by Lan Chan
“And?” I asked.
He eyed me suspiciously. “He’s not. But that thing walking around in his body isn’t Malachi Pendragon. At least not all of him.” He stroked his chin. “I actually kind of like it. He’s less annoying this way.”
My laugh was dry. “Trust you to think that.”
“Do you think his grandmother is actually buying what you’re selling her?” Basil asked me. “Or anyone else who knows him? I had to put a hex on Max to get him to stay in the Reserve when he found out. Durin has banned any shifter from giving you grief, but I have to know what I’m working with here.”
I poked him in the hip. “I don’t think I care for this new responsible you.”
“And I don’t care for whatever it is that makes you believe you’re alone.” I hugged his side, desperately missing him despite him being right here.
“I blasted him with Angelical,” I told him.
“What?”
“I used Angelical on him to erase his feelings.”
Basil looked from me to Sophie and back again. “Lex!”
“I know!”
He got up and started pacing. “I...do you know...he’s....”
This wasn’t good. “I think I broke him,” I told Sophie.
Basil threw his arms into the air. “I’m not the only one you might have broken! You can’t just go around throwing Angelical at people.”
“I had no choice. The potion didn’t work, and he wouldn’t break the bond otherwise.”
“What potion?” Oops. Forgot I hadn’t told him about that either.
Sophie dug herself into a comfortable position under the covers. “I wish I had popcorn,” she said.
“Nothing,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Basil was almost foaming at the mouth. “Of course it matters. Sooner or later, somebody is going to figure out he’s not right and –”
I gave a humourless chuckle. “As long as he bonds with somebody viable and spits out a healer child, I don’t think anyone is going to be too upset at me.”
“If he can even have children anymore. You have no idea what the Angelical might have done to him.”
“I had to stop him!”
Basil knelt down in front of me. “And what about you?” He took my hand. “You’ve had to give up so much for the sake of protecting people. What about what you want?”
“I don’t get to want things. My life isn’t a story with a happily ever after, Basil. I’m okay with that.”
“I’m not,” Sophie piped up.
“Me either,” Basil said. He searched my face. “What aren’t you telling me?”
I patted his cheek. “I’ve told you more than I have anybody else. The rest is mine to bear.”
“What the hell kind of logic is that?” Basil roared. Lucky there was a spell to keep in sound.
Try as he might, I refused to tell him any more. He left muttering a string of curses.
I was feeling lighter after having seen him. And then I woke up feeling smothered. My nostrils were blocked. Pressure built behind my left eye. “Sophie?”
She rolled over in her bed. “Soph! I need to turn the light on.”
She grumbled and I heard the sound of her moving around under her blankets. I flicked on the Fae lantern and started at myself in the mirror. Blood caked the lower half of my face. It stuck in my hair and all over my sheets. When I stood up, it felt like somebody was holding a drill to my head.
“Oh, Lex!” Sophie hissed. Her eyes were filling up. “Go and take a shower. I’ll fix this and make you some potion.”
I stood under the spray for longer than was necessary. The whole time, I clamped my lips shut so I wouldn’t throw up. My blood painted the water a diluted pink and didn’t run clear for ages. While I dressed, I started bleeding again. Walking down the hallway before dawn with tissue paper stuffed up my nose wasn’t a classy getup. Sophie had changed my sheets and comforter while I was gone. She had a vial of her potion ready for me. It was darker than the ones she’d given me previously.
I gulped it down. Within thirty seconds the pulsing in my head eased. My bloody nose crusted and didn’t run anymore.
“Soph,” I said, holding up the vial. “I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth but what the heck is this stuff?”
She started biting her nails again. “You really don’t want to know.”
I sat there pinching my nostrils together and trying to think of the worst possible thing she could be doing. Oh jeez. “Please tell me I’m not drinking supernatural essence.”
She didn’t say a word. “Sophie...”
“I’m going back to sleep,” she announced. She jumped back under the covers and lifted them over her head.
“You’re not killing anyone, right?”
She ripped off the covers and gave me a dirty look. “Of course not!”
“But....”
“But you don’t need to know.”
“Don’t need to know or is this one of those things that I shouldn’t know in case it incriminates you later amongst a jury of your peers.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Who cares? In case you’ve forgotten, you’re dying!”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. “Please don’t do anything you’ll regret on account of me.”
Storming out of bed, she came and stood right in front of me. “And what exactly is it you’re doing?”
“Soph.”
She scrunched her face up to stop from crying. “We’ve shared a bedroom, a life, for almost three years. I know you, Lex. You’re going to try and do something scary and I don’t like it.”
I closed my eyes for a second. The strain of everything threatened to overwhelm me. Turned out, knowing you were going to die was a lot harder than just dying. I couldn’t help swiping the back of my arm across my nose even though I was no longer bleeding.
Despite the assistance of Sophie’s death potion, my body was breaking down at a much faster rate than I had first anticipated. It scared me to think how much Kai had been healing me without my knowledge. My window for action was rapidly shrinking.
“Now that you mention it,” I said. “I am just slightly terrified.”
Grabbing me, she held me tight. “Are you sure there isn’t any other way?”
“Not unless we can go back and undo all the Angelical I’ve spoken. And all the other stuff I’ve done since I came here.”
“How can this be the only way?”
I squeezed her back hard. “Because Lucifer has been an asshole for an eternity and he’s not about to stop now.”
Not knowing how long the potion would last, and how much time I actually had before my illness rendered me useless or dead, I asked for access to the heavenly blade.
“What for?” Sophie wanted to know. “You just had an epic meltdown after speaking an Angelical word. What if touching the blade brings on another episode?”
“If I second-guessed everything, I’d never leave the room.”
“That might not be the worst idea.” She retrieved the blade for me nonetheless.
My hand shook a little as I went to grab hold of the handle. When nothing cataclysmic happened, I let out a long withheld breath. “I’m coming with you,” Sophie said.
“No, you’re not.”
“The hell –”
I teleported. Boy, that was a handy trick. She might be pissed later but it was better than trying to explain to her what I was doing. The Great Hall was deserted at this time of night. Still I locked what was left of my magic away and glided up the steps in a half-phase. Once inside, I picked an empty room and sealed the doors and windows with exclusion runes. Drawing an invisibility circle, I sank bone magic into it. Sweating when I was done, I sat there on the cold marble floor, my head bowed between bent knees. Shit.
It wasn’t even that much magical expenditure, but I felt as though I’d gone three rounds with a manticore. How on earth was I going to pull off this half-baked idea? Shaking myself, I pushed forward, rememberi
ng that time was not my friend.
In an effort to conserve energy, I had picked up a piece of blue chalk from Sophie’s ingredients box. Using it as a visual aid, I drew a big circle the circumference of the room. When I was done, I drew six smaller concentric circles until the final one was the size of a dinner plate. Placing the heavenly blade inside the circle, I went around filling in the rest of the space. More circles, always in denominations of three and intersecting each other, were placed at equal intervals to build a structure that was unbreakable. The last thing I needed was for the summoning to backfire and take Ravenhall with it.
The wards I drew were a mix of runes and sigils from an ancient Celtic druidic civilisation. Like my hedge magic, it was the language of this plane and I wanted it to reinforce the magic that I would be summoning. When the circle was complete, it resembled a talisman used by witches who dealt with astrological hexes.
As an added layer of protection, I slipped into the Ley dimension. Shadows danced behind my eyelids as the flash of blue and black magic imprinted on me. The circle was a mass of interconnected waves. The blade glowed an unearthly silver, calling to mind that thread that had come from the sky while I had been trying to grow the Arcana trees.
Gritting my teeth, I reminded myself that if I dawdled, Jacob would get his wish. Thinking of the mage sent a shiver of intense hatred through my veins. When I got my hands on him, I would make him pay. A voice deep in my mind chuckled, knowing I would probably never get the chance. But I pushed it aside and leaned into the rage that was the only thing keeping me going at the moment.
Reaching out, I placed a tentative hand on the blade. The flare of light almost blinded me. Shutting my eyes was useless but I did it anyway. Taking a weighted breath, I gathered every scrap of concentration I could and forced it into the circle. “Show me the Hell dimension,” I said aloud despite being alone. “Take me to the spot where there are the most demons present.”
Magic fluctuated within and outside the circle. My gut roiled as the room wavered around me. Nausea clawed its way up my throat. The hand that touched the heavenly blade shook. Pressing my free hand into a fist, I grabbed the Ley dimension and wouldn’t let go. Slowly, the image around me flickered at the edges and the room disintegrated. In its place, a towering white crystal cathedral rose up to the sky. Its tallest spire touched the tip of the clouds. I took in the unearthly frontage of the building, which was decorated in a frosted, eight-pointed star, the four main points longer than the four in between. The Morning Star.
A gasp caught in my throat. Panning my gaze further out, I watched as the sky bled from blue to orange to red as the horizon expanded away from the cathedral structure. Just as the sky turned to bloody ash, so too did the earth beneath it. It was as though the building and the immediate area surrounding it was an oasis in a desert of desolation. I recognised it for what it was. A piece of the heavenly realm cast down to Hell.
Lucifer’s stronghold.
Biting my bottom lip, I squinted as black and red dots materialised in front of my eyes. As my focus tunnelled, the dots began to solidify into recognisable forms. I saw then why it had taken me so long to notice that there were life forms down on the ground. It was because there were so many of them that they made up the ground. What I was seeing wasn’t parched red-and-black earth. They were demons. So many of them that they stood and crawled all over each other.
Stacked two and three in a spot, they fought with tooth and nail to be at the perimeter of the barrier that kept the cathedral in its heavenly cocoon. The circumference must have been hundreds of metres wide. So many demons it hurt my head to even count. Many more than there were supernaturals. And those were only the low demons that I could actually physically pinpoint. In between, black and brown steaks like ribboned clouds whipped through the air. The demon essences coiled and stretched as they too tried to find a path back to their master. It was their presence that caused the air to be tainted in an oppressive darkness.
A blaze of blue-tinged purple lit up the sky as a creature with immense black wings glided through the air around the perimeter. It was joined by another and another until the air itself was teeming with purple fire. The winged demons on the ground gave brutal, impotent screams as they were unable to lift off the ground for fear of being eviscerated by the winged creatures. They were like nothing I had ever seen.
Having met a dragon up close, I knew these things weren’t of the same species. While the dragons were sleek creatures of unbreakable scales and sharp intelligence, these winged creatures were rough-skinned, their hides abrasive like that of a shark. Where a dragon’s wings were immense and membranous, the demon creatures had delicate, papery-thin wings that reminded me of the fins of a fighting fish. As I crouched in the summoning circle watching them, a single word popped into my head: leviathan.
In Demonology 101, we had learned that leviathan were sea demons created by Lucifer when he had first been deposed from his throne. The Earthly realm was so densely packed with water that the armies of the leviathan quickly overcame those of the other seraphim. But Gaia had risen up against Lucifer and destroyed the leviathan when she caused the seas to open up and swallow them whole. These things that now rose in the sky and slid through the air as though they were swimming had been upgraded.
Where was Jacob in all of this? Touching the blades edge once more, I asked it to show me the demonic mage. Rather than holed up nursing his wounds, the circle offered up an image of Jacob standing inside a blood circle surrounded by six open portals.
“Raise them up,” he barked to his minions on the other side of the portals. “Take as many of them as you can and turn them.” Through the opening of the portal directly in my eye line, I saw another mage cloaked like the necromancer who had tried to kill me with ghouls while I was forsaken. His face was covered, his back enveloped in darkness punctured by the white glow of the moon. In the field behind his back a building sat silent. All of its windows were dark except for the ground floor. I recognised it instantly. Nanna’s psychiatric hospital.
The mage in the portal raised his hands and made a curling motion. From the space around Jacob, a dense cloud of demon essences swirled and jumped through the portal. They twirled around the mage, picking up flecks of his grey magic before shooting through the windows of the hospital.
The building that had been silent only a second ago erupted in a chorus of wailing. My throat locked as I imagined those poor people being possessed. He was building an army of possessed humans. For what reason, I wasn’t sure.
Retracting my hand, I dismantled the circles and strode to the commune where the remainder of the Sisterhood now resided. Matilda opened the door. “Shouldn’t you be at the Academy?” she said.
“Where’s Giselle?” Forget politeness.
“Guarding Emily. Why?”
“I need help.”
Her eyes brushed over me in a sweep like she was checking for injuries. “What kind of help?”
“The fatal kind.”
“Lex…”
She did a perfect impression of a statue when I was done telling her what I wanted. If I had known it was that easy to shut her up, I would have suggested a suicide mission sooner. After swallowing like she was trying to push down a boulder, she shook herself. “You’re sure there’s no other way?”
“Even if there is,” I said, “I don’t have the time.”
She bit the inside of the cheek. “I’ll discuss it with G.”
Even as she closed the door, the sudden hardness of her voice told me I would get my wish. Because wasn’t that what the Sisterhood had been gunning for all along? My death, to be free of Lucifer’s prophecy?
47
A week later, I got my answer. Surprised that she would use the mirror, I tried not to let my desperation show. Every day I woke up covered in blood. To get by, I’d been drinking two vials of Sophie’s potion just to keep myself together. But I knew I wasn’t getting any better. This needed to happen now.
“You
have a deal,” Giselle said. “The Sisterhood will back you.”
Great. I had their support to die. It felt like a mistake more than a victory.
Without Giselle to train me and Kai to find a replacement for her, my evenings were freed up. The illusion training room wasn’t my favourite place. Giselle had tainted it with her tough love training. But as I sealed the door so nobody could get in, I thought about what it was I needed.
“Hello, room,” I said aloud.
“Alessia,” the MirrorNet voice responded.
“I need you to do some calculations for me. Comb through the MirrorNet database. Look for any information you can about how much force is expelled when a seraph is unmade. Cross-reference that with the strength of my magic circles. Then work out how many demons I would have to drain to get enough power to contain the explosion.”
“Affirmative,” the MirrorNet answered. Lucifer’s spitting image appeared suspended in the middle of the room. I took an involuntary step backwards. Even knowing he wasn’t real, I reacted to him with an inward shudder.
Next, the Mirror created a magic circle around him that perfectly matched the integrated dual lines of my hedge magic and bone magic. And then it began to rotate the circle around Lucifer.
“A suggestion?” the Net said. “Human souls are more powerful than demon souls.”
I blew out an exasperated breath. “Yes, I know. But we’re not going to kill any humans if we can help it.”
“Understood.”
Even the artificial life forms around here were prejudiced against humans. How could we stand a chance?
As the MirrorNet personality worked, the Fae lanterns in the ceiling flickered. That couldn’t be good. “Mirror, what’s happening?”
“The calculations are extensive. They require more power.” I didn’t like the sound of that. Creeping over to the door, I unlocked it and glanced outside. Ah shit. Half the Academy had been powered down.
Streaks of gold sailed through the sky. “It’s the illusion training room,” Curtis shouted at his guard partner.