Raven's Rise (World on Fire Book 3)

by Lincoln Cole

  Perhaps it hadn’t happened here at all. Or, rather, not this version of here.

  He shook his head to clear his thoughts and focus his mind.

  Frieda remained focused on the energy, not paying attention to him. He opened his mouth to warn her that he meant to try something reckless, maybe stupid, and then he heard that crashing sound again. Only, this time, he could also sense Abigail’s “room” and what the demon wanted.

  Abigail.

  “Here goes nothing,” he whispered.

  He reached out with his mind.

  The instantaneous effect felt like nothing he’d experienced before when using his newfound abilities. This time, instead of reaching out and touching something, it seemed rather like he’d stepped outside his body and crossed over. All at once, he found himself free from his corporeal body, and the effect disoriented him.

  The scenery changed, and the world seemed to slip out from underneath him. One second, he stood on the street next to Frieda in Raven’s Peak, and the next, he went someplace that he didn’t recognize.

  He appeared in what looked like a small bedroom, though broken down with age and wear. All the furniture looked brown and rotten, and a disgusting bed lay in the center of the room, covered with hastily discarded blankets. It all had an unreal feel to it. Like looking at an incomplete painting. And, from somewhere, he heard chanting.

  “Abigail?” he muttered, though not intentionally. The word just slipped out, but as soon as he said it aloud, he knew he’d done the right thing. This place belonged to Abigail; he just had no idea how. Each and every thing here felt fake, except he knew it as hers.

  Hers? Her what? Memory? Dream? He had no idea. And, still, the sentiment felt true. She had been here only moments earlier.

  “Where the hell am I?”

  He stepped around, trying to find a way out of the room. The place had a door, which he walked toward. He reached out to touch the door handle, and his hand slipped right through it. He couldn’t grasp the metal, and when his hand passed through it, the entire door became less real for a second. Then it solidified once more.

  A crashing sounded, and the entire room shook, which startled him. The walls faded in and out of focus for a few seconds, and when Haatim looked down at himself, he could see that his incorporeal body did the same thing.

  A moment passed, and things returned to normal.

  “This isn’t real,” he said aloud, more to steady himself than anything else.

  He looked around the room once more, but it held nothing else. Haatim had come to the wrong place. Abigail had moved on.

  With his eyes closed, he focused on Abigail. He could sense the area around him, which extended beyond the room. Tense, he reached out, trying to get his bearings in the void.

  Just outside the walls of this faux room, a presence filled with power and hatred dwarfed the creature that had, until recently, occupied his sister. It came from Surgat. Haatim could sense the demon through the barrier of the wall, but felt certain that Surgat didn’t know of his presence.

  Also, he could feel Abigail, though he had no idea where she’d gone. Outside this room, it felt like a swirling nightmare of confused energy and chaos, and impossible to pierce or understand.

  She remained out there somewhere, he knew. He just had no idea of where.

  ***

  Abigail focused on the memories of the day that Arthur had found and rescued her from the cult. Mistakenly, she’d believed them lost, but they had only hidden. These memories, she had buried deep within her mind, locked away and forgotten.

  As soon as she conjured them in her mind, a wave of nausea and confusion washed over her. The emotion of those memories made the first thing she experienced, and she realized she would need to push through that to find the memory itself. Determined, she gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and stepped through.

  Suddenly, everything shifted. She stood in another room now, lying on a hard wooden table. This one felt dank and smelled musty and damp, like rotten wood and decay. Lit candles surrounded her on the table in a circular pattern, filling the room with a faint glow, but she could see no other lights.

  Abigail tried to sit up, but something bound her wrists and ankles. Though all just a memory, the bindings felt sturdy and rigid and real. They gave her almost no room to move and chafed her skin.

  Pain and worry flooded into her, but she bit back the fears. They had brought her here to perform the ritual. She remembered it all, could see and feel the room, and it felt like she’d become a scared little girl all over again.

  “I can’t do this.” Abigail pulled at the bindings. “I need to get out of here.”

  “You have to confront this.” The echo of Arthur stood near the table, frowning down at her. It gave her relief when she saw him, but only a small amount. The image of him looked less real here, distorted and hollow.

  “It happened here,” he said.

  “I know.” She struggled to control her breathing. Then, with her eyes closed, she said, “I remember this place.”

  “The place is inconsequential. You need to remember the demon’s name.”

  “I know.”

  People chanted in the background. She didn’t recognize the words, but the voices formed into a steady hum that seemed to ripple through her body. Abigail trembled. The ropes tightened. The walls came closer too, collapsing in on her.

  “Abigail, relax. You need to relax.”

  “I can’t do this,” she cried out, shaking and jerking her arms. The ropes remained unyielding, and she let out a little gasp. “I can’t.”

  “You have to.”

  “No, I need to get out of here.” She strained against the ropes and cried. The emotions came like a tidal wave, and she felt on the verge of a panic attack. Not since being a little girl had she experienced panic like this, right after she’d escaped from the cult. This, though, seemed so much worse.

  “It isn’t real.”

  “It is,” she gasped. “It is real.”

  “No, Abigail. Only memories.”

  Each passing second, the dial of her fears turned up another ten notches.

  The dagger. She could see the dagger hovering in the air over her body, ready to strike. It hung there, poised above her, and then it entered her flesh. It cut, tore, and pierced. Abigail writhed on the table, trying to get free, but the ropes only grew tighter and tighter, cutting off her circulation.

  “Get me out of here!” she shouted, straining against the ropes, but it made no difference. The air thinned, the walls closed in, and she couldn’t think straight. She needed to escape, but the ropes grew ever tighter.

  “You need to relax,” the echo of Arthur said.

  “No! No, get me out of here.”

  “Abigail.”

  The voice caught her off-guard, stopping her cold, and she opened her eyes.

  Haatim stood at the side of the table, looking down at her with a scared expression, next to the echo of Arthur, but neither of them seemed to know of the other’s presence.

  The sight of him flooded her with relief, but concern riddled the feeling.

  “Haatim! Are you real?”

  “What?”

  “No, you must be just another creation of my mind.”

  “A what of your mind? I’m real. It’s me.”

  Abigail frowned. Was this a trick? “How did you get here?”

  “I have no idea. I just … I heard you screaming and sort of … latched on, I suppose. I tried to come to you and, suddenly, I ended up here.”

  “I mean, how did you get here in my memories at all?”

  He stared at her helplessly and shrugged. “No idea. Are you okay?”

  “No. Please, untie me.”

  “No!” the echo of Arthur shouted. “The memory must stay clean. No interruptions, or you won’t experience it properly.”

  Abigail hesitated, as Haatim reached over to unfasten the bindings on her wrists.

  “No, wait,” she said.

 
“What?”

  “Don’t untie me. Not yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t … you can’t see the fake Arthur?”

  He looked around, frowning. “No. It’s just us in here.”

  Which meant he couldn’t see the cultists either. “I need to see this memory through to the end,” she said. “You can’t let me up yet.”

  He frowned. “All right. What can I do?”

  “Please, just stay with me.”

  He grabbed her hand, and where he touched her skin, it tingled with energy, which spread throughout her body, giving her strength and courage.

  “Always.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief and closed her eyes. “Thank you.”

  “I will never leave you,” Haatim said.

  Another crash shook the room. Surgat had found her in this new location and still tried to force his way into her mind. She’d run out of time and would need to return to the memory as soon as possible to find Surgat’s real name.

  “It’s over,” the demon shouted from behind the door. “You’ve lost.”

  A wave of energy washed over her, pressing her back to the table. It felt like a wall of wind, and everything shook for a full five seconds.

  When it had passed, they could hear the demon laughing from outside the memory. A horrible grating sound.

  Haatim looked over at the door, wearing a terrified expression. “What was that?”

  “You felt it, too?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded and gulped. “I think … I think the portal just opened. We should hurry.”

  Chapter 37

  Dominick kept moving down alleys and side streets, weaving through buildings but making sure not to get too far from his friends. Slowly, he worked his way back toward Frieda and Haatim.

  The demon chasing him in Abigail’s body moved at almost a lackadaisical pace. Occasionally, it lashed out at him, throwing a car or building, but the attacks seemed distracted and more to keep him moving than anything else.

  It didn’t focus on him, which gave him newfound hope. Probably, the demon had engaged in an internal fight with Abigail to maintain control of the body. Of course, Dominick didn’t know if he led the demon on a wild goose chase, or if it did the same to him.

  A few seconds later, he got his answer.

  The ground still shook, but suddenly, the tremors intensified, causing Dominick to lose his balance and stagger to the ground. He scuffed his knees and hands on the rough pavement and fought to regain his footing.

  A second later, a pulsating wave of energy came from the reddish glow. It felt almost as if a bomb had gone off, and the wave knocked him a meter back and onto his butt.

  The wave of energy ended as abruptly as it came, leaving him dazed and disoriented. The ground shook but less so than a moment before. He stood and looked around. New cracks and rifts had opened in the ground everywhere around him.

  Dominick walked over to one and peered inside, shocked at just how big and deep it seemed. He couldn’t see a bottom, only an endless pit leading down into the Earth below. Not natural.

  Then a creature came bursting out of the darkness of the rift. Dominick stumbled back with a yelp and jerked free his gun. The creature flew past him and up into the air, and Dominick sucked in his breath.

  It appeared similar to a golem one might find decorating a gothic church, though considerably more horrible than any he’d ever seen. It had talons and a beak and wings that spanned at least three meters. The entire creature looked like it weighed at least five kilograms, and if he had to guess, it was made of stone or pavement.

  The worst part was that it moved so fast. It let out a groaning sound and dove at him, flying in with its talons outstretched. He dove backward, narrowly avoiding the claws, and then rolled to his feet just as the creature came after him again. It looked like it should have moved slowly, considering how bulky and cumbersome it appeared, but that didn’t prove the case.

  He raised his gun, dodging another flyby attack, and then shot at the golem. The bullet ripped a chunk out of its midsection, but it seemed more like he’d shot a brick wall than something made of flesh or scales. Suddenly, a hole opened in the center of the golem where the bullet had passed through, and light shined from the other side.

  He fired again, and then ducked when the creature swooped in at him once more. This shot hit it squarely in the chest, and another hole appeared, but if the creature even noticed that sections of it had chipped away, it didn’t let on. The golem let out a grinding roar and came at him again.

  Dominick ducked, and then dove to the side, having no clue how to take down something like this. No field manuals detailed how to handle a situation like this, and he needed a different plan.

  Like shooting a wall, his bullets had no trouble penetrating. Where the bullets entered, holes appeared, and cracks splintered from those holes. Maybe he could do enough structural damage to the creature’s body to break it down.

  Worth a shot. He fired again and again until his clip emptied, dancing away from the creature whenever it came close. He filled it with holes, trying to pattern the shots to link the fractures.

  It moved slower as he shot more holes into it, and it wobbled as it flew toward him. It didn’t seem to experience pain, but he had weakened it. Holes riddled the creature now, and chunks of its body had gone missing, carved off by the bullets.

  Dominick’s final shot went through the midsection, linking up a network of small holes. At first, nothing happened, but then came a loud cracking sound. Its midsection fell away. The lower half of its body tumbled to the ground, crumpling to stone and sending up a cloud of dust.

  The creature flew to the side clumsily, having difficulty remaining in flight without the counter-balance. It stumbled into a building and fell to the ground, letting out a rumbling sound when it tried to pick itself up.

  Dominick loaded another clip into his gun and walked toward the creature. He stopped about a meter way, and then fired into its head. Each shot carved off a section until the head became little more than a stub on top of the body, which disintegrated, sinking to the ground in a pile.

  Dominick took a step back, eyeing the pile of broken fragments. He looked around. The demon possessing Abigail had gone. It must have slipped away during the fight, assuming the golem would take care of him.

  It pleased him that the demon had guessed wrong. He smiled, kicking at the pile of dust.

  “That didn’t seem so bad.”

  From behind, came a roaring blast. Dominick spun, startled. More creatures erupted from the rifts in the earth.

  A steady roaring accompanied the exodus. More golems flew out of the rift, as well as smaller flying demons that looked like giant, scaly bats.

  Dozens—maybe hundreds—of them came. Followed by other demons, which crawled out, some looking like giant fiery dogs, and others like horribly demonic spiders. He even saw a few of the demons he’d faced in Pennsylvania and again out at the church.

  Smoke poured from the rifts in fetid clouds, rising into the sky, and more demons hovered in those clouds, tiny ones little more than mosquitoes, flying in groups. He counted at least a few dozen golems in those first seconds, and they circled in the air, searching for prey.

  It had taken him two clips to drop the first one, and he had one clip left.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Dominick turned and sprinted down the street, heading back toward the red glow where Frieda and Haatim had hidden out. With just fifteen shots left, he had to make them count.

  Two of the little bat-like creatures came swooping in at him. He ducked beneath one and raised his pistol and fired at another. The bullet hit it right in the chest, and it disappeared into a cloud of smoke and ash.

  Dominick grimaced in satisfaction. At least those ones wouldn’t give much of a threat. His victory proved short-lived, however, when he looked and saw hundreds more flying out of the rifts.

  The other bat-thing kept coming at him, baring its
razor teeth and trying to bite. He swatted at it, knocking it away, and ran on. Not wanting to waste the bullets, he refrained from shooting the thing.

  At a sprint, he rounded the final corner of a building and dashed to the red portal and Frieda.

  They’d gone. Frantic, he searched around for them. Each second that passed, more demons came pouring out of the ground and flew into the sky, and in other places, demons dragged themselves out of the cracks and onto the earth. There had to be hundreds in this area, and they came out all through the town.

  Before long, they would get overrun.

  “Dominick!” Frieda shouted from a nearby building. It looked like an old antique store with a glass front, though mostly cleared out when the town evacuated.

  He rushed over and found her hiding inside, protecting an unconscious Haatim.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, worry evident in her voice. “He seemed fine one moment, and then he just collapsed. I dragged him in here but can’t wake him.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “I don’t know. Look out!”

  More of the demon creatures came swooping down at the front of the shop. Dominick stepped outside, raised his pistol, and fired twice. Two more little creatures exploded into puffs of smoke.

  “What the hell are those?” he asked.

  “Demons,” Frieda said.

  “What kind?”

  “No idea.”

  “At least they aren’t hard to take down. I thought Surgat planned to bring an army.”

  “He does,” Frieda said. “Those are the fodder.”

  “Why haven’t they attacked us in force?”

  “They will. They’re awaiting his command.”

  ***

  Abigail looked at Haatim, “I’ll start the memory.”

  The presence of Surgat surrounded the room they occupied and attempted to break in. Each time it attacked the memory, she grew a bit weaker. They wouldn’t have much time before it made it through her barrier. “Stay with me.”

  “I’m right here.”

  She squeezed Haatim’s hand, clasping him for relief. “Here goes nothing.”