by Lan Chan
My victories weren’t without casualty. My left hand was still bleeding from the cut. The pain in my head was making me queasy, and though I had held my own until now, I knew these demons were just henchmen. The bigger, stronger ones were locked in a battle with the supernaturals.
Taking a moment to catch my breath cost me. A half-dozen kikimora, half-insect, half-human demons, descended on me. One little knife wasn’t enough to defend against so many. I drew a circle just as the fist pincer sliced through the air in front of my face. It struck my circle and tried to burrow through. The circle flickered, sending shockwaves of pain through my head. My legs wouldn’t move when I commanded them to. The intention was there but it was like my brain had become detached from my body.
I keeled over, spitting more blood onto the grass. Again and again they struck, each time dispersing the pain until it shot all the way down my spine and into my chest. Crap!
Clutching at straws, I tried to think through the delirium. The only thing that came to mind was the power stealing. But as I let my gaze sweep across the clearing, I knew that wasn’t an option. What little stamina they had, the supernaturals sorely needed it.
That only left the trees. My chest ached at the thought of ripping energy from nature. But if I didn’t do something now, I was going to die. We were all going to die.
With my bleeding hand, I traced a smaller blood circle around me. I feathered my fingers and drew squiggly lines in the dirt to represent the roots of the trees. Then I drew a picture of the sun, the source of all life. When I flooded the blood circle with hedge magic, I almost wept because far from cringing away, the trees were already offering up their power. My hands were shaking uncontrollably when I placed my palm on the blood circle. One part of my mind latched on to the power being fed to me from the trees. The other part tried to hold my thoughts in place because I was having trouble thinking straight.
For some reason, the heavenly blade popped up in my head. As soon as it did, the lock popped in my mind and the words on the blade filled my thoughts. Anhiliah. Destroy.
A deep, groaning sound reverberated through the clearing. Starlight lit up the back of my eyelids as the pain in my mind became an aching crescendo. I cried out, my voice carrying over everything until the world itself exploded in a wash of blue and silvery black. The kikimora disintegrated. The circle around me fanned out and rippled over the clearing.
A terrified scream pierced through the drumming agony in my mind. I caught the circle a bare second before it touched Cassie, trying to draw it away from her. There wasn’t enough strength in me. My heart thumped at the same time a splatter of green blossomed around her, teleporting away just as the slice of my circle hit the spot where they had been.
“Run!” I screamed, unable to control the destructive force of the circles. The supernaturals fled, knowing the chaos my power could create. I closed my eyes and whined as the magic took over my body.
39
With the last bit of strength I could dredge up, I tried desperately to hold on to the Angelical. None of it stuck. It was like my body no longer knew how to reclaim its power. There was nowhere for the supernaturals to run except into the arms of the demons ringing the clearing. Most low demons had one goal: destruction. They barely understood the concept of self-preservation because Lucifer had never instilled it into them. In his eyes, they were expendable. They certainly proved it now by not fleeing even though the supernaturals were charging towards them, trying to get away from my destructive power.
A body crashed down in front of me. The circle wavered but recognised Kai’s presence and allowed him entry. He scooped me up in his arms, angelfire lashing out to hold me suspended. Jaw set harder than steel, Kai flooded me with every ounce of healing he could produce.
“Pull it back, Blue.”
Terrified, I didn’t fight the healing. Breaking down the barriers I had set up against the bond, I allowed myself to sink into it. If there was an emotional equivalent to Arcana fruit, it was a Nephilim bond.
Tranquillity like I had never known settled over me. It soothed the pain that distracted from clear thought and spiralled through my chest, knitting my broken body back together. While Kai healed me, I slipped into the Ley Dimension and swept my hands over the clearing like a painter drawing a wide arc. But instead of pulling the magic back, I infused it with bone magic comprised of memory, familiarity, and love. The blades of the circle phased through the supernaturals, the way any Sisterhood witch would have. They became solidified beyond that and cleaved the ranks of the demons into nothingness.
The clearing rocked with an excess of power that was sucked into the vacuum of the looming portals. It exploded and forced the portals to snap shut. For a second, everything was blissfully still. The angelfire ebbed, Kai’s arm slackening around me. He leaned over, his weight braced on his fist and began to cough. Blood splattered on the grass.
“Kai!”
“I’m fine,” he said, his tone scathing. “You couldn’t just run, could you?”
“Run?” It dawned on me that the urging to leave had come from Kai through the bond. Great. Now he was messing with my instincts as well.
“For your information,” I snapped, “it didn’t work!”
He reeled back, surprise flashing across his soot stained face. “You tried?”
Now was not the time to get into this.
The supernaturals regrouped around us, forming a protective circle. Among them, I recognised Max, Charles, and Trey on the left as well as Durin and Yolanda up the front. Several other shifters I didn’t know personally were dotted in equal distance around the circle. Astrid was a golden fixture on the right. She twirled her rapier in her right hand, the hem of her silver gown muddied and torn in the fight. Without needing the Ley sight, I picked up Jacqueline and Cassie’s energy in the formation behind me and Basil huddled in the corner with Nora, Laila, and Nanna. It didn’t surprise me that so many human guests were still standing. Our very nature created a buffer against a soul bomb.
Kai pushed himself up to standing. He swiped the back of his hand across his lips absently, his thoughts laser focused on something up ahead. He marched forward to take his place in the barrier around us.
The defensive positioning confused me until I blinked and realised that the night had been banished completely. The sky above us wasn’t clear but a strange opaque white like a cataract. What now?
Sophie crouched down beside me. “Diana?” I asked.
She pointed past the supernatural barrier. “She’ll be alright. The demons ignored most of the unconscious. Are you okay?” she asked.
“Not really.”
I didn’t know how not okay I was until Sophie helped me to my feet. It was hard not to be transfixed by the glowing rift that hung in the air at the edge of the clearing. Unlike a demonic portal, this thing sparkled in shimmering gold and silver.
“What the hell is that?” I said.
“A dimensional rift,” Professor Mortimer told me. He stood two metres to my left. The right sleeve of his dinner jacket was torn all the way to the elbow. “It’s what we use to hold the magical cities suspended within the Earth dimension.
No. I just wanted it all to stop. My foggy brain couldn’t take any more revelations about how much worse things could become. When did I ever get my way?
A voice rang out across the clearing. “Not bad,” Jacob Buchanan said. “Much better than the Seraphina massacre. Then again, you didn’t have a bone witch last time. Alessia. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Kai’s broad back went rigid. Hatred so vile it made my insides burn, coating the bond. It was difficult to tell whether the feeling originated from me or Kai. I made a beeline for the front of the supernatural formation only for Durin to block me out.
“Stay back,” he barked. Hell with that. I phased through the gap between him and Yolanda. She tried to grab hold of me, but her hand simply slipped past my shoulder.
Jacob grinned when he spotted me. Another po
rtal had been created in the space beneath the rift. It wasn’t nearly as big as the ones I’d closed, but it was enough for the dozens of humans to file through it and take the place of the demons that had surrounded us. Their eyes glowed red and black and they carried heavy artillery.
“Shit,” Max swore.
The weapons weren’t the problem. Neither was their humanity. Demon possession evened the playing field, amplifying human strength. But there were some laws that were universal. Even the supernaturals couldn’t get past appearances sometimes. It was acceptable to fight a human adult. The issue was the two little girls barely out of diapers and the three boys with missing milk teeth. Babies.
The hairs on my arms stood on end as the protective instinct of every shifter was activated and morphed into hateful aggression. Most species were protective of their young, but being remedial in the conception department pushed the supernaturals’ instincts into hyperdrive.
Following on the heels of the humans were demons that possessed the lumbering gait of gorillas. Coarse silver hairs dotted their skin even though it appeared leathery like rhino hide. Their forelimbs were enormous, putting a weight burden on their torsos so that they appeared to walk on four legs even though they clearly had arms. Their heads were reptilian and protected by a skull plate that compressed their features into slitted menace. Unlike any earthly creature, sacks on the side of their heads throbbed with a sickly green that could only mean poison.
As the demons tumbled in twos and threes out of the new portal, a blunt force hit the Reserve, making the ground shake uncontrollably. I dropped low to the ground, hands pressed to the grass for balance. The shifters did the same. The opaque white sky blossomed in a fiery red mist that turned the world into a bloody landscape. It lasted all of five seconds before the white began to eat up the new energy. Twice more the unknown threat slammed against the sky. It made me realise the sky hadn’t turned white. Instead, the Reserve had been sheathed in an artificial cacoon.
The white barrier flickered for a second. The momentary weakness brought about splotches of transparency through which I could make out hundreds of figures on the other side wearing golden armour. The elite guard. They were out there, unable to reach us.
“Amazing what a few measly human souls can do,” Jacob observed. “Like this, for example.”
The front line of our defensive guard took a step forward, myself included, as Jacob reached out and plunked one of the little boys from the group in front of him. The child didn’t make a peep, his bloodshot eyes unblinking, his ruddy cheeks still. If it weren’t for the soft expansion of his chest, I would have thought him already dead. “Leave,” Jacob commanded. With a barely perceptible jerk, the demon inside the child writhed out of his mouth.
“Oh dear God,” Nanna breathed.
Free of the demon’s hold, the little boy whimpered. He kicked his stubby legs, crying desperately. Fury like I’d never known burst inside the bond. Kai’s angel blade was a blaze of heavenly fire in his white-knuckled grip.
“That’s right, Malachi,” Jacob smiled. “We are here again.”
“Put the boy down,” Durin snarled. All along his bare arms, coarse black hairs were beginning to sprout and thicken.
“I’ll do better than that.” The supernaturals managed to advance three steps before the gorilla demons marched forward and latched their meaty hands around the throat of every human on the field. Everybody halted.
“Still shackled by your ridiculous code, I see,” Jacob drawled. With the flick of his free hand, Jacob sent a burst of his blood-stained black magic into the atmosphere. The cloudy barrier swirled and cleared, becoming the reflective sheen of a mirror. And then, the mirror face rippled and I knew we were being broadcast over the MirrorNet for the whole of supernatural society to watch.
The shuddering sobs of the little boy in Jacob’s clutch boomed like thunder in my ears. Every laboured inhale over closed-up airways sent a wave of hysteria running through my veins. Impotent rage battered at me from all sides. The supernaturals were ready for a massacre, no longer caring about anything but inflicting pain. But if they dared to move a muscle, all of the innocent humans would die.
Without knowing it, I had slipped into the Ley dimension and feathered my bone magic over the captured humans. The children could be forgiven their possession. Unbearable terror marred their auras as it did some of the adults and teenagers who had been taken against their will. But not all of the humans had been unwilling participants.
My bone magic snagged on a middle-aged man with sagging features and a disturbing smile that had nothing to do with the demon currently piloting his consciousness. He was the poster child for why the supernaturals were hesitant to reveal themselves. Jacob’s head turned in my direction as though he could tell where my thoughts were occupied.
“When you set him free,” Jacob said, “he will make them over anew.”
“Keep dreaming,” I spat with bravado steeped in uncertainty. My fingers curled into fists.
“Your dreams have a tendency of coming to life, don’t they?” He smacked his palm onto the boy’s forehead and ripped out his soul in a deafening crack of released energy. Durin’s ferocious roar and the corresponding howls from the other shifters would have busted my eardrums if I hadn’t retreated into my mind where the pool of my magics resided. My physical arm lashed out in front of me, the bones in my hand crunching as I gathered them into a fist.
Jacob’s smirk was all I could focus on as my bone magic whipped out and held tightly to the little boy’s soul. Threads of blue and black crawled over the boy’s skin, feeding him my essence in order to keep him tethered to the Ley lines. Giselle was a master of soul manipulation, but Jacob was a god in comparison. He unstitched the boy’s soul faster than I could hold it in place. My only saving grace was that I had power and I used it as a band-aid rather than a cure. Around me, the shifters’ threatening lament became a confused crescendo.
Jacob gave a disappointed shake of his head. “What a waste,” he said. “All that power to a worthless human.”
He proved his contempt by lashing out. I wasn’t fast enough. Instead of continuing to battle with me for the soul of the little boy, he flicked his hand and wrenched the soul from a man in the group in front of him. The separation happened before I could split my attention. I screamed as the demon crushed the man’s skull the moment his soul was removed. Without a living body anchoring him to this dimension, his soul became lost. I whimpered as my bone magic tried to snatch the glowing white orb from Jacob’s fingers. Grinning, he tossed it into the sky. The soul morphed into a beam of light that spread over the barrier.
The trees screamed in my thoughts as their roots were torn asunder. It gave me a crude picture of the perimeter of the destruction. The Ley lines that held the Reserve suspended in place began to erode. The veil became a transparent coating as wards broke and the Reserve moved away from its foundations. The dimensional rift gaped, expanding until I could no longer see its edges. It widened as it grew in height, the golden light blending into a murky darkness at its centre.
A collective gasp went up around me as the world beyond the rift came into sight. A landscape of barren red stone continuously on fire. Hideous creatures crawled or flew over the parched ground, fighting with each other. Hell. Or Jacob’s manifestation of it. He was dragging all of the Reserve into the Hell dimension.
40
Distracted by horror, Jacob was able to snatch the boy’s soul from my grasp, crushing it in his fist and throwing it at the dimensional fissure. Again and again he tore souls from the humans, directing them like shooting stars into the void. The supernaturals broke formation. So did the demons. They came at us in a crushing wave. Purple and orange magic sprang from the earth closest to the dimensional rift as Basil and Professor Mortimer attempted to slow the momentum of the Reserve.
Somebody grabbed me and tossed me behind the line of defence. A feeling of warm tingling scattered over my skin as I rolled through Professor Mo
rtimer’s deep purple arcane circle.
Skin and muscle split all around me as the shifters burst into their animal forms. Turning my head when Sophie gasped, I watched with terrified amazement as Max transformed into an enormous lion. Midnight-blue stripes slashed across his hide. Where the fur bristled on his back, it was streaked in bright pink. This was new. He looked like a toy lion that a child had dipped in a paint palette. Except you would be a moron to make fun of him. “Is he even bigger than normal?” I stammered.
Sophie’s eyes were all white. One of the gorilla demons snapped its fanged mouth at him. Max’s right paw shot out, claws swiping across the throat of the demon and ripping out chunks of flesh. Not satisfied that it was dead, Max snatched the demon’s body and beat it against the ground before using it as a club to decapitate another demon. Feral rage pulsated from him in waves that had my prey instincts urging me to retreat.
Everywhere I turned, the same heart-stopping fury radiated from all the shifters. While the vampires fought with cool detachment, shifters gave in to their animal halves in a fight, and boy, they were pissed.
Charles was the only one who hadn’t bothered to shift. Nor did he move far from his original position where the slumped over forms of his mother and sister was bundled. Anything that got too close was met with the savage frustration of a lion contained. One of the demons slipped through a gap left open by Durin and Yolanda. The monstrous thing ran three steps before Charles snapped a punch that punctured its ribcage. He proceeded to reach inside while the demon tried to claw at his eyes, and tore the demon’s heart right out. Blood soaked the front of his shirt, his hair, his skin. Charles gave no indication that he saw it as he paced around in a protective circle of his own, eyes glowing gold, lips bared back over sharpened teeth.