Shit. The opening of the portal.
Dropsy turned suddenly, her light illuminating the demon Forneus. His spider legs had twitched under his torso, and he was pushing himself upright.
Okay, this isn’t good either.
Dropsy drew back in a contraction of light. Forneus lurched for a few steps, then fell, catching himself against my cocoon, his head poised above me. I recoiled, but the eyes that peered into mine weren’t demonic. They were watery gray and benevolent.
“Malachi?” I said.
He gave a pained smile. Using the razor-sharp edges of his front legs, he began sawing the length of the cocoon. When he reached my midsection, I pushed with my hands, creating an opening large enough to wriggle from. Thick liquid dripped from my body as I gained my feet and retrieved my sword and staff from the goo.
“You all right, all right, are, are, are?” Malachi shouted above the hellish racket.
I turned to find four of his legs braced against the cocoon for balance, while his hands steadied me. Forneus had been blown from his demonic form, but some patchwork of what had been Malachi remained.
“Yes.” I gripped his forearm. “Thank you.”
With a network of cords running between everything, the Night Ruin looked like a cross between a spider’s web and a mad alchemist’s lab. The druids and half-fae were arrayed on lower levels, along with a multitude of pods holding sickly colored liquids. Mediums for Malphas’s claimed souls, most likely.
Ley energy gushed up from the foundation, supplemented by the reclaimed energy beaming in from the four locations I’d seen in the hallucination. Supercharged by all that raw energy, the elements of the Aristotelean Set had performed their parts well. Too well. Ultimately, the opposition of Spirit and Infernal Fire had collapsed the space that separated Malphas from the time catch.
Which put him a stone’s throw from the present.
Above, the portal continued to open. A pair of eyes peered in now, enormous and demonic.
“He’s coming through!” I shouted to Malachi.
“Balance!” he yelled back. “Sustained, through, through, the portal is, is, is, balance!”
He fell to the platform, pulling me down into a kneeling position beside him. His hands were cold, and his eyes had gone glassy.
“Hold on,” I pled. “We’ll help you.”
Dropsy, who had been peering out from behind my cocoon, hopped forward. Malachi’s gaze drifted toward her light. He tried to smile as he mouthed, Balance.
As the glow fell from his eyes, I slipped my hands from his dead grip and peered skyward. Malphas’s appearance was kraken-like—enormous and incomprehensible. Harsh bursts of energy highlighted the contours of a craggy face as more of him pushed through. The rupture created by his violent passage wouldn’t end with him. Many, many more would enter. A demon apocalypse would ensue.
My instinct was to thrust my sword skyward and unleash the full force of the banishment rune. But that was what had created the portal in the first place. When deep laughter rumbled like thunder, I heard Malphas’s voice from my vision:
This was inevitable, Croft. You were inevitable. The great savior.
I had acted predictably, according to my nature. Just as he’d known I would. Anything I cast in the name of Spirit would be met with a counterforce of Infernal Fire. A force Malphas commanded.
The portal is sustained through balance, Malachi had been trying to tell me.
What if I were to cast a force that went against my nature? I thought suddenly. That upset that balance? I eyed the runes of my blade, then dropped my gaze to Arnaud.
When my magic nodded, I swore.
That was going to mean accepting his demonic deal, shredding my promise to Vega. I imagined her face when I told her I had not only released Arnaud, but promised to never seek retribution against him again. That he would be free to roam the world with only a vague promise to stay away from us.
I’ll lose her.
The time catch was shuddering now with Malphas’s arrival, the shrieks of his legion growing stronger and more soul thirsty. I looked around at my other teammates, then back at the demon-vampire Arnaud.
My magic nodded again.
“Shit,” I spat, and struggled toward him through the hot, swirling winds.
Dropsy followed. When she peered over the edge of the platform, her light picked up a squat body on Broadway. It belonged to Bree-yark. He was lying face down in a haze of infernal smoke, his goblin blade beyond his outstretched hand. Ever the bulldog, he’d tried to fight Forneus when they’d arrived.
You better fucking be all right, buddy.
The open pouch beside him told of Dropsy’s journey all the way up here. I didn’t know how she’d managed it, but I was glad she did. She backed from the edge now in a mournful hunker.
“We’ll check on him in a sec,” I told her.
Arriving at Arnaud’s cocoon, I began cutting it open from the neck down. As I pried the shell from his throat, I saw that the manacle had been removed, probably by Forneus. The same was true of his wrist shackles.
“Wake up!” I yelled, slapping him.
Arnaud’s head rocked, but he didn’t stir. I dragged him from the thick suspension and onto the platform. Thinking of Vega and our daughter and everything I stood to lose, I paused before opening my mouth again.
“I accept,” I whispered.
The energy of the demonic agreement reacted, seizing me hard enough to shock the breath from my lungs. Arnaud’s eyes opened and he sat bolt upright. He peered around, seeming to comprehend everything at a glance. Overhead, Malphas’s form was growing, along with his demon horde. A look of fear and loathing gripped Arnaud’s face. Finally, his eyes locked on mine.
“You’ve accepted the agreement,” he said, an angle of surprise in his voice.
I nodded, but my heart was pounding sickly. “If you’re serious about stopping him, I need your help.”
Arnaud peered skyward again, then felt around his naked neck. Though his body was brimming with infernal energy, much of it courtesy of Malphas, there was nothing now to hide him from his master’s wrath.
“What do I do?” he demanded.
I pulled him to the center of the platform, where the fount of ley energy was thickest, and aimed my sword upward.
“Grasp the handle!” I shouted. Arnaud’s slippery grip came up under mine. “When I give the word, push your infernal energy through the blade. As much as demonically possible. Do you understand?”
He nodded, eyes glowing yellow.
With a Word, I activated the banishment rune. Powered by raw ley, the white light shot like a jet’s contrail toward the portal. The winged demons shrieked and darted from it, but I felt infernal energy pushing back with equal force, reestablishing the balance of opposing energies, wrenching the portal still wider.
All right, here it goes…
I shifted power from the banishment rune to the one beneath it, fire.
“Now!” I called to Arnaud as a spire of flames roared up, consuming the light of banishment.
His face hardened with malice and determination. Dark tendrils of energy burst up the blade and joined the elemental fire. Arnaud and I labored to hold the shuddering sword, to keep our aim true. Arnaud then shrieked something that made it sound as though he were vomiting a lung. But it was Malphas’s true name.
The spire of Infernal Fire steadied and collided into his former master’s face. The entire portal shook. And then Malphas made his first mistake. Believing I’d upped my power, he responded with an even greater output of infernal energy. This time, the portal buckled. Panic seized Malphas’s eyes.
Yes, yes, it’s working!
I could feel Malphas trying to pull back, to correct the balance, but it was too late. The portal was contracting, collapsing around him. Beside me, Arnaud let out a savage cry of glee. When I looked over, he was giving his former master the finger.
“Hold on!” I shouted as the sword started to waver. “Keep pu
shing!”
Arnaud brought his free hand back to the hilt and willed more energy into the blade, further tipping the balance that had held the nascent portal open, upsetting it further and further toward the infernal.
Malphas’s monstrous face contorted into impossible shapes. With a roar, he thrust a clawed hand down as if intending to seize and crush us. Even though he was far away, I instinctively ducked lower. His winged legion took up the cry and began circling down his arm, spiraling toward us.
Those guys can reach us.
“Push!’ I shouted at Arnaud.
The word was barely out of my mouth when, in a deep, thunderous crack, Malphas broke apart. His winged legion dispersed in shrieks. Some dove back into the collapsing portal, joining their master in ruin. Others remained, flying aimlessly. But with the portal’s demise, our time catch was failing.
When I recalled the power from my sword, the rune obeyed, the fire returning to its symbol. I pulled the sword from Arnaud’s grip and waved it toward my bound teammates. “We’ve got to get them out!”
Fallen pieces of Malphas were impacting around us now. One burst to my left, sending me into a stagger. A shrieker swooped in. With a grunt, I swung my sword around. The blade tore through the creature’s wing, sending it off with a shrill cry. I plunged my blade through the chest of another and blew it apart with a Word. The damned things were everywhere. I summoned a shield around the platform, but it was weak, and it wasn’t going to be worth a damn when the time catch decided to breakdown.
I looked around for Arnaud—our ride home—but I could no longer see him.
I was shouting his name when my shield failed in an eruption of sparks. Energy roared in my ears while plummeting pieces of Malphas crashed around me. The time catch was entering its final throes.
I tried to shape another shield, to hold our world together a little longer. Stones rushed up from the collapsing platform, and I fell. Images of my teammates and Vega sped through my mind. But my final thought was of our little girl.
Safe now.
48
“It was foolish of me to carry that plate of gingersnaps inside,” someone said, “because it told her I was, in fact, home. Just one of those things I didn’t stop to consider. Like so many other things I do, I suppose.”
A slightly hunched man wearing a silk robe that matched his dangling curtains of black hair came into focus.
“So there she was,” he continued, “going door to door, window to window, shouting that she knew I was home. And I’m crouched behind the refrigerator like a spooked cat. You’d think after all these—”
“Claudius?” I interrupted.
He stopped pacing beside the full-sized bed I was tucked into and trained his tinted glasses on me. “Yes?”
“Where in the hell am I?”
My surroundings had the vanilla look of a guest bedroom.
“Oh, my place in Peoria. Or is it, ah—”
“Yes,” I said, “but what am I doing here?”
“I thought I explained all of that to you.” He blinked several times. “Didn’t I?”
“Maybe, but I’m not sure I’ve been conscious.”
“Hm, your eyes were open. Though that might account for the vacant stare.”
“What happened to the time catch? To everyone else?”
I shoved the covers off and sat on the edge of the bed. I was wearing wool socks and a black silk gown, one of Claudius’s no doubt. Underneath, my body felt roughed up and hollowed out. But I could also feel warm currents of healing magic running through me. Powerful elder-level magic.
I hesitated. “The s-senior members?”
Claudius chuckled. “Yes, yes, they’re out now. In fact, they’re the ones who placed you in my care.”
“How? The last thing I remember is the time catch collapsing.”
“When you destroyed Malphas, a powerful trap he’d set around the Harkless Rift came apart. You were correct about him being responsible for their confinement. Freed, the senior members went straight to the time catch. They were able to preserve it long enough to extract you and the others. They would have waited for you to awaken, but there are points along the rupture site that needed shoring up.” Claudius smiled broadly. “The Order is very much in your debt. You prevented a demon apocalypse.”
“I had help,” I said distractedly. “Where are the others?”
“They’re…” He glanced away. “They’re being cared for.”
“But not all of them made it,” I said faintly. “Did they?”
“Most will be fine. But no, some were beyond the Order’s help.”
I saw the light fading from Malachi’s eyes and Bree-yark lying face down on Broadway and the entire platform disintegrating…
“I don’t know the names of the fallen,” Claudius said, “or I would tell you.”
The room blurred, and I wiped my eyes. Claudius came over and patted my shoulder uncertainly.
“‘Find Arnaud,’” I whispered.
“What’s that?” He leaned nearer.
“When I asked Arianna how I could help her and the others, that’s what she told me: ‘Find Arnaud.’ It was by his hand we were able to collapse the portal and destroy Malphas. And that’s what freed the Order.”
I knew I’d done the right thing, but I was still thinking of the cost. With Claudius’s report that some hadn’t made it, the one faint glimmer of a silver lining was that maybe Arnaud had been among them. But I could still feel the demonic energy of the agreement that bound us, cold and jeering.
“Well, Arianna’s a sharp bird,” Claudius said. “She knows what she’s talking about. Oh, that reminds me!” He straightened suddenly. “She said there was something you needed to take care of when you awakened.”
“She did?”
He pulled me by the arms until I was standing, then signed in the air behind me. By the time he turned me around, a portal was yawning open.
“Wait,” I said, “what about my clothes?”
“They’re still in the dryer. Oh, but here’s your cane.” He inserted it into my hand.
Before I could ask where I was going, he gave me a shove.
“Good luck!” he called.
49
Following a series of somersaults through a cloudy vacuum, I landed in a familiar casting circle on a sheet of polyethylene in a large basement space. I was back in 1 Police Plaza, performing a half-split on the same spot we’d departed from.
Holy hell, I thought, wincing upright and straightening my gown.
The holding space was empty. The clock above the desk read 3:10 in the morning. So why had he sent me here?
“Welcome home.”
Vega uncrossed her legs and stood from a chair in the corner of the room dressed in her detective blacks. A rumpled blanket over the armrest suggested she’d been dozing. The sight of her sent a dozen raw emotions pouring through me. The net effect was an all-consuming numbness, and I drifted toward her like a man in a dream.
She pressed her cheek aggressively to my chest, fists balling up the back of my gown. My arms swallowed her. This was the moment I’d kept returning to over the course of the journey—through 1776, 1861, 1660, the recent past—this idea that she would be at the end of it. We remained like that for a long time.
“How did it go?” she asked at last.
“Malphas is gone, and the Order’s back. The demon apocalypse has been postponed indefinitely. So, about as well as it could have.”
She breathed a quiet thank God.
“How long was I away?” I asked.
She checked her watch. “Almost six hours.”
I snorted a laugh of disbelief and leaned down to kiss her.
“Is that Mr. Croft I hear?” someone called in a singsong voice.
I stopped and closed my eyes. It had come through the speaker to the cells.
“What’s he doing here?” Vega asked in a dangerous whisper.
I’d been hoping to savor a few more moments with Ricki be
fore having to tell her what I’d done. But this is what Arianna had meant when she’d said that I had something to take care of. She must have noticed the infernal bond between the demon-vampire and me, and she’d returned him to the freshly warded cell. Now I had to fulfill my end of the agreement if I didn’t want to forfeit my soul.
I shut off the speaker and returned to Vega.
“Look, I have something to tell you.” I rubbed her arms, then held them. “My magic was right. The key to recovering the Upholders, stopping Malphas, and freeing the Order was in the time catch. Well, time catches, plural.” Her head tilted in question. “That’s another story. The thing is, Arnaud’s role turned out to be much bigger than just getting us there. He helped us to destroy Malphas.”
“And that’s why he’s still alive,” she said, her gaze cutting to the cell.
“I made a deal with him for that help.”
“A demonic deal?”
I sighed and nodded. “In exchange, I can’t destroy him. And neither can the Order or anyone I hire. So basically, once I let him out of that cell, I can’t touch him. It wasn’t something I negotiated. He formed the agreement and left it out there. I never, in a million years, thought I’d take it.”
“What did your magic say?”
Her voice was tired but neutral, like her eyes.
“It told me to listen to his words. I think my magic knew the opportunity would come for Arnaud to destroy Malphas.”
That must have been why it hadn’t issued a warning during the entire journey, despite that I’d largely been playing into Malphas’s hands. It was just a matter of me listening when it told me to listen.
Vega sighed. “Then we have to trust it.”
I was starting to tell her I didn’t like it either, but I stopped.
“Call it a detective’s intuition, but when you left here, I sensed that Arnaud remaining alive was a possibility. And while I’ve been waiting, I’ve had time to think. I gave you shit over your magic, but it’s only because I don’t always understand it. All right, it scares me. But it’s a part of you, and I don’t get to pick and choose which parts I love and which parts I don’t. That’s not how it works.” Her mouth leaned into an almost-smile. “Plus, you always seem to pull through, so it’s obviously doing something right.”
Night Rune (Prof Croft Book 8) Page 35