by Lan Chan
More humans detached from the shadows, bringing with them ingredients and implements for a ritual. All of them were dressed in military fatigues with guns strapped to their back and belts.
“Jessica!” I pleaded. Her top lip curled. She snatched Gabriel’s Key from her finger and tossed it at me. The ring landed in the grass. Heavenly or not, it wouldn’t work with the soul gate erected. She shuddered as though using the ring had been repulsive. I grabbed it all the same. Reaching out, she snatched Sophie’s arm.
“They killed my best friend and you did nothing,” she said. “This isn’t even close to payback.”
I couldn’t work out what this was until one of the military guys brought out another figure from over the slope of the hill where I could just see the outline of a van. The person in his hold didn’t struggle. They travelled under a gap in the tree canopy. For a split second, moonlight hit the crown of the prisoner’s blonde hair. I cursed up a storm in my head. Emily.
It was only when she was pushed closer and she saw me sitting there in the grass that her instincts kicked in. She whimpered behind the tape that had been stuck over her mouth.
Holding her in place just outside of my reach, the military dude pressed the barrel of a gun under her chin. “Shut up,” he said. She immediately quietened.
After years of being terrorised by demons and supernatural magic, there was something crudely horrifying about guns. It set my teeth on edge as I thought about all those weapons the Sisterhood had constructed in their mission to destroy the supernaturals. But these people weren’t Sisterhood. They weren’t even Terrans. They were Human League. Why did humans always have to mess everything up?
While I had been distracted by Emily’s hostage situation, Simone and Jessica had dragged Sophie off to the far side of the lawn. There, somebody set up a cauldron and lit a fire beneath it with a camping stove. The military guys were bringing out one hostage after another, lining them up beside a shaking Emily like ducks in a carnival game.
The sound of propellers caught my attention before the flashing of lights alerted me that there were humans in the air. My knuckles turned white where my hands were bunched around the tufts of lawn. The symbol on the side of the helicopters said one was a police chopper and the other was from a local news station. They did a slow circle around the location of the dimensional rift.
Fae and Nephilim guards ascended into the air, readying themselves for the moment when the magic would interfere with the technology. It came accompanied by a metallic screeching that made me shiver. The police helicopter threw out sparks and started to cough smoke. Its propellers stopped spinning. Both choppers began their untimely descent, Fae and Nephilim trailing behind them.
Judging by the size of the rift relative to its distance, I would say that it was already the size of a football field. It would be even bigger once Declan was finished with his ritual. Already the lights in the city below were being short-circuited by magical interference. If the rift became any bigger, it would take out all technology in the city.
The Human League had always wanted to bring the supernatural world crashing into the human world. What better way to do that than with a mass awakening? The human population was too big for the supernaturals to compel or glamour in its entirety.
A pair of sweaty, hairy knuckled hands grabbed me. Something smashed against the soul gate again as a military guy lifted me up to my feet and pretty much tossed me inside the circle they had drawn around Sophie.
My heart almost busted out of my chest when they gave Lucifer the same treatment. The indignity of it would have set him off big time if he hadn’t been locked up inside the vessel.
While Jessica and Simone were drawing their own circle around the hostages, some of whom were children no older than five or six, Declan approached us. In his hand, he held a vial of Sophie’s potion. The one she had been giving me in order to keep me alive.
He rolled the glass vial between his fingers. The fire beneath the cauldron cracked, spitting blue flames against the small pit that they had dug out of the grass.
“You know what we want,” Declan said to Sophie.
She raised her head defiantly. “Go to hell!”
He shook his head, looking mournful. “That’s what we’re trying to prevent. Were you not just there? Haven’t you seen what our future will be like either way? If the demons win, we will be overrun and enslaved. If the supernaturals win, we will be at their mercy for all eternity. The only hope we have is if we become stronger than they are.”
I snorted. “And how are you going to do that?”
Sophie glanced away as I struggled to grasp at the silent communication that was going on between them. Another boom against the soul gate broke the hum of activity. A lion-shaped boulder hit the side, was thrown off, shook himself, and readied for another assault. It was only Professor Mortimer’s magic that kept Max from running headlong into the soul gate again. In his anxiousness to get to Sophie, Max hadn’t noticed that the rebuff from the soul gate had injured his back legs. One more hit and I wasn’t sure if he would get up.
“Stop it!” Sophie snapped. “Leave them alone.”
“I’m not making them do a thing,” Declan said. “All I want is to have a fighting chance.”
“What you’re going to get is anarchy!” I said. “People are going to riot in the streets. Or worse, they’ll be so scared they’ll lose their minds.”
He shook his head at me. “That’s so very easy for you to say when you’ve been sheltered by the supernaturals since the moment they found out about you. The rest of us can live or die and they wouldn’t even blink.”
I grit my teeth. “You know perfectly well that’s not true. Do you think they would have let you walk among them for so long if they didn’t think you were worth listening to?”
Somebody behind his back snorted. “Listening is just a stalling tactic,” Simone said. “Action is the only thing they understand.”
“What the hell would you know?” I barked. “You’ve been around for two seconds!”
A slow grin spread across her face and touched the very depths of her eyes. “And you know everything, do you?” she humoured me. “Do you perhaps know how the vampires produce their blood juice? How many humans suffer for that trade? Or has your vampire sidekick bitched and moaned to you so much about his poor family dying that you no longer care about what happens to your own kind?”
I opened my mouth, tried to speak and then shut it again. “What?”
She leaned forward, flashing her teeth at me. “The little boys were the easiest. Their souls slipped out of them like bananas out of their skin. It was child’s play.”
Shaking my head, I tried to comprehend what she was saying. “You killed Andrei’s family.”
She wagged a finger at me. “Not technically true. That Nephilim up there killed them. I simply made them forget who they were.”
“And Rachel’s mum?”
Her features pinched. “Rachel needed a push. We were looking for a hedge witch.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You thought she was me. You killed her mum on a hunch.” Anger filled my words, but they were blunted by my shock. All this time I had been looking for a supernatural culprit and the humans had been the ones to cause it all. Why was I surprised? Giselle had been employed in the Dominion prison for years without detection. The Sisterhood had infiltrated supernatural society the same way as supernaturals integrated into the human world. They were all as bad as each other as far as I was concerned. And while they were all bickering, Lucifer was silently building an army.
Right now, my immediate concern was the way Declan was watching Sophie with keen interest. He held up the potion once more. “You know how to do it,” he said.
“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest. His eyes flicked to me.
“Very well.” Turning, he made a gathering motion with his hands. From the back of another van, the military guys carried out more hostages. Sophie hissed at the same time my
heart sank. These hostages were unconscious, their hands and feet bound in chains of silver. The black tar poison splashed across their skin and clothing.
“You sick bastard,” Sophie spat, trying to get to her feet. Simone kicked her back down. I sat there staring, my tongue coated in bitterness. They had taken pups from the Zambian compound.
“How could you?” I breathed.
“We do what we must to keep ourselves alive,” Declan said. He waved the vial in the air again. “Why don’t you tell her where the potion she’s been drinking came from?” This he directed at Sophie.
She turned her head away again. “Your meek little friend here has been hunting supernatural criminals,” he said. “What makes what you did and what we’re doing so different?”
“I didn’t kill anybody!” Sophie cried.
“No,” he said. “You just hunted them, bled them, and then fed their essence to Alessia to keep her alive.”
I blinked slowly, trying to take in what he was saying without the screaming going on in my head. I had already guessed at what Sophie was doing, but to be hit with the truth of it was more shocking than I had anticipated. Her head was downturned.
“I didn’t kill them,” she said again softly, and my heart ached for her. Because of me, she’d embraced the stigma of her great grandfather’s actions and tainted herself with the same brush. If the supernaturals found out, how would they react?
Fury simmered beneath my skin. “So now what?” I said to Declan. But as I stared ahead at him, Lucifer’s prone body gave me my answer. They were going to try and steal his power for themselves. “Are you out of your mind? He’s an archangel! You can’t just harvest him. It’ll destroy us all!”
Narrowing his eyes, Declan placed the vial of potion in front of him on the grass. “That’s why we’re going to do a test run.”
He stared at me unblinking until the cold dread of his intention slid down my rigid spine. “No way,” Sophie said. “You can forget it!”
Declan tapped at his chin. “You can do whatever you like,” he said. “Everything you need is laid out in front of you.” He glanced down at his watch. “But for every fifteen minutes that you delay, one of those shifters is going to die.”
I had every intention of ripping his soul right out of his body. If there weren’t suddenly a dozen rifles pointed right at me, I would have. What strength I would use was beyond me. But if I died, I would die happy knowing I had taken Declan with me. Before he stood up, Declan placed a boning knife into the circle within my reach. “Just in case you decide that it’ll be easier if you’re not breathing.”
With that, he turned his back and walked to where Jessica and Simone were finishing up their circles. Goosebumps scattered down my arms as though a cold breeze had swept past.
“Lex,” Sophie said. “I can’t –”
“Shhh.” I reached out and held her hand, my fuzzy brain working furiously to try and find a solution to our problem. The issue was, there were so many problems I didn’t even know where to begin. And at the back of my mind, Kai’s frantic presence within the soul link kept dragging my attention away.
The shaking of my hand transferred up Sophie’s arm. She placed her other hand over mine, trying to still my convulsing.
“I’m not going to make it,” I told her. Glancing up to the sky, I saw that the elite guard were now also present. Angus’s black wings were ringed in a steely silver glow, his expression harder than granite. “They’ll find a way in eventually,” I assured her, knowing that given long enough, Kai would always find a way to get to me. “You just have to stall until they do.”
She tugged at our intertwined hands. “You will be –”
“No, Soph. I won’t be.”
Even now I felt the seam of my soul coming apart. I hadn’t stopped bleeding from my nostrils the entire time we’d been here. My head felt like someone was taking a scalpel to it. Inside, the pools of my magic were waning. “If it comes down to it and you need time, I want you to perform the ritual on me.”
She let go of my hand in steadfast refusal. “No!”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ll never forgive myself if they murder the kids.”
Sophie shook her head in disbelief, her eyes welling. I took in a shuddering breath of my own, not fully comprehending the words that were coming out of my own mouth.
And then, because we didn’t have enough problems already, Simone clapped her hands and stood up. Declan back-paced so that he was a good distance away from their circle. One of the military guys brought a child hostage up to the circle and placed the little girl within Simone’s reach.
Apprehension clutched at my heart. I reached out and stole the potion that Declan had left on the ground. Drinking it down despite knowing where it had come from, I watched as Simone uttered the words of an unbinding spell.
In the Ley sight, I saw her perform the thing I had been trying to perfect for months now. The unstitching of a soul. She did it with the practiced hand of an expert craftsman. Where I had always been slow and unwieldy, the girl’s soul came away clean. She gave a brutal little scream that made my insides curl. The last tendril of soul that was linked to the Ley lines almost broke apart. I whipped out with my bone magic and tried to hold it in. Simone staggered forward as I countered her command, my raw magic stopping her dead in her tracks.
The butt of a rifle smacked me in the right side of my head. Pain fractured down my jaw and neck as I fell sideways. Sophie yelped and fury ignited on Kai’s side of the soul link. It wasn’t comforting knowing the man who hit me was going to die, because I had let go of the girl’s soul. Simone grabbed it and performed the last rites of her ritual. Declan fell to his knees and threw his arms over his head as a flash of blinding light flared. It lifted into the sky, sailing directly up and into the orbit of the dimensional rift. There, it exploded in a shower of streaking lights. The reverberating boom could be heard all over the city. And in the aftermath of the explosion, the dimensional rift widened by the length of another football field.
In its wake, I heard a groan of dimensional anchors breaking. Blinking back tears, I saw that the rift was now a gaping-wide hole in the horizon. Through it, Seraphina’s spires rose up. The soul link vibrated with horror-filled shock as Kai and I realised the same thing at once. They were going to bring Seraphina down to earth.
55
There would be no going back from this now. The technology might have failed close to the rift, but it was so large that a recording could be made from a great distance. Not to mention the millions of people who were watching it live. The wailing of sirens filled the night.
The thing about high magic was that it required no balance. Mages could conjure something from thin air, drawing from the reserves of their power which they learned to cultivate from a young age. Low magic was different. For every action, there was a consequence. While Jacob had been able to tear apart souls to create a dimensional rift that only affected the focal point he chose, Simone wasn’t able to do the same.
I swallowed hard as the shockwave rippled past the borders of Seraphina. It clashed with the veil barriers the elite guards had erected. In a perverse tainting of magic, the pulse of the soul’s destruction reversed the intention of the magic. Instead of keeping demons out, the veils became a signal. It sucked in demonic energy and tore a hole in the barriers keeping the demons in the Hell dimension.
My mouth gaped as an enormous claw breached the perimeter of the rift. It grabbed at the unstable barrier like it was a piece of tissue paper and tore a hole right through the dimensions. The thing’s arm was the length of a construction crane, long enough that when its shoulder was birthed from the rift, its hand touched the ground with no effort.
The earth groaned like a woman in labour. The ground shifted as the demon stomped its legs to test its balance. My neck grew sore craning to take in the demon in its entirety. The thing was massive. Bigger than the demon that had come through the portal last semester at the Academy. Unlike that demon, t
his thing wasn’t frail looking. In fact, the more I gaped at it, the more it struck me that it might not be a demon. Proportionally, it looked exactly like a man. Balding and with eyes glowing like lava, it boasted a physique of a fighter. The bulging muscles on its shoulders were like small mountain ranges.
“Is that…” Sophie couldn’t finish. Absently, I think I nodded but I was too riveted to really respond. This wasn’t a demon. It was a being from another dimension. The giant took a tentative step forward. It walked clear of the hole it had created. Each step caused the ground to rumble anew. According to Magic History, trespassing across an interdimentional barrier was a painful and disorienting process. The giant proved this by throwing its head back and bellowing its rage. My ears popped and filled with liquid as the humans around me made pained faces and covered their heads.
Elite guards raced from the portals Basil and Professor Mortimer opened, moving to intercept the giant before it could destroy the city. Next to this thing, they appeared like ants crawling away from a curious bully.
Behind the giant, demons spat from the breach, falling from the sky in a suicidal wave. The rift was high enough that even a demon couldn’t survive that kind of a fall. That was the beauty of overwhelming numbers. They had blood and bodies to spare. As the demons fell, they created a pile of stacked carcasses that grew ever higher. It closed the distance between the rift and the earth, making it possible for the ones coming behind to survive the fall.
And then there were the winged demons. Great lumbering beasts that never should have been able to take flight they were so twisted. Once the winged demons had amassed in numbers, they began to ferry the other demons over. Demon cooperation, the thing nobody had counted on. Behind those demons came the ones without form. They slipped through the portal and immediately went in search of vessels.
I heard the MirrorNet’s voice telling me that there were millions of demons in the Hell dimension. Watching them come streaming out of the rift, I knew that the city and soon the world would be overrun. There were simply too many of them.