by Lan Chan
24
Astrid grabbed the two girls who stood inside watching and tossed them out. “Secure the room,” she told me. I chucked the cake box onto the basin bench and drew a circle around the bathroom, locking everybody else out.
Maddison scooted over as I knelt down beside Cassie. Blood stained my jeans, but I tried not to think about it. Astrid appeared on her other side. “What happened?”
Cassie clung to me and sobbed. I held her tight even though she was squeezing the air from my lungs. I tried to make soothing, reassuring noises. With the grim detachment of a guard, Astrid inspected Cassie for injuries.
“Don’t bother,” Maddison said. “She’s not hur–” She bit her lip, unsure of her assessment. “At least not by a weapon or anything.”
Only when her hands we thoroughly covered in blood did Astrid come to the same consensus. That of course meant we had nothing to go on and that seemed to unnerve Astrid. Her blue eyes filled with concern as she shrugged at me.
I rubbed Cassie’s back. “Cass. What happened?”
She hiccupped. Maddison ripped more hand towels from the dispenser and replaced the dirty ones. They were saturated in blood within seconds. Cassie was haemorrhaging.
“Infirmary,” I told Maddison. The Nephilim was about to teleport when Cassie screamed. “No! I’m not going anywhere like this!”
Her face crumpled. “Cass, we have to do something. You’re going to die of blood loss.” That was not a sentence I thought I would ever say under these circumstances. It was insane.
“I don’t care!”
“What about Kai?” Diana suggested.
The shriek basically ruined the hearing in my left ear. My head was ringing. “I already suggested that,” Maddison informed us. “This is what I got for it.” She lifted up her wrist to show us long ugly scratches that were taking their time to heal.
“Okay,” I breathed deeply as my ear cracked. Think. It was hard to do with a hysterical teenager clinging to me. No infirmary and no Kai. I racked my brain. How in the world did supernaturals heal without human medication?
I knew the answer to that, it just took a little while for my brain to kick in without free oxygen flow. I turned to Astrid. “Can you go to the potions lab and break into Sophie’s locker? She’s got some vials of a gold liquid in there that smell of marshmallow. Bring back as many of them as you can.”
Astrid popped out of sight.
“We’re going to sit you up, Cass.” Maddison and I braced her, and Diana helped us move her so that she was propped up with her back against the wall. She wouldn’t let go of my hand. Hers were freezing. As were her lips.
Astrid returned in a flurry of gold dust. She thrust the vials in their wooden stand at me. I uncapped all eighteen vials and lifted the first to Cassie’s lips. “Drink.”
She was a much better patient than me. Then again, Sophie’s potion smelt like heaven. “What is that?” Diana asked, her nose twitching. Her eyes shone brighter just at the smell.
“Health elixir. Sophie’s been working on it since Max got busted up in the games by all that silver.”
The theory behind the potion was that it was meant to boost a shifter’s already considerable immune system. I had everything crossed that it would do the same for Cassie. By the time she’d drunk half the vials, colour began to seep back into her skin. “Good girl. Keep going.”
I didn’t have to tell her twice. I was tempted to have some myself. Maddison did. “Oooh,” she cooed. “It’s like my insides are tingling.”
When there were only two vials left, Maddison no longer had to change the paper towels. She traded wadding them up for running them under warm water. I pressed the damp towel she handed me to Cassie’s forehead.
The Amazon teen managed to collect her emotions. “What happened?” Astrid asked again.
Cassie scowled. “I wasn’t feeling too well so I went to lie down. Next thing I knew I was kissing the floor. It felt like somebody was stabbing me in the gut. I must have passed out because I woke up in here.”
Maddison filled us in on the rest. “I came back from class and was swinging by to see if she wanted to eat. I found her on the floor of her room. I dragged her in here and she just shot blood out from between her legs. I almost passed out seeing it!”
Thank goodness for Maddison’s timing. The only perk Cassie got as Jacqueline’s granddaughter was her own room. And that had more to do with the fact that nobody wanted to be under such a watchful eye than being a real perk.
“How do you feel now?”
“Better.” She glanced at the lower half of her body. “I need a shower.”
Maddison screwed up her face. “You need an incinerator.”
This made Cassie whine. “Did everybody see?”
“Pretty much.”
Pre-pubescent tact was non-existent. Diana rifled through the supplies in the cupboards below the sink and found mystical lighter fluid. They gathered the bloody towels into a pile in the middle of the floor. Astrid drew her own circle around it and set the whole thing on fire.
My jaw almost hit the tiles when the circle ignited and flashed a familiar green before it disappeared and burned into ash. What the heck? I cast around but none of the others seemed to have noticed.
Maddison was helping Cassie up and into one of the shower stalls. “Can you remove the circle?” she asked me. I did so. She and Astrid exited. Maddison to get Cassie a change of clothes and Astrid to make sure nobody disturbed us without the protection of the circle.
“I’ll take the potion stuff back. How long has Sophie been working on this?” Diana asked.
“Months.”
“How dead are you going to be when she finds out?”
“Stone cold.”
Cassie sputtered under the spray. “I’m sorry. I’ll explain it to her.”
Judging by her jittery knees when she got out of the shower, she was in no condition to do anything but crash. “What’s that?” She peered into the sink at the soggy cake box.
“Oh, we brought you cake.” I lifted the box and handed it to her.
“Thanks!”
On our way out, Maddison enlightened her. “You do realise the only way they would have known you were sick was probably because the boys told them, right?”
Cassie promptly tossed the box into the trash with more force than she’d done anything else tonight. I didn’t even want to touch what was going on there.
After I was assured she wasn’t dying, I made her promise to get checked out in the infirmary when she could walk on her own.
Astrid teleported us back to my room. Sophie was just coming back from her shower. “Hey, where have you –”
She sniffed. “Why do I smell marshmallow?”
My hasty explanation was peppered with Diana’s helpful over-exaggeration of the situation. Sophie’s brows knitted together. She closed her eyes. I could feel her emotions vibrating. Also, there was just a hint of pink sparks in her hair. We’d boxed her into a corner. How could she be angry when her potion had been used to help Cassie? That didn’t soothe her disappointment, though.
I stealthily removed her towel and toiletry bag from her grip and anything else she could use as a projectile. “I’ve been working on that for ages,” she said. “It was going to go up against Celeste’s exorcism potion at the Halloween Showcase.”
“At least you know now that it works,” Astrid said.
Sophie’s escalating irritation stopped dead. Her head cocked to the side. “Good point.” She sat down heavily on her bed. “What even happened?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Spontaneous menstrual haemorrhaging.” The boys would die if they knew. It was no wonder Cassie didn’t want anyone to see her. Least of all, Kai. As usual, Sophie and I were eerily in tune.
“Isn’t it a bit strange that first Jacqueline and now Cassie have been mysteriously sick?” she said.
I eyed Astrid. She was the definition of sickening good health. “Have you ever been sick before?
”
She shook her head. “I’ve been injured several times, but no demon has managed to curse me as yet. I hear it’s quite unpleasant.”
“You think this was a curse?”
She shrugged. “What else could it be?”
What else indeed. I was still mulling it over as I settled into bed with the codex in my lap. It was the first time I had the motivation to go through it. Something about the flare of green in that fire was nagging at me.
This was definitely not light reading. I skipped past the inside cover as best I could, feeling both irritated and charmed by the monogramming. Unsure where I should even start, I flipped to the index and went through it alphabetically.
Sophie’s soft laugh interrupted my yawn. “I wish I could take a picture,” she said. “You’ve gone cross-eyed reading that thing.”
“It’s so bloody long!”
She rolled over onto her back. “What are you even looking for?”
I chewed on my answer before spitting it out. “I’m not even sure. I guess anything specific I can find about Raphael and the Pendragon line.”
It was a good thing nobody questioned why I would have an interest in that topic. Sometimes, the truth really did hide the best lies. “Isn’t there a section of our Magical History book that touches on that?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t very in-depth.”
She rubbed her eyes. “It sounds like you’re trying to cheat on your exam, Lex. Or should I say, Alessia Hastings-Pendragon.”
I threw a pillow at her. If the book wasn’t so heavy, I would have used it instead. She grabbed the pillow missile and tucked it to her side as a shield. Tuckered out from her shift, Sophie fell asleep pretty quickly. I reluctantly flipped to the front page and started reading. The thing about searching for stuff was that you wasted a lot of time trying to find where to start when you should just dive in. I found exactly what I had been looking for on the sixth page of the codex. The section was on the bond between the Nephilim and their seraphim sires.
It began with all the same stuff I’d learned in Magical History. The war in the heavenly realm and Lucifer’s massacre of a number of seraphim ripping open the barriers between the dimensions. Michael and the remaining seraphim were able to seal Lucifer away but by then the earth dimension had been breached.
In order to fix their mistakes, Michael, Raphael, Uriel, and Ariel gave up their right to the heavens and imbued the first Nephilim with their blood. The codex went into much greater detail than our Magical History class about the sacrifices the seraphim made. But humans had also sacrificed plenty. The first humans to have been blooded were all heavily pregnant females. Every single one of them had died during childbirth to produce the first Nephilim. Funny how Magical History never mentioned that.
Each Nephilim created and each born of the first blood was connected to their seraphim sire. Even if there was peace, they would never be able to go back where they came from. The forms they took now were lesser versions of their past selves.
There was a passage about the remaining seraphim in the heavenly realm being so removed from humans that they were unable to speak to us directly. They required a specific vessel and often the human they chose went mad from the encounter. So many more questions filled my mind.
It was tempting to skip over Lucifer’s chapter, but I forced my way through it. With each paragraph, my hope became increasingly thin. Because Michael and co. had forced Lucifer to the Earth dimension and trapped him with Gaia’s help, he technically didn’t make the choice to fall from his perch in the heavenly dimension. He also didn’t relinquish any of his power to humans to create any Nephilim. All of this meant that in a fight, he would be stronger than all the fallen seraphim except Azrael. The problem there was that Azrael had dominion of the Sea of Souls. That was where the root of his power lay. In this dimension, Lucifer still outgunned him.
My breath snagged as I got to the end page of this section. It was titled; The Death of a Seraphim. It stated plainly that even though the seraphim had been stripped of a great deal of power, their essences were still pure. If they died, their destruction would most certainly rip a hole in the dimension. It was a single theory in the paragraph that I couldn’t get past. It read: Just as the Nephilim have been their greatest weapons against the forces of Hell, so too are they their greatest weakness. Blood birthed the Nephilim and blood will bind them together forever. Through life, illness, and death.
It wasn’t explicit, but knowing what Lucifer had told me, the message was clear. If a line of Nephilim died, so too would their seraphim sire.
I flipped directly to the chapter on the seraphim specifically. On the first page was a picture of a woman in her thirties. Gabriel the messenger, original owner of my teleport ring.
I was interested to learn that Kai’s father had a theory that while the seraphim gave their blood to the Nephilim, their existence branched out and touched on the life essences of the whole supernatural community. He’d been a bit of a Ley line enthusiast and claimed he had seen an intricate connection linking Raphael and other supernaturals.
With each word, my throat locked tighter. It sounded like Kai’s death wouldn’t only affect Raphael but might have health repercussions for all of supernatural society. With a heavy feeling in my chest, I closed the book and went to set it on top of Sophie’s ingredients chest. In the morning, I would try to return it to Christopher. My sort-of name might be monogrammed onto the cover, but I could never be its owner. Not if I wanted everybody I cared about to survive.
25
Sometimes, when I had something especially nerve-wracking to do in the morning, the night slipped by in a blink. Tonight, when I closed my eyes, my mind spewed forth a disjointed reality of bright lights struggling against a black canvas, briny sea air, strappy sandals, and mainstream music. I stood against the railing on the top deck of an ocean liner. Beneath my feet, the wooden boards swayed back and forth, up and down to the whim of the ocean. A horn blared. To my dying days, I would never be able to understand why people went on cruises.
Even though I was no longer unreasonably terrified of the ocean, memory of my fear still lingered. The chance of contracting some kind of stomach bug was too high. And then there was that feeling of being trapped. There was nowhere to go on a ship.
Around me, men and women in loosely formal clothing were mingling and laughing. The slightly tipsy ones were singing to the music with unrestrained joy. A golden-haired girl no older than five or six ran between the bodies of the adults on the dance floor. Two other children chased after her, the high-pitched giggling drowned out by the music.
As my vision settled, I noticed the seniors on comfortable lounges around the edge of the deck. One older couple danced in a slow circle out of time with the music but perfectly in rhythm with each other. The old woman wore a cobalt-coloured dress in heavy material that cinched at her waist. The capped sleeves and slightly flared waist reminded me of something a secretary in an old movie might have worn. I had a slight obsession with old movies. Nanna used to watch them all the time when I was kid.
Jacob materialised on my right. He wore black suit bottoms and a navy striped shirt with the collar open. It fit with the dress code of the party goers, but they seemed to ignore him as though they couldn’t actually see him. In his right hand, he clutched the same slightly curved blade that he used to hurt me. I jerked from my reverie and tried to call out to Morning Star.
Something tugged in the pit of my gut. When I tried to sink into the Ley dimension, the image only grew louder. It was there but I couldn’t reach it in my dream state. Individual voices boomed and lowered in an unsteady wave. My hands gripped the railing until my knuckles turned white but there was nothing I could do.
“The trouble with you, Alessia,” Jacob said, “is that you just don’t know when to stop fighting.” He threw his arms to the sky and turned in a circle. Pivoting on the inch-thick heel of his shoes, Jacob clapped his hands together. An errant wind picked up the hems of s
kirts and dashed them against women’s legs. The balloons and streamers blew horizontally. The older couple stopped dancing to stare dazedly around them.
Overhead, the moon had been a big cheesy half-slice. Thick clouds rolled over it, obscuring the light. While everybody glanced up at the strange turn of weather, a spark ignited in the air beside the dance floor. I tried to scream so hard my throat became sore. Still nothing came out but a hoarse, painful groan. The children were the first to spot the ripple in space and time. I was standing there directly in the little girl’s eye line when the first cry broke out. It ripped through the music and filled the night air with the haunting premonition of death.
The first demon to emerge from the portal possessed a long, forked tail. The limb whipped out from behind and speared through the chest of the old woman. Blood, black in the dim light, blossomed on her chest. Both her arms reached out one last time for her husband before the demon wrenched her backwards and tossed her body into the ocean. The crash she made as she hit the waves flipped a switch. The scene became pandemonium as people scrambled to get away. Except they were on a damned boat. There was nowhere to run. They tried, of course. Some had quicker instincts than others. That only prolonged the inevitable.
Jacob turned slowly as more demons poured from the portal. Some of them were bipedal. Others slithered across the deck, leaving behind a shimmering slick of silvery goo. The effort to find my voice was making me dizzy. So too were the shouts of the people being cut down. What got me was that it wasn’t all about indiscriminate killing.
Some of the more advanced demons were collecting souls. They gathered them like bowling balls and shot them into the sky where the souls burst and lit up the night like fireworks. In their aftermath, a section of the sky seemed to have been torn open.
I gasped and averted my gaze as a four-legged demon snatched the little girl and crunched into her. Blood dripped from its fangs onto the deck. It stepped in her blood as it dragged her body over to the side and nudged her off. Instead of falling in the water, the girl’s body slammed into a lower railing and splattered on to the bottom deck. The demon left bloody footprints as it chased its next victim down the hull.