by Kristie Cook
Holy shit. I knew the Daemoni severely outnumbered us, but seeing this many in one place provided an entirely new perspective—a reality check that felt like a slap in the face.
“We need to get out of here,” Tristan said as a horde of Demons flew through the sky straight for us.
Of course. We couldn’t forget the Demons. They’d apparently been hiding in the cover of the night sky like we had been. And thankfully, they ignored us, too focused on their destination, I supposed, because they flew on past us.
What are they doing? I asked as we sped away.
“Dorian’s made his move. Lucas has what he needs to drop the veil.”
Dread quivered through my chest and into my stomach. We can’t stop this. There’s no way!
Something unseen, warm and too strong for me to fight, suddenly gripped my wrist and stopped me in midair. Tristan jolted to a halt, too. The warm goodness flowing into my arm subdued any desire to try to escape as we flew toward the face of a mountain at the south edge of the valley. The force pulled me downward to the top of one of the pine trees that looked like an alien creature with multiple thick, white arms dangling with icy tentacles. My feet landed on a branch, and a cascade of snow dropped through the limbs below. Tristan settled next to me, and when I reached up to grab an overhead branch to balance myself, I found Mom and Rina sitting above us.
“You must stop Lucas,” they said at once.
“It’s good to see you, too,” I mumbled.
“Alexis, you are out of time,” Mom said.
“You must gather your army. The final battle is coming,” Rina added.
Balancing on the branch, I turned to face the valley below. From here, the campfires looked like fireflies flickering in the darkness. The rhythmic beat of the Shaman drums sounded as though they were right below us rather than a few miles in the distance as the snow and mountain faces threw all sounds into sharp relief. My heart pounded along with them. The air should have smelled crisp and clean, but instead left an acrid aftertaste in my nose and throat that must have come from the concentration of Daemoni and Demons.
“Look at all of them,” I said to Mom and Rina. “And there are tens of thousands more coming. Hundreds of thousands of them, not including the Demons. There’s no way we can stand up to them.”
“Gather your Amadis. Your Norman armies, too,” Rina said.
“What? You can’t expect me to bring the Normans into this. That’s a death sentence for them.” For all of us, really.
“The Norman militaries want to fight,” Mom replied, “and they deserve the opportunity to go to war as they’re trained to do. They’ve watched the Daemoni slaughter their loved ones, their friends, and neighbors. They’ve lost their communities. The very people they’ve sworn to protect. As a warrior, you know what that means.”
“But we’re supposed to protect them.”
“You are to protect their souls, darling,” Rina clarified.
“So sending them to their graves is okay as long as their souls are safeguarded from evil?” The question was rhetorical. I already knew their answer—they’d told me before that was exactly how it was. “It’s not their war, though!”
“You’re wrong, honey. It’s always been their war.”
Rina nodded. “More than their lives are at stake if Lucas brings Satan to the surface—their very souls are.”
“They’re right.” Tristan shrugged when I looked at him. “The Daemoni were always after the Normans’ souls, long before the Amadis even existed.”
“Yes,” Rina said. “The Angels only interfere in the Norman world when necessary. They started the Amadis because they needed an army on Earth to assist and protect the Normans.”
“But that’s all we’ve ever been,” Mom concluded. “The Amadis may be the Angels’ army, but we are the Normans’ soldiers, fighting in their war on Earth while the Angels fight for their souls in the Otherworld. Things have changed and will continue to change until this battle is over. But what hasn’t changed is that this is the Normans’ war just as much as—or more than—it is ours.”
Holding on to the branch above me, I leaned back and stared at the thick, dark clouds growing in the night sky as I contemplated their point. What they said made sense and the truth rang through me, but …
“I can’t do it,” I told them. “I’m sorry, but I can’t in good conscience lead them into this battle. I don’t even want to bring the Amadis into it.”
“You can, and you will,” Rina said. “How do you say? The wheels are already moving?”
Tristan straightened up. “What do you mean?”
“It is time,” Rina replied simply.
“The Amadis and the Norman armies are already coming together under your leadership,” Mom said, and she pointed to a snow-covered meadow at the backside of the mountain perpendicular to us. A clearing the Daemoni wouldn’t be able to see from the valley—but Demons and were-birds could see fine from the sky. “You will gather them right there.”
I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. “And then what?”
“You will know,” Rina said.
I turned back toward them and stared with my mouth half-open. Their dark eyes were full of an unfathomable depth of wisdom, shining on me with assurance.
“You want me to bring my little army of ten thousand Amadis, join them with maybe fifty thousand Normans, if there are even that many, and what? Hang out until the Daemoni attack? Or wait. You probably want us to march into the valley first and then just stand there, facing that.” I flicked my hand toward the Daemoni camps in the distance.
Rina bowed her head. “This is what you must do.”
“That’s absurd!”
“Trust us, Alexis,” Mom said. “Follow our instructions, obey the Angels, and you will defeat Lucas.”
I let out a dark chuckle. “This is ludicrous. What’s the rest of the plan, Mom? Give me something other than this insanity. Something for me and my troops to believe in.”
“That is the plan, honey. That is all we know. Follow it, and you will be victorious.”
“And what about Dorian?”
Something flickered in her eyes, and the corners of her lips twitched, but she censored any true emotion. “Let him serve his purpose, and always remember, he decides the fate of his soul. Nobody else.”
“It is time.” Rina tilted her head in another bow. “Remember, Alexis. Believe in what you cannot see with your eyes, what you do not know in your mind, but nonetheless feel in your heart and soul.”
And with that, they disappeared.
I turned toward Tristan who leaned against the trunk with a confident glint in his eyes.
“Do you have any idea what the hell that was supposed to mean?” I demanded.
One side of his mouth quirked up. “Somebody has a plan, but hasn’t revealed it yet.”
“Well, that’s freakin’ helpful.” I hopped up to the next branch to try to gain a better view of the surrounding area. The pace of the Daemoni coming this way seemed to have increased—both in their speed and their numbers. “So what’s your plan? Because theirs sucks.”
“My plan is to follow theirs.”
“You can’t be serious.” I looked over my shoulder and down at him. He appeared to be completely serious.
“First of all, they’re our commanders. You may be the leader of the army here on Earth, but we serve the Angels. We obey their orders.”
“Orders that will get us all slaughtered?”
He straightened up and stepped away from the trunk. He rested his arms on another branch in front of him, putting his head nearly level with mine. “I’m sorry, ma lykita, but I have no other plan. You’re right. We’ll be severely outnumbered and out-powered. I see no other solutions except retreating, which is not an option if we want to stop Lucas and save Dorian. We’ll have to trust that there’s more to their plan. You heard them—it’s the only way we’ll win.”
“There must be something else.” I scowled as I wedg
ed myself between branches and watched the Daemoni and Demons below, trying to figure out why they came here to this particular place. What were they doing? Were they also preparing for war? But why would they be? As far as they were concerned, they had their victory. I reached out for a couple of minds in range and recoiled at the evil thoughts filling them. Thankfully, they weren’t completely clear, fuzzed over by inebriation. They matched the sounds that traveled up the mountain to our ears—songs and cheers, noises of celebration.
“I’m not learning anything here,” I finally told Tristan after we watched for a while. “I don’t really want to, but we’ll have to move closer to get any good intelligence to take back.”
“Our best intelligence came from Rina and Sophia,” he replied. “They told us everything we need to know.”
I rolled my eyes. “Everything they said is ridiculous. If I can even bring myself to obey their orders, I won’t be the blind leading the blind into this.”
I ran along the branch until I could launch myself into the air without catching my wings on spindly branches and icicles. I shot straight up, higher than the Demons flew, although their attention remained focused downward. Tristan followed me as I moved closer to the center of the valley, while remaining high and on the western fringe. As though they’d purposefully built their camps this way, a wide circle in the heart of the valley remained clear of everything but snow. The main thought I could grasp among them echoed Rina’s words. “It’s time” rippled over the Daemoni below as they began to crowd toward the expanse in the middle.
Tristan and I hovered about halfway up the mountain above them, watching as the crowd began to part directly across the clearing from us. The mind signature approaching the center elicited an involuntary growl from my throat, but when I couldn’t find the mind that I thought would be with him, foreboding and hope battled within me. Where was Dorian? Had he changed his mind and escaped? Or was he being held captive somewhere, such as with the Ancients? Was he nearby and cloaked, or was he soaring away to safety, perhaps even looking for Tristan and me?
We should look for Dorian, I told Tristan at the same time Lucas produced a ball of orange fire between his palms. Curiosity froze me in place. He spread his hands wide, growing the flames until they surrounded him, and then he rose a few feet above the ground, floating like he had when he’d cornered us at the Capitol building.
“What the hell?” I breathed.
Lucas’s voice boomed over the valley. “Indeed. It is time, my faithful children.”
He glided over the snow to the center of the clearing, and with a flourish, lifted his arms upward. Underneath him, the snow and ground began falling inward, at first in a tight circle, as though a drain had opened in a tub. The spiral grew quickly, though, sucking away the earth and snow, and within minutes, a sinkhole at least fifty feet in diameter yawned open like a gaping mouth. Lucas, still wrapped in a fireball, swooshed around the sinkhole, corkscrewing down into its pit, and then zoomed upward. The entire space filled with fire.
The Daemoni cheered before their voices fell into a low chant, and they stomped their feet in rhythm. Shaman continued beating their drums, and caught up in the excitement, Weres began transforming, the wolves howling a background chorus.
“The Ancients are coming,” Lucas said, his voice reverberating across the valley floor and up the mountains. “Soon, our lord will be here. For now, let us welcome the rest of our brethren who have been trapped in the Otherworld for millennia too long.”
The orchestra of voices, stomps, drums, and howls grew louder as Lucas lifted his arms again, like a conductor signaling the crescendo. The wind suddenly picked up, whooshing against my ears and knocking me off-balance as it blew in every direction, but mostly upward. Lightning cracked across the sky, illuminating low, dark gray clouds. Snowflakes the size of saucers began to fall over the valley, sizzling in the pit of fire, where the flames grew larger and jumped higher. An orange glow lit up the area nearly bright as day, reflecting off the thousands of faces and the sides of the snow-covered mountains.
A large and dark object shot out of the pit, high into the air before soaring across the valley and slamming into a mountainside. The chunk of black ice shattered, the sound resonating across the land, and a Demon burst out of it. Many more followed at quick and regular intervals, as though shot out of a cannon from the bottom of the pit, like the fireworks that blast several balls into the air, one right after the other. They all careened into the surrounding mountains and exploded, freeing the Demons inside.
Dozens of them.
Hundreds of them.
Thousands.
“The veil has dropped,” Lucas yelled over the ruckus. “Soon, we open the Gates to Hell.”
Chapter 22
My heart thundered against my ribs. “Oh my God.”
I turned in midair to face Tristan, but a large body soared toward us in my peripheral vision. Tristan grabbed my hand and took off. Like rockets shooting through the air, we flew toward the south end of the valley, back to where we’d been before when Mom and Rina spoke with us. I’d called their instructions absurd then. I’d had no idea just how ludicrous and dangerous they really were.
Whether it grew bored or had been called back, the Demon that had been chasing us turned away and returned toward the fire pit that resembled too much for my liking the lake of fire in Hell. No other Demons chased after us. Not even Lucas paid us any attention, though surely he was aware of our presence. He obviously didn’t care about us anymore. He didn’t need to.
Tristan and I flew wide circles around the area, searching for Dorian, but when I couldn’t find his signature, we assumed he was cloaked. So we returned to the same tree we’d been in before and watched the ceremony or celebration or whatever you’d call the horror playing out below in the valley. The hours stretched into the next day, I thought, although it was hard to tell because the sun never rose.
“It’s too late in the year for constant darkness,” Tristan murmured at one point. “There should be several hours of daylight by now.”
“So they’re doing this?” I glanced up at the starless sky where huge, low clouds hung.
He did, too. “The pending storm wouldn’t make it this dark.”
“There’s hardly any smoke rising from the fire pit,” I noted.
He looked down at me with dark eyes. “It’s the evil energy rising from Hell, blocking out the light.”
I recalled the thick black of nothingness in Hell, and a shudder racked through me.
Demons continued shooting out of the pit, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and those in the Earthly realm kept on with their party. Lucas disappeared, although I sensed him nearby in a large tent. Unfortunately—or maybe fortunately—Dorian was not in there with him, as far as I could determine. We kept waiting for something new to happen, to see if we could figure out what came next, but nothing ever did. Lucas kept his thoughts guarded, signaling that he knew I was close, so I didn’t know what “soon” meant to him when he’d made his statement about opening the Gates of Hell.
“This is pointless,” I said to Tristan after a few more hours. “We should be looking for Dorian more instead of wasting our time here. I’m not learning anything from their minds that are drunk on evil except that Satan is coming. Maybe we can stop—”
“Alexis.” The familiar male voice sounded in my head, and it didn’t belong to Tristan.
“Owen?” I gasped. Tristan lifted a brow, and both of us spun on our respective branches, searching.
“There.” Tristan pointed to the very space on the side of the other mountain where Mom had said to gather my people.
Apparently, I didn’t have to gather them. They were coming all on their own.
“Oh, no!”
We flew off the tree and swooped that way, where Owen stood in the clearing and others were appearing out of nowhere, coming through his portal. Charlotte, Blossom, Vanessa, a tiger I knew as Sheree, Jax in human form, Sonya, Alys, and Brog
an … and more people pouring through the opening. Dozens at first, but the crowd quickly grew into hundreds of Amadis. Then Owen disappeared for a moment before coming through a new opening, bringing more bodies, and then he disappeared once again.
Tristan and I landed on the ridge above them so we could see both them and the Daemoni. When they saw our wings spread out, people below gasped, and murmurs floated over the crowd, which continued to grow. And not only with Amadis. I spotted Heather, Teah, Teal, and other Normans at the front, and then Kristen, Olivia, and more from the London cell of A.K.’s Angels came through a new portal, followed by Ammi and Terrence, two vampires who could still be considered newborns.
Our people talked excitedly among themselves as they gathered into groups, climbed trees, and perched themselves on boulders.
This is bad. I glanced over at the valley where the Daemoni continued their celebration while yet more Demons flew from the pit of fire. So bad.
“Guess we know what Rina meant when she said the wheels were in motion,” Tristan said. “Apparently, your army was already on its way.”
“On their way to their deaths,” I muttered. “What are we going to do?”
“I’d say we’re going to battle.” Although he didn’t yell the words, he didn’t quite whisper them, either.