He didn’t wait for an answer; instead, he turned abruptly away with a swirl of his heavy coat and stepped around the corner. The hair at the back of my neck stood at sudden attention as magic stirred the air thickly, a brewing storm of its own. By the time Tamara and I glanced at one another, trying to decide what to do, it was too late.
A hollow boom ruptured the night as Charles’ unrestrained magic tore the house’s front door off, taking part of the wall with it.
He’d asked us to stay behind.
Predictably, none of us listened.
Tamara and I darted around the corner in a rush, and the others unwisely followed our lead.
“Ca-Lethe Meladoquiel!” Charles stood just inside the fractured living room, his voice ringing, his staff flaring bright and raised in challenge.
Petra looked up from the magazine she’d been reading, smiled, and rose. “Charles. I was wondering if you’d follow me.” She adjusted her figure-hugging, white button down shirt; she was the spitting image of her sister, with the same golden hair, pale skin, and slender, almost-perfect build.
I could see her irises bleeding ink from ten feet away.
“Did you miss me?” Petra’s voice slit the air like a tainted surgeon’s blade, its sound abruptly alien. I froze in my tracks, my skin crawling. “I didn’t know you’d bring friends.” She tilted her head strangely. “How delicious.”
“I abjure you!” Charles bellowed defiantly, his voice somehow pitifully small in the wake of hers. His staff blazed like a beacon, so bright I had to turn my head. “Forsworn, accursed fiend! You have no place—”
“Yet I remain,” Petra’s toxic voice burned my ears, an edge of Moroi power bludgeoning the air. The white-hot light from Charles’ staff flickered and waned as something massive stirred Next Door; the edges of my vision flexed as the barrier between realities bent and bowed under the pressure. I tried to move, to act.
I couldn’t.
Beside me, Tamara gasped for breath that wouldn’t come.
The light from Charles’ staff extinguished, drowning us in perilous, hungry darkness—darkness that moved of its own accord.
“Let me extend you all an invitation.”
Something blotted out the light, even to my eyes, stealing my senses, swallowing us all whole.
This was no comfortable oblivion.
Instead, it was a fearful, caustic void. I had no awareness of my body, but some spark within me refused to submit to the devouring darkness. I clawed at it with my mind—much as I had once fought another encroaching abyss, what felt like a lifetime ago.
You couldn’t have me then, I thought.
Somewhere far, far away, I twitched. I stirred. I saw a flicker of oppressed light.
And you can’t have me now.
The void rushed away from me, fading like ink on water.
“Now, what do I do with all of you?”
I caught a glimpse of storm clouds, black on a blacker sky, crawling across my vision far overhead.
“Hmmm, maybe...” The voice—like acid on a soft, soothing breeze—came from right in front of me, poisoned silk on my skin, then slowly drifted further away. “Not this one, though. Ugh. Useless.”
I stood on a broad terrace of dark marble that jutted out into a starry, seething void. To my right was a vast palace of the same rotting ebony stone, so huge my mind reeled away from its looming specter.
“No…not this one either.” The alien voice moved away, dripping with disdain, and perhaps disgust. It was hard for my mind to parse it properly.
The pitch-black marble under my feet was veined with red and purple that wound through the stone like human blood vessels. Directly in front of me was an elegant table and chairs made of bones and gold; Charles sat slumped in one chair with his back to me, bound to it with thick, dark chains. Across from him was a high-backed chair like a throne, with a perfectly ordinary china tea set between them.
Well, this certainly wasn’t Kansas anymore. We were obviously Next Door, but how?
To my left lay the rest of the terrace, pushing out into the void, with a dark, wispy storm cloud hovering and sparking an arm’s length from the railing. All along the edges dangled cages of cruel iron, sharp, serrated spikes, barbed walls, and softly jangling meat-hooks coated in chunks of forgotten, blackened flesh.
Death lingered over the terrace like an old friend. I tensed in revulsion that ran to my very core, the feeling returning slowly to my own dead flesh. This place was like a garden devoted to the glory of torment.
And even worse, a couple of those cages were occupied.
“No, and no.” The voice sighed. “You never bring me good presents, not anymore.” My heart thudded once, forcing sensation back into my body. “Ah, well. I have plenty of vacancy.”
My skin shivered, icy dread edging into my spine. But I forced myself to turn, to look at the speaker, which was in itself an act of will.
Four heartbeats echoed, faint and dull as if from far away, just to my left. My friends and I were all lined up: me, then Kitty, then Tamara, and lastly the two boys.
The demon stood at the end.
I didn’t know what else to call her. I’d only encountered one before: the Rawhead. I knew there were many more, no two necessarily the same, but nothing Charles had taught me had prepared me for her.
Over seven feet tall, she was impossibly, terrifyingly beautiful—at least, what little I could see of her. The creature’s edges trailed away into thick wisps of dark smoke, like the tenebrous mask of smoky blackness that clung to her figure instead of clothes, somehow so murky that even my supernatural vision failed to fully penetrate its depths. Indistinct tendrils, tentacles, and spines emerged from behind her, no matter which way she turned, framing the indistinct silhouette of her lithesome figure like an unholy halo. A wispy shadow of her body showed through the umbral fog—soft, curved, and undeniably, inhumanly feminine. I caught the faintest hint of damp, midnight skin as she shifted beneath the gloomy veil.
This was what I had felt stirring Next Door. Her.
I tensed, instinctively turning away from the terrible figure. The edges of my vision were wreathed in inky smoke, and everything shifted and crawled when I wasn’t looking directly at it, as if I were trapped in a Lovecraftian nightmare.
From behind the umbral veil, I felt her eyes lock onto me instantly, and with a whip-crack of swirling smoke, she was suddenly in front of me.
“Well, well, well. What have we here?”
Her gaze fell on me fully, crushing me under its casual weight and the promise of potential annihilation. Pinned down by those hidden eyes, I tried to drink in the death in the air, to grab at those energies and pull them to me.
Nothing happened. I could run my metaphysical fingers through the lingering energies, but couldn’t grab them, neither to empower myself nor to step back Home.
I felt her smile.
“Ashley!” Charles bellowed my name, his chains rattling feverishly as he strained and twisted in his seat. “Don’t give in to her! Don’t let her in! This place isn’t what it seems; remember Maggie! We’re in her—”
He cut off, choking on pain as his bonds suddenly sprouted iron barbs and bristled with razor blades, but the wizard stubbornly refused to give the anguish a voice. He twisted in his seat, straining, growling through agony and trying to lay eyes on me. “There’s...always...a way...Home…find it!” Horrified, I watched as Charles lost his voice and coughed blood as the restraints sawed into his flesh, binding him tighter and tighter to the chair.
But what did Maggie, the maddened, childish specter who’d kidnapped children and invaded my dreams, have to do with the here and now?
“Let’s have a look at you.” Darkness trailed along my torso as a slick, midnight-purple appendage, tipped in brutal spines and barbs of blackened bone, slid underneath my chin.
I felt my iron-hard skin rupture as the demon’s alien limb brushed against my flesh, and I rose to the tips of my toes trying to avoid further con
tact with it, letting her raise my chin and force me to gaze into her obscured visage.
Even from beneath the veil, it felt as though her unseen eyes would flay the flesh from my bones. I felt the pressure as her eyes locked with mine, searching inside me, but I couldn’t penetrate her obfuscation enough to return the favor.
That was okay. The sane part of me was pretty certain I didn’t want to.
“I remember you: Ashley. Strigoi.” Something inside me shuddered as she named me, as if gripped in a massive, malicious fist. I felt a sudden, despairing rush, as if I’d just lost something essential, indescribable—or rather, had it stolen away, lain bare for all to see.
How did she know me? I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. I tried to step back, but it felt like my body wasn’t really here—or maybe wasn’t fully mine anymore. Not a very pleasant thought. As Charles had said, there had to be a way out of here. There had to be a way to get my friends out. Everything about this place was caustic; her mere presence felt like it was eroding my sense of self. I wasn’t certain how long my will would hold out, and we were all clearly at the creature’s questionable mercy.
But how could I escape a Next Door realm without help and without being able to manipulate the energies here? It really was like I was trapped in a…
...Nightmare.
“Wishing to leave so soon? A...pity.” She was in my head; I could feel her inside my skull. Like the Rawhead, but a thousand times worse. She bent forward, leaning over me, her trailing, inky shadows and tenebrous visage inches from my face. She was so close, I could feel the pressure of her voice on my skin as much as hear it. “So few desire to linger and sample my hospitality.”
I summoned the bits and pieces of my fraying willpower and broke eye contact with her, glancing past her at the hanging cages and hooks. “Maybe you should fire your decorator,” I rasped, my voice raw and small.
To my surprise—and relief—she tilted her head back and laughed. But far from lightening the mood, her mirth was actively painful, scraping along my nerves like wildfire.
It was time to go.
While she was distracted, a claw burst from my thumb and I jammed the blade haphazardly under my jawline, digging deep into the rent in my flesh. The sensation didn’t really register as pain, but I concentrated everything I had on it regardless.
I figured I had one shot at this before she killed me.
The edges of the world rippled, ink swirling in agitation.
Her mirth muted, she looked down upon me, judging.
A glob of my thick, dark blood fell from my jawline. Time slowed down as it fell, crawling impotently, and my focus narrowed to a pinpoint, shutting out everything else. Even the demon.
Not then and not now.
I dug at my wound, losing myself in the sensation of something real. The globule of ichor shattered on the blood-veined marble.
Time to wake up.
I came back to my senses, ink streaming away from my vision.
“Petra” was staring at me, a smirk on her pale face.
The house was just as we’d left it, almost as if no time had passed at all while I’d been trapped in the demon’s personal realm Next Door. But like in the “dream,” we stood in a line, Charles slightly in front of us, everyone but myself still as a statue, eyes closed and completely at the creature’s mercy.
“Less than one in ten million,” Petra commented. Her voice had returned to normal, and her manner was casual—there was nothing except the bleeding rings of ink in her eyes to declare her as something so much more than mortal.
“What?” I strode forward, putting myself between my friends and the demon. My body felt like I’d just woken up, with a lingering numbness that was thankfully fading fast.
“That’s how few can resist my invasion,” she explained casually, adjusting her clothes. I noticed her feet were bare, the bottoms of her expensive black slacks tinted with offensive grass and dirt stains, a token of our earlier chase. “All others fail and falter, fodder that serves only to feed the machine of my will.” Her eyes flickered, irises liquid and filled with seething, caustic darkness.
I shuddered. But I didn’t back down. Underneath the Moroi skin lay the demon whose name I couldn’t pronounce; but now the ground rules were different. So hopefully I wasn’t about to get myself spectacularly rearranged.
“Let them go,” I said flatly, nodding to the line-up of my friends and falling into a combat-ready stance.
“Make me.” The shadows in the corners of the room came alive, a halo of them writhing out from around her profile, a halo of dread and darkness. Petra lifted a hand, and I braced myself.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened to me. Behind me, I heard the faint sounds of Tamara’s pain.
Whipping around, I watched as Tamara’s feet floated free of the ground. The Moroi’s beautiful, passive face twitched as her own shadow coiled around her throat like inky fingers, tenebrous claws pressing at the vital blood vessels in her pale, flawless neck.
I hit Petra in one smooth lunge, my shoulder colliding with her gut and driving her backward. With my full strength behind it, the impact hurled us both across the unfinished living room in half a second, but I didn’t stop there. Whatever I’d done to break free of the demon’s power, that immunity obviously didn’t extend to my friends—I had to get her away from them and keep her attention.
There were only a couple of ways I could manage that, and both of them were violence.
We slammed into the door jam Petra-first and obliterated it, widening the entryway into the kitchen like a pair of drunken demolitionists. I didn’t hear bones break, but the air went out of her lungs in a whoosh; hopefully that meant I could actually hurt her. As our momentum slowed and she grabbed my coat, I threw us both forward in one last burst; we hit the kitchen island and broke through it, and I slammed her into the kitchen counter, burying her in it.
Petra didn’t let go; grinning, she tightened her grip on my shoulders and threw me sidelong across the room. I hit the stainless steel fridge with a resounding clang and clatter like a big, hollow gong, deforming the metal better than a wrecking ball. As I rebounded and stumbled, she pried herself free of the cabinets, throwing shards of wood and granite countertop across the room with casual ease.
I punched my claws into the fridge and threw the whole thing at her. She swatted it aside, sending it spinning across the room to embed into a wall with a deafening crash, still grinning.
Well damn.
Then she glanced down, both of us suddenly spotting where a shiv of broken bone jutted jarringly from the smooth Moroi flesh of her forearm, blood already dripping and tainting the edges a garish crimson.
She chuckled and shrugged. “Oops.” The liquid hazel of her Moroi eyes burned through the ink for a moment, and the bone reset itself, the blood either retreating into the wound of its own accord or burning away into wisps of smoke, regenerating far faster than I’d ever seen a Moroi heal before.
It didn’t matter. She wasn’t invulnerable here at Home. That was what mattered.
I kicked one section of the fragmented kitchen island, tearing the chunk of granite countertop free and sending it flying. It hit her in the gut like the jagged, rocky missile it was, and knocked her cleanly to the ground. I charged her, but she kicked me directly in the shin as soon as I got within range; I felt my bone flex a little as I came crashing down.
The demon-in-Petra’s-clothing rolled aside before I could even hit the ground. She was on top of me in an instant, and I saw her go airborne out of the corner of my eye—right before both of her stolen knees impacted the small of my back, driving me into the floor, my spine creaking in protest.
With one arm momentarily trapped beneath me and my torso embedded six inches into the tiles, I lost way too much precious time. Still pressing hard into my back, Petra grabbed my hair and helpfully pulled me partway free of the floor, only to repeatedly smash me face-first into the cracked, fallen stone countertop. The g
ranite shattered under the force of successive impacts, sharp splinters of rock scraping across my face and eyes as she ground me into it.
I flipped my tactics around; instead of fighting her, I pressed down and ripped myself free of the floor, shoving off in a powerful push-up and lifting us both off the ground. We hit the floor again and rolled in a tangle; in a fluke of sheer luck, I somehow came out on top and drove my fist into her gut, cracking a rib and the battered travertine flooring beneath her.
I could have used my claws. Should have used my claws. Pinned her to the floor like a possessed butterfly. But I didn’t. Instead, I held back; after all, I highly doubted it would harm the demon inside her.
I didn’t want to murder another member of Tamara’s family because of this monster.
The demon twisted and drove her knees to the side, throwing me off her but not before I wrapped my hand tight around her throat.
She was still grinning, damn it.
Growling, I grabbed a cabinet and hauled us both to our feet, then slammed her into the wall by her throat. The lights flickered and sputtered out, leaving us in the dark. I twisted and smashed her back into the other half of the kitchen island; I heard her bones crack as I uprooted the island and sent it tumbling.
“Petra” gave the same saucy wink Silvia had given me before.
With a full-throated roar, I lost my shit. Flickers of Charles in the bone chair, black, barbed iron bands eating into his flesh, and images of Tamara floating and choking flashed through my mind’s eye. I scraped Petra’s body along the wall, demolishing most of the remaining cabinets as my vision tinted red and my skin burned with rage. Petra grabbed my arm, trying to break my hold, but though the troll-damaged bones in my forearm shifted and threatened to snap, she didn’t have the leverage to break my grip while stranded in the air.
I stepped over to the fridge embedded in the wall and smashed her into it until it fell free, my thoughts haunted by the sound of her sister’s snapping neck as Petra’s ribs broke under my relentless assault. As the deformed refrigerator tumbled to the floor, I slammed the possessed Moroi into the wall and buried my boot in her gut.
Shattered Ashes (Dying Ashes Book 3) Page 11