Torn by Fury

by S. M. Reine

“You killed her,” Elise said.

  “It was necessary. They could have toppled the city before we managed to break free.”

  “I only left you one instruction, Leliel.” She tightened her fist on the hilt of the falchion until she thought she might shatter the unbreakable obsidian. Her mind was swimming. Dead angels, James’s memory of Rylie’s body turned to stone, the girl’s smile when she talked about her pregnancy. Marion. “Where is the child? Give me Marion. Now.”

  “I have no idea who you’re talking about,” Leliel said.

  She wasn’t lying. Eve was confident of it.

  But if the angels hadn’t taken her to New Eden, then where could Marion have possibly gone?

  Fear crawled up her throat at the idea of Marion wandering somewhere on Earth, alone—or in the hold of some predator. That fear was a foreign sensation to Elise. A mix of Eve’s maternal urges and Elise’s fierce protectiveness of her half-sister. It clashed, multiplied, choked her.

  It wasn’t just emotion choking her. She felt hot all over. Her innards were writhing. Elise lifted her hands to look at them, and they seemed fine—but that was just the glamor.

  Underneath, the anathema powder was overwhelming her.

  “You need to release everyone you’ve captured,” Elise said, struggling to bring back Eve’s superhuman grace. She suddenly couldn’t seem to grasp it. The first angel was slipping away faster and faster. “The humans, the werewolf pack, all of your living victims.”

  But her command didn’t have any gravity to it. Leliel’s expression was clearing rapidly.

  The angel shook her head, massaging her temples.

  “I don’t understand,” Leliel said. Her voice was stronger now.

  Elise looked around at the other angels. Leliel wasn’t the only one freeing herself from the illusion. As Eve slipped away from Elise, everyone was starting to break free.

  Help me, Elise thought, searching for the first angel inside of herself.

  All she found was growing pain. Her whole body was shaking.

  The glamor flickered.

  Leliel was the first to realize what was happening. She sucked in a hard breath. Rage flashed through her eyes. “Godslayer!”

  Her wings flared behind her, snapping to their full width—and their full brightness. It punched through the glamor spell protecting Elise. Eve burned away, exposing a demon’s pale flesh, the leather clothing, the blood of all the angels on her hands.

  Cries rose from the cemetery above as the angels finally saw the dozens of dead on the streets.

  It didn’t matter. None of it mattered anymore.

  Elise clutched at her stomach. Her skin was slippery. Her fingers stung at the contact of her blood, no longer amber-colored but the sludgy black of an oil slick. These are my intestines, she realized as something meaty slipped through her grip.

  “If she’s here, the army won’t be far behind!” Leliel roared. “Close the final gate!”

  Elise couldn’t let them isolate New Eden.

  She tried to get to her feet, but her body didn’t obey her. She collapsed instead.

  With her cheek to the ground, and her blood spreading underneath her, she watched the angels take flight. She watched Leliel approach her step by step. And beyond the angel, she saw movement.

  Werewolves erupted from a tunnel set into the wall. The pack was free.

  “No!” Leliel’s cry sounded like it came from another dimension.

  Elise rolled onto her back, clutching her falchion. It was the only thing left to ground her as she sank toward death.

  There were growls. Screams. The beating of wings.

  Everything was so bright.

  Gentle hands lifted her. She felt everything shift inside her, spill out from under her ribs, splatter onto the ground. The pain was too much.

  Elise passed out.

  Twenty-One

  JAMES CAST THE healing spell quickly. It came to him much more easily now that he had done it once before.

  He muttered the verses that he’d memorized under his breath. The result was far more powerful in Araboth than it had been on Earth. The energy in the air was thick and left him sluggish.

  James was casting just a few feet away from the gate to New Eden, and he kept an eye on the glow of light between the columns, waiting to see if Elise would return.

  He needed to finish the spell before she got back.

  “Almost there,” he whispered to himself as he drew faster. One line came out wavy where it should have been straight. He smudged it away, then redrew. Even in a rush, there was never time to be sloppy.

  The strange whining sound came over him so slowly that it took him a moment to realize what he was hearing. He’d thought it was just the spell’s energy buzzing through him—but he had heard that toneless note before, and the rush of white noise that came with it.

  James straightened, searching for the source. The dead garden was blurred around him. He could see the cables of the universe again, just as he had in Northgate. A cluster of them near the Tree were so bright, so alive, that they burned James’s retinas.

  Benjamin Flynn stood at the center of that brilliance, balanced on one of the Tree’s arching roots.

  The boy wasn’t doing anything to make the universe vibrate around him like that. He was just standing there, with no sign of how he could have possibly entered Araboth, looking more or less like a completely normal teenager. “What do you want?” James asked, hand tightening on his pen.

  Benjamin managed a smile. “I’m trying to help.”

  His voice sounded different. Familiar.

  “Help?” James whispered.

  “Yeah. Help. Don’t you recognize me? I know I look odd, but you have to know who I am by now.”

  That was his son’s voice. It sounded like Nathaniel Pritchard talking.

  But that was impossible.

  James almost stepped out of the circle before he remembered that it would break the magic. He hung just inside the perimeter and stared at the precognitive. The boy almost seemed to glow.

  “You’re not Nathaniel.” He shouldn’t have felt so doubtful when he said that. Benjamin Flynn looked nothing like his son. Even ignoring the superficial differences, Nathaniel wasn’t precognitive. He was a witch and an angel. Just like James.

  “I know you don’t understand,” Benjamin said. “You can’t understand.”

  “Make me understand,” James said.

  “Everything runs in cycles. History repeats itself. There are always three—there have to be three. But right now, there’s only one. There’s only me. It’s too much. It’s not supposed to be like this.”

  He was rambling. It was nonsense.

  “If you’re Nathaniel,” he said slowly, “then how did you get here?”

  “I went inside,” Benjamin said.

  His heart sped. “Inside what?”

  Benjamin smiled. It was a sad, regretful expression. “I found it in Eden, and I thought it might be a way to get out. All it did was change me. Now I’m everything.”

  I’m everything.

  Nathaniel had said the same thing to Elise in a dream. James had seen it in her mind. He had seen how sad Nathaniel looked when he said it, how lost he had been, and Benjamin’s expression was exactly the same.

  “My God,” James whispered.

  “Don’t call me that,” Benjamin said. “I’m still your son.”

  The air churned suddenly, blowing dust into his circle. James lifted a hand to shield his eyes.

  There shouldn’t have been any wind in Araboth.

  Angels swarmed from the flat gray sky, swirling toward him. There were no doors in that direction. The only door leading back to Earth was beyond the Tree, beyond the wall, in the opposite direction.

  They must have come from Limbo, which meant that these were the angels that had killed Rylie. And if they were here, then that must have meant that they’d killed the pack, too.

  James threw barriers around the circle, deploying a half a
dozen protective runes simultaneously. The cables lashed around him with the electric blue flare of his magic. Through the dance of energy, he could see that the root was empty now.

  Benjamin was gone again. The world was a little bit darker.

  “Come on, come on,” James muttered, anointing his forehead with oil in a rush.

  He set the steel-bladed falchion at the center of the circle. After seeing the amount of power that Lincoln generated, he didn’t risk using anything less than his most valuable artifact as a vessel. If anything could contain this much energy, it would be Elise’s sword with its hand-carved symbols, its history of blood, its legacy.

  The angels landed outside the circle. There were only three of them left, but it would be enough. James was only one man, after all.

  One of the angels shoved his hand into the circle, thrusting his power into the barriers. James’s skull rang like a cracked bell. He staggered, tasted blood, regained his footing.

  “No,” he said, and he pushed back.

  The magic flared, but the angel didn’t let go. “We’re ready for you now, mage,” he said. He turned to the others. “Strip it.”

  They stepped around the circle, all three taking up position an equal distance apart. Arms and wings spread, they embraced James’s magic. They weren’t pushed back by the power of his wards.

  Instead, they began pulling it apart.

  James realized what was happening too late. He tried to withdraw his magic, but the energy had already gathered in the fists of the angels.

  “You don’t know me,” the first angel said, “but my name is Makael, and a long time ago, I taught magecraft to those of our kind at the academy. We lost the ability to create magic after the Treaty. But we didn’t lose the ability to manipulate what was already there.” His eyes burned brightly as the magic coalesced in his palms. “You’re clever to recreate it, but not cleverer than I am.”

  The wards vanished, devoured by the angels.

  “I don’t know about that,” James said. “Are you clever enough to cast warlock magic?”

  James took a rune that he had hidden on his shoulder blade—a spell that burned like fire, a spell that sickened him to touch—and flung it at his attackers.

  Infernal flames engulfed Makael.

  The angel pitched to the ground with a shriek, his feathers curling like leaves in a bonfire. Even in Heaven, the fire raged, consuming his entire body in an instant. His robes peeled away. His skin cracked.

  James’s stomach cramped at the strength that infernal magic sucked from him, but he still had one more warlock rune with him—the vicious wards that he had taken from the House of Abraxas. He unfurled it and swung around to face the second angel, who was rushing at him.

  He slammed the magic into her gut, flooding her with energy.

  Her mouth opened in a silent cry. Her skin exploded from her body, leaving her instantaneously flayed.

  She dropped to the ground in a bloody mass of muscle tissue.

  Makael struggled to his feet, wings still burning, and lurched at James. His foot crossed the line of the circle, snapping it. Then his hands were locked around James’s throat, and the garden was blurring around him, darkening from gray to black.

  James struggled, but the angel was a thousand times stronger than him, and oxygen was dwindling. He sank to his knees. Makael smoldered as he forced him down, hands glowing with James’s stolen magic.

  Another spell. I need more.

  He removed one of his gloves.

  Makael dropped his throat and seized his wrist instead. Air flooded James’s lungs. His relief was only momentary—the sight of the ethereal runes reflected in the angel’s eyes killed it immediately.

  “Give that to me,” Makael said. He drew the runes away.

  James clamped down on them, trying to hold the magic against his flesh by force of will.

  But they began crawling up Makael’s arms.

  A howl broke the silent air in Araboth. It was joined by another howl and instant later, and then another.

  The angels all jerked at the sound, paling with shock.

  “Damnation,” Makael said. “They’ve found us!” He released James and staggered away. “Amiel—don’t let them follow me!”

  Makael leaped through the archway to New Eden, cradling James’s runes to his chest. Light flared around him, then faded. He was gone.

  The remaining angel, Amiel, spread his wings to take flight. James hurled himself at his legs. His unexpected weight dragged the angel back to the burned ground.

  “Release me!” Amiel ordered, kicking at him.

  James only managed to hang on for a moment, but a moment was long enough.

  Werewolves erupted from the dead, twisted bushes along the river Mnemosyne. Abel was at their lead, a swift shadow in the gray light of Araboth. In three long strides, he crossed the barren earth to the Tree, lunged into the air, and caught Amiel by the wing.

  The angel crashed under his weight—and he never got the chance to fight back.

  Abel shredded him.

  James stood back as the werewolf ripped the wings from the angel’s back, bit into the skin, worried the spine in his jaws. James was staring. He knew he was staring, but he couldn’t make himself move. Amiel died quickly and messily, and the other werewolves never needed to intervene.

  “Good Lord,” James said as Abel shook the blood from his fur.

  At the sound of his voice, the werewolf rounded on him. Abel was panting hard, eyes aflame, pure hatred in his face. It was incredible how much emotion the beast could show.

  Alarmed, James took a step back.

  “It’s me,” he said, holding his hands out in a gesture of defenselessness. “It’s just me. I’m not one of the angels.”

  The anger didn’t fade from Abel.

  James was suddenly, acutely aware that he was surrounded by werewolves—any one of which could kill him in an instant, and none of whom might be able to tell the difference between his smell and that of the angels. His whole body felt like it was tied into a knot.

  “You can still get to New Eden,” James said, pointing to the doorway.

  That made Abel’s focus drop. He turned to the gate. His hackles lifted, and a growl rumbled from his chest.

  At the sound of footsteps, James glanced at the bushes.

  Hank stepped from behind the other werewolves. He had shifted back into his human form at some point, and now he carried a hunk of obsidian cradled in his arms. James had transformed Rylie into that himself, yet it still took a moment to recognize her. She was frozen in the same position that she had died in. Her hair seemed to hover around her shoulders.

  “Abel’s been like this since Coccytus,” Hank said stiffly. He kneeled to set Rylie’s body beside the circle. “He turned me back so I could carry her, I think, but he’s gone. He’s not even human now. He’s—he’s pure anger.”

  And it seemed to be rubbing off on the surviving members of the wolf pack. Two of them were standing so close that James could feel the heat of their breaths on the back of his neck.

  “That’s the door to New Eden,” James said as levelly as possible. “One of the angels made it through. He has some of my runes. We can’t let him share that magic with the others.”

  “It’s not up to me,” Hank said.

  But the Alpha seemed to understand. Abel stepped toward the gate, and the pack followed.

  They didn’t make it through the door.

  The machine sitting back among the roots began to groan. The earth shook under James’s feet, making his circle tremble and the steel falchion skitter across the ground.

  As he watched, the cogs pushed against each other, turning faster, opening the heart of the machine to the air.

  It was black inside. So very, very black.

  Abel skidded to a stop a few inches from the gate, lip peeled back over his teeth.

  “What’s happening?” Hank asked, still crouched protectively over Rylie.

  The light between t
he pillars had vanished, tinting New Eden on the other side in shades of twilight. Darkness pulsed from the machine, traced up the doorway, and turned the glowing ethereal runes the same color as the machine.

  Wind blasted past James, pushing him toward the doorway. He braced himself against it.

  All of the light in Araboth swirled toward the gate.

  “They must have activated it from the other side,” James said. “They’re going to tear the dimensions apart.”

  Though his spell had been interrupted, James could still see the cables of energy—just barely. He traced the path of the energy coming from the machine with his eyes. It was multifaceted, far-reaching, and incredibly destructive. It didn’t just span the distance between the machine and the doorway. It reached fingers into all of Araboth…and beyond.

  The walls between worlds were collapsing.

  Everything was melting around them. Trembling. On the verge of fracturing into a billion pieces.

  And Abel lunged for the gateway.

  James reacted purely on instinct. He leaped out of the broken circle and caught a fistful of the werewolf’s fur.

  “Don’t!” he shouted. The Alpha twisted, snapping at him. James jerked his fingers back just in time. “You can’t go in there. You might not be able to come back.”

  “I don’t think he cares,” Hank said.

  Probably true—but James had to at least attempt to stop them while he had Abel’s attention, however inhuman it might have become. “Run to the door beyond the wall.” James pointed to the place where half of the Tree had collapsed on top of the wall, forming a bridge that would allow them to get to the other side. “It’s a straight shot. Run, and don’t stop running until you reach Earth.”

  Abel snarled and moved for the gate again. James jumped in front of him. That close to the gate, he could feel the pull of its collapse strongly, and not just on his body—it was sucking his magic away, too.

  “If you want to survive this, you need to run,” he said. “Rylie would want you to escape.”

  Pain flashed through the wolf, twisting his whole body. His eyes flicked to Rylie outside the circle.

  “They deserve to die for what they’ve done, and they will,” James pressed. “But you have to run. Now.”