Raven's Rise (World on Fire Book 3)

by Lincoln Cole

  Exhausted and weak, the idea of trying to tap into those powers again made him feel nauseous.

  “I don’t know if I can do that right now,” he said, and then took a deep breath. “But I’ll try.”

  He reached into himself, closing his eyes and focusing on his internal abilities. Instantly, heavy nausea filled him, and his body tensed. He tried to tap into the energy but couldn’t find it, and it brought physical pain attempting to reach out and search the area. It felt like the world vibrated, so he stopped and opened his eyes.

  “I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t find her.”

  It took him a second to realize that the shaking of the ground hadn’t just happened in his head. The car shook. A slight tremor as though an earthquake had hit nearby. They’d reached only a kilometer or so outside of town now, and they could see it rising in the distance.

  They all exchanged glances.

  “It’s okay,” Frieda said. “I think we found her.”

  ***

  “What the hell?” Dominick yelped when the car shook. “What’s happening?”

  Frieda didn’t answer straight away. It felt like a thrumming—constant like a nearby jackhammer shaking the pavement. They continued forward, down the road, and the town grew larger while the pain pattered against the windshield and roof. As they went, the rumbling intensified.

  “It seems like it comes from over that way.” Haatim pointed up ahead. “Near the center of town.”

  “Yeah, but what the hell is it?” Dominick stared through the rain-lashed windscreen.

  “I don’t know,” Frieda said, finally. “But I think we’re about to find out.”

  Chapter 34

  Abigail had no idea of her location.

  She found herself sitting on the edge of a bed in a dark bedroom but couldn’t remember ever coming into the room or sitting down. It seemed like she’d just appeared there all of a sudden.

  A single window broke the monotony of the wall on one side of the room, and a door stood closed on the opposite side. She stood and walked over to the window, and then realized that everything outside looked hazy and out of focus. She couldn’t even see the ground or trees clearly. Abigail could see just enough to tell that she didn’t occupy the ground floor of whatever building she stood in.

  The room felt vaguely familiar like she had come here before; however, she couldn’t place it from memory. The bed held stains in various places, and the sheets looked torn and frayed. The old and musty walls showed chipped paint and holes where the wood had rotted.

  The memory of this place didn’t come only from externals, though. A vague undercurrent of fear ran through her entire body. It filled her with dread and a sense of weakness that she couldn’t explain.

  Dread of what? Abigail didn’t know.

  The last thing she remembered was standing out in the woods with Frieda, Dominick, and Haatim and trying to stop Nida. She couldn’t remember what had happened, or if they’d stopped the ritual.

  Had they lost?

  Had she died?

  “How did I get here?” she asked aloud, shaking her head. Not expecting an answer, she felt completely caught off-guard when she received one.

  “I found you here.”

  With a yelp, she jumped to the side, but almost instantly, nostalgia replaced her fear. The voice shot pangs of emotion through her body.

  Arthur’s voice.

  The emotional outburst she felt at that moment caused her to sob with both longing and joy.

  She spun and saw Arthur leaning against the doorframe of the room. She hadn’t even heard it open and suspected that, in fact, it hadn’t. It had simply … changed.

  He stood watching her with his arms folded across his broad chest. He looked younger than she remembered, maybe late twenties or early thirties, and appeared a lot healthier than he had later on in his life.

  Arthur must have looked like that when he’d first found her, and before he had sacrificed everything to try and save her life from Surgat. This must come from before he’d given up his life to protect her from herself.

  “Arthur!” Abigail rushed across the room and threw herself into his arms. He caught her and pulled her close, hugging her back. She squeezed him for a long moment before pushing him back. “This must be a dream.”

  It didn’t feel like a dream, though; she could feel his warmth and smell his sandalwood cologne. He felt real and complete, not some figment of her imagination. And, she couldn’t even remember this version of him when she pictured Arthur in her mind. Had she conjured it in her mind?

  “Hey, Abi.” He put a hand on her shoulder and smiled down at her. “It’s been a long time.”

  ***

  “Is this real?”

  “What do you think?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t think so,” she said, at last. “If it were, I would at least understand how I got here, wouldn’t I? We’d gone to Raven’s Peak to fight Nida. That’s the last thing I remember, but I don’t remember if we won or lost or how I got here.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I remember …” Abigail took a step back from Arthur.

  He watched her, a curious expression on his face.

  “I remember blood,” Abigail whispered.

  “Blood?”

  “Lots of it. Oceans of it. It seemed like I drowned in it.”

  “Oh?”

  She could recall the sensation when Nida had poured the blood on her forehead. It had felt like she’d gotten dunked into a river of the stuff—thick and coppery and overwhelming her senses.

  However, it didn’t make a complete memory and came more like a sensation of something she had experienced. Abigail couldn’t put her thumb on it to nail it down. The details remained fuzzy and incoherent.

  She shook her head. “I can’t explain it.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  “Dominick,” she said. “Standing over me. And Frieda. She …”

  “She what?”

  The memory came like a bolt of lightning: the needle injected into her neck, the poison pumping through her veins.

  “She killed me.”

  “Did she?”

  “Am I dead?”

  “Are you?”

  Abigail frowned. “You aren’t a lot of help.”

  Arthur smiled back at her, but this time, he didn’t respond verbally.

  She let out a sigh and rubbed her forehead. “What did you mean when you said that you found me here?” she asked. “Found me when? Do you mean with the cult?”

  “Yes. I found you here when you were a little girl. Not this room, exactly, but rather, this place.”

  “You never told me about when you rescued me,” she said. “I asked you about it many times when I was little, but you always refused to tell me.”

  “The real Arthur never saw this room. He once told you that he wondered where they’d kept you, but you said you didn’t remember.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “Don’t you?”

  She hesitated. “Where are we?”

  “An old manor in the woods, long abandoned and crumbling to ruins. You don’t know where it is in the world, but you remember this place. Frieda told you that they kept you here for weeks, torturing you to break your spirit and prepare you for some ritual.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t recall any of this.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “It’s true.”

  “That’s the salvation of childhood: the ability to forget the worst things that happen to us. The memories stay here, though, only locked away.”

  “Locked away?”

  “Yes. This is as close as I could bring you without doing damage to your psyche. You must experience the rest on your own.”

  “What?”

  “The memories feel painful. If I immerse you into them, and you reject them, then all is lost. You must, consciously, bring yourself into them.”

  Abig
ail looked around the room once more, though now, she could remember it better. She recalled the hours spent here wishing she could escape but feeling too terrified even to try. They kept her here and fed her, but they almost never talked to her.

  “They kept me here when they weren’t torturing me.”

  “Don’t focus on the torture, Abigail. It isn’t what we’re after.”

  “Then, what do we want?”

  “That day when Arthur saved you. It is important that you try to remember everything that happened.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it can help you. You need to think back to that day when they performed the ritual on you. It happened during the ceremony, and you’ve buried that moment the deepest.”

  “What do you mean? Why would that moment feel worse than the torture?”

  “Because the demon came into you then. You need to find the name of the demon when they summoned him.”

  “Surgat.”

  “We gave it that name, but that was not the demon’s true name. Even The Ninth Circle never knew it, and because of that, couldn’t control it when first they summoned it into this world.”

  “Then, how on Earth would I know the demon’s true name?”

  “Because the demon told you,” Arthur said. “When it first entered you for the merger. They wanted to use a little girl for that reason. You would have proven easier for the demon to control. It told you.”

  “What do you mean? When did it tell me?”

  “When you invited it in.”

  ***

  “I didn’t invite it.”

  “They scared and manipulated you.”

  “No. I would remember.”

  “Don’t focus on that. It’s a minor detail. You must focus, instead, on the moment and find the name.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Focus, Abigail. The memory remains there, and all you have to do is bring yourself into it and experience it. You will learn the demon’s name, which terrifies it.”

  “Because it would give me power over it,” she said. That gave her the reason that the demon had felt terrified when she came with Sara: it feared she would remember. “Which means I can beat it.”

  “Not without the name. We’ve come close to that memory, and you just need to tap into it.”

  “But, I don’t remember any of this.”

  “It is all right here. Just try.”

  She blew out a breath. “Okay.”

  Abigail tried to think back to that day, or even that time in her life. It felt like such a long time ago, and the memories appeared muddled. Faint, they jumbled together.

  They’d strapped her to a table; robes and pale faces; candles, incense, and chanting; nothing about the memory felt concrete enough to grasp onto. The emotions had vividness, even if the memories didn’t, and after only a few seconds of straining, she gasped for air and nearly had a panic attack.

  As a little girl, she’d blocked these memories, and trying to access them now invoked the primal fear she’d originally associated with them. She’d convinced herself that the memories had no reality, and it felt hard to believe any of that had actually happened to her. They seemed more like memories of something she’d seen on TV than an actual thing in her life.

  “Focus, Abigail.”

  “It won’t do any good,” she said, gasping and walking back to the bed. She fought to control her racing heart. “I can’t do it.”

  “You need to access those memories. I can’t do it for you.”

  “But, you are me.”

  “In a sense, but not completely. You created me to help, but I can’t do anything that you cannot do yourself. This gives us the only chance we have to stop Surgat and survive this.”

  “So, I’m basically just having a conversation with myself.”

  The echo of Arthur didn’t reply.

  “Great,” she muttered. “I hid those memories for a reason.”

  The memories brought her back to when she was just a scared and broken little girl before Arthur had found her.

  The moment when Arthur rescued her had become the moment when she considered her life to have begun. Everything before that didn’t matter; it was just before.

  Arthur taught her how to get strong, how to fight, and how to protect herself. He showed her how to forget about the terrible things that had happened to her and to use the emotions from those events to make her strong.

  It scared her that accessing those memories would bring it all back. Everything she had done, all the trials she had overcome: it would all be lost. She would get brought back to the crying and timid little girl, strapped to the table all those years ago.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t remember anything from those months, let alone that day.”

  “The memories are there.”

  “But I can’t access them.”

  “Think, Abigail. This is important.”

  “I know, but I don’t remember. I must have blocked it out or destroyed them.”

  “You hid them, but you can find it again. You can still access it, but you need to focus.”

  “How do you know about them, and I don’t?”

  “Because I am a fragment of you.”

  A sinister thought crossed her mind. What if this were the demon, disguised and trying to bring her back to that moment for its own reasons? What if it planned to use that moment to weaken her so that it could assume control? Had it told her the name for real, or was this all a distraction?

  What if this all turned out as nothing more than a trick, and it used Arthur to distract her and break her will?

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To help you,” the visage of Arthur replied.

  “You aren’t the real Arthur. What are you, really?”

  “Your memory of Arthur.”

  “No. I don’t remember Arthur looking like this. If I imagined you, then you would look different. I don’t recall this version of him.”

  “Yes, you do. He looked like this when he came to rescue you. This is as close as I can bring you to that moment in time, which makes this a fitting image to display.”

  “The demon has access to my memories. It could use you to trick me.”

  “It has access to your body,” the echo of Arthur said. “However, you remain in control of your memories.”

  She hesitated. “My body? What’s it doing?”

  “I don’t know,” the echo said. “I only exist in your memories. You brought me here because you know the importance of this memory.”

  Abigail didn’t know if that held truth or not. She didn’t know if the demon would need her to access the memory, or if what the echo of Arthur said would prove accurate, and she also didn’t know how to verify it.

  Unable to remember if she’d ever known the name of the demon, she couldn’t know whether or not it spoke true. However, she did remember its fear when she’d come with Sara, and it came from something she knew and could use against it. But, did that give enough to trust this version of Arthur and search out these memories?

  Basically, she felt stuck with an impossible decision. Trust the visage of Arthur and try to find the demon’s name, or ignore it and try to fight back against the creature in another way.

  It came down to the realization that she didn’t have any other choice. If she left this memory without a weapon she could use against the demon, then she would, essentially, have given up. The beast would destroy her within moments. Only a fluke of the poison had hidden her away and given her a chance at all.

  No, when she thought about it, she had no real choice but to trust the echo of Arthur.

  Essentially, she had to trust in herself.

  Abigail took a steadying breath. “What do I need to do?”

  “You need to go into that memory. That offers the only chance you have of surviving this.”

  Chapter 35

  “You ready?” Dominick asked.

  Haatim couldn’t think of anything in his life that
he felt less ready for than what they were about to do. Dominick pulled the car to a stop, and the shaking grew worse. The day had darkened even further, and that sense of otherworldliness had intensified. It barely felt like they remained on Earth, and more like they had transported to somewhere other.

  A place between.

  Redness glowed up ahead of them, about a block down the street and to the west of their current position. The town felt less like a ghost town and more like a sleeping beast now. That red glow appeared quite ominous and seemed to form the central point of the vibration.

  He could feel the presence of evil from that glow—like a hungry animal waiting for its moment to burst through from the other side and come forth into this realm.

  “Haatim?” Dominick said. “Hey, Earth to Haatim.”

  Haatim glanced over, startled. “What?”

  “I asked if you’re ready to do this. We don’t have a lot of time, and we all need to stay focused.”

  He took a deep breath and lied, “Ready.”

  “All right.”

  All three of them climbed out of the vehicle. Broken sections of the pavement showed huge cracks from the violent vibrations. They stood near the epicenter of it now, and it ripped apart the entire city. Haatim found it difficult to keep his feet, and the motion made him sick to his stomach.

  Or, maybe, that came from the situation. He couldn’t tell for sure. They circled to the trunk, and Dominick popped it open. Frieda looked as out of sorts in this situation as Haatim. For the first time since he’d met her, she appeared dirty and disheveled, covered in mud and dirt and without any of her usual grace or poise. To see her like that didn’t give him any confidence.

  “Here.” Dominick handed him a shotgun and pistol. “Don’t waste your ammunition. We don’t have a lot left.”

  “What the hell will we do?”

  “End this.”

  “How?”

  Dominick picked up a shotgun and chambered a round. “I don’t know.”

  “We need to kill Abigail,” Frieda said. “We won’t have another chance.”

  “And how in the world do you plan to do that? She has Surgat running the show now, plus he’s about to bring in a demon army. What chance do we have?”

  Frieda pulled a pistol out of the trunk. Then, with her free hand, she picked up Arthur’s sword.