a sword into its throat. I wasn’t gonna lie, a great sense of dread snapped closely at the heels of whatever pride I was feeling, but I knew we were going to make it out of this.
All of us.
Draven was the last of the Obsidian Order’s troops to make it through the portal. He collapsed it with a thought, the portal itself shrinking to become a small blue orb that floated into his hand. He pocketed it and looked around at where we all were, then headed over to where I was standing. Behind me were Romeo, Mercutio, Bastet, and Kandi.
“I see you brought backup,” Draven said. I could see it in his eyes, the fight or flight instinct we all had rearing its head. I placed my hand on his shoulder and squeezed it, trying to keep his eyes on mine. I nodded, doing my best to soothe his nerves, and he nodded in return.
“Backup?” Kandi called out from across my shoulder, her eyebrow cocked. “Baby, we’re the main event.”
“I thought we could use the help,” I said, then I scanned the spot I’d brought us to.
We were in the heart of one of the poorer neighborhoods in the city, standing near a construction site that looked like it had been abandoned years ago. There wasn’t a worker in sight, not a cop for miles, and no wandering eyes from passersby, either. The mages had put up a magic field around the area to keep the general population from seeing any of what was about to happen, and to keep anyone from fleeing. I had a suspicion that had probably been enough magic to tip Valoel off to our presence, but it was also necessary.
In all the time I’d been here, I hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave the construction site. I hadn’t felt any sudden spikes in magic. I hadn’t been attacked by an army of Serakon. I could, however, feel the Wrath and Tenacity stones. They were nearby. They were, in fact, directly in the heart of that jagged, abandoned construction site.
Valoel was still here. He hadn’t left. That could only mean he was preparing himself for our assault.
“We can use all the help we can get,” Draven said, which struck me as a little odd. Draven? Accepting help from mages?
“Good. As far as I can tell, he’s in there somewhere. I don’t know how many are there with him.”
“I’ll get some of the Aevians to take up positions in the sky and scout the area… and to watch for signs of external threats.”
“Do that. I’m going in.”
“Going in? Already?”
Nodding, I extended my hand and opened my palm. Inside, were Hope and Wisdom. “He won’t come out to get them if I wait with all of you. I need to go in on my own.”
Draven stared at the stones, then looked at me. He reached into his pocket and produced what looked like a small necklace. “You’re gonna have a hard time fighting with those things in your hand.” He passed the necklace over to me.
“Draven...”
“Here.”
He opened the small, gold locket attached to the necklace. Inside, there were two small chambers—each just large enough to house one of the stones comfortably inside. Carefully, making sure neither of the stones touched him, I placed them in the locket and closed it. Immediately, the locket’s top turned translucent, allowing me to see the stones as they rested inside.
Draven walked around me, pulled my hair up, and waited while I clasped the necklace around my neck. “Thank you,” I said, glancing at him from across my shoulder.
“You’re welcome.”
I maintained eye contact with him probably for a moment longer than I’d expected to, but when the moment passed, I set myself back to focus on the task at hand. It was time to become bait. “Are you guys ready to go?” I asked the mages.
Bastet arched her eyebrows at me. “Are you kidding? You’re kidding, right?”
“Watch my back. As soon as I start fighting, send in the cavalry.”
Taking a deep breath, I started walking into the construction site, stepping from the cold concrete of the sidewalk onto the rough, gravelly dirt ahead of me.
The deeper I went the less light would reach me from the streets. As far as I could tell, this was going to be some kind of shopping mall, a huge complex that seemed to go on forever. Some of it had been built—maybe a quarter of it—and that section of the mall stood at the far end of the site. If Valoel was going to be anywhere, it was going to be in there; inside that shell of a building.
The irony that the last time Valoel and I had faced off had been inside a construction site wasn’t lost on me. Life was just full of little coincidences, wasn’t it? I wasn’t going to let him beat me again, though. Not this time. This time I had three God stones and their blessing. That had to be enough to beat him and the Wrath stone.
It had to be. Hundreds of people were counting on me; that was to say nothing of the many countless thousands of people Valoel’s magic would touch if I didn’t win tonight. I had to win. I had to beat him back into the darkness and take the stones from him, no matter the cost. The comforting sound of feathery wings moving overhead filled me with hope and courage; exactly the kind of fuel I needed to continue pressing deeper into the construction site.
If I was being honest, it was starting to get a little crowded. There weren’t any machines around here anymore—they were long gone by now—but a lot of the materials that were going to be used to build the mall were still present. The deeper I went, the more they seemed to be forcing me to walk between them, like they were funneling me down a certain path.
A metal clang rang out through the silence, a sound that made my skin crawl. I stopped walking and looked around, scanning my surroundings for signs of movement. The wind kicked up a clod of dirt that floated in the air and dissipated, but that was it. Then I heard another, like a small, lead pipe being smashed against a much larger pipe.
I spotted a stack of them and decided to move closer, drawing my dagger and getting ready to fight whatever was down there. Was it Serakon? Mages? I had no idea how many layers of protection I’d need to get through before I got to Valoel himself, but I was ready to cut through all of them if I had to.
As I moved closer to the stack of long tubes, I noticed a figure standing on the other side of them. It was dark, and it was difficult to see the person through the mess of construction equipment, but I recognized his hair anywhere. That grey hair, with those dark features, those black eyes. It didn’t look like there’d be many layers of protection for me to cut through.
Valoel was already here.
“Hello, Seline,” he said, his voice amplified and made more sinister by the tubes he was speaking into. It sounded like he was speaking through gritted teeth, like there was anger in his voice—repressed anger.
“Valoel,” I said, watching him through the tubes. “Where are all your friends?” I asked.
“You should know. You’ve killed a few.”
“I didn’t want to have to kill anyone. You made me do that.”
“Have I? I don’t think I have the power to make you do anything.”
“That’s funny, because you can make other people do your bidding whenever you want them to. Where are the Serakon under your control?”
A pause. “Waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For me to tell them to murder your friends. We’ve been watching you ever since you left the fortress. I knew it was only a matter of time before you came here to get… these.” He flashed the stones at me, their ligh
t dancing against the insides of the pipes between us.
“So, you let us gather our army and come here? Are you insane? Do you actually think you can beat us?”
“I know we can. And we will. Because you don’t have this.”
The Wrath stone pulsed, its magic shooting through the pipe and striking me hard against the chest. I could feel its power working through me, its tendrils reaching into my brain, trying to root themselves in there so they could take control of me. But Hope and Wisdom flashed against my chest, and between them they deflected the majority of Wrath’s power. Enough that I could beat the rest with my own mind.
“You found the fifth stone,” Valoel said, “Impressive… but it won’t save you or your friends. I know it, and you know it. There’s only one way you’re all making it out of here alive.”
“Let me guess… I hand them over? I’m getting pretty tired of that request.”
“Maybe so, and for that reason, this is the only time I will make it. Enough blood has been spilled, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I would, if you weren’t about to go on another killing spree of your own as soon as you get all five stones.”
“There are those who must be cleansed, yes. But we want the same things, you and I.”
“Oh? And what do I want?”
“To make this world a better place to live in. You and I both know we can’t go back. Not even the God stones can grant us that power. The rifts are more powerful than even the Gods themselves. So, while you’re here, you want to make life better for you and the people you care about. It’s a noble goal, and one I share with you.”
I scoffed. “Really? You care about someone other than yourself? Spare me.”
“I care more than you think. Do you not believe we share the same capacity for compassion? For love?”
“Not when you’re holding the Wrath stone. Maybe if you were to hand it over to the person who is supposed to have it, you’ll think straight again. Until then, I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar that inside, you’re one-hundred-percent selfish asshole.”
The Obsidian Order Boxed Set Page 78