Fiery Edge of Steel (A NOON ONYX NOVEL)

by Archer, Jill

  As before when we’d discussed this case, reactions to my theory were mixed. Everyone agreed that my logic was sound, but my evidence was thin. What we’d discovered so far wasn’t enough to pass judgment on “Vodnik,” let alone execute him. Even Ari (who’d executed an untold number of demons before enrolling at St. Luck’s) agreed. I looked at Fara.

  “You’re the gap filler and glamour expert. Know any spells that will strip a glamour? Or that will reveal a demon’s true face? If we could cast something like that over Vodnik it would at least tell us whether he’s really who he says he is.”

  Ari’s signature zinged painfully and he gave Fara a piercing look. “Do you? I thought only Archangels knew revelation spells.”

  “That’s right,” Fara confirmed.

  “I know Revelare Lucere,” Rafe said quietly.

  “Really?” Fara looked impressed. Ari’s signature flared. But then again, Ari had made his position on unauthorized spellcasting clear last semester. He didn’t approve of it. Thought it was wildly dangerous. Thought it could result in all kinds of unintended consequences.

  “A botched spell is no joke,” he said to Rafe. “Just ask Fara.” I inhaled sharply. Is that what happened to Fara? A botched spell?

  “I don’t have to cast it,” Rafe said. “I’m just telling Noon I know it.”

  “And you can cast it without botching it?” Ari said dubiously.

  Rafe shrugged. And that, I thought, was the difference between Peter Aster and Raphael Sinclair. Peter would have bristled and been insulted, tried to convince whoever was calling his competence into question that they were ignorant and incorrect. Rafe, on the other hand, didn’t care what anyone else thought about his spellcasting abilities. Which (combined with what he’d shown he could do so far) had me trusting him that much more.

  “What’s Revelare Lucere?” I asked. “What does it do?”

  “It’s a revelation spell,” Rafe said. “Its name means ‘to reveal a shining brightness.’ The brightness being a reference to Lucifer’s Morning Star. It’s one of the oldest spells there is. Some Angels think it’s the spell Joshua was referring to in Joshua, one, twenty—” Rafe looked pointedly at Fara.

  “‘We must look demons in the face,’” she said. It was the first time she’d quoted the Book since the Elbow. But, though her voice had the same scratchy tone it always did, it sounded far less preachy now and much more selfassured.

  “It’s good to see you quoting again, Fara,” I said.

  “I never stopped believing, Noon,” she said huffily. “I just realized that it’s the truth behind the words that matter more than the words themselves.”

  Personally, I’d never been able to decide if Joshua 1:20 was my favorite or least favorite Joshua quote. But that was probably because, as Fara had just suggested, it was the one I felt was the most truthful. And therefore the most frightening.

  “How is it that you know an Archangel spell, Rafe?” I asked. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe he could cast it, but I did want to know how he’d learned it.

  He cleared his throat and gave me a self-deprecating smile. “Right after I was kicked out of the Joshua School, I stole Friedrich Vanderlin’s spell book.” Everyone looked shocked. Rafe had to be the boldest—or the stupidest—Angel I had ever known. “Anyway,” he continued, like he was telling the story of how he’d elected to take an extra sugar cube for his coffee instead of the story of how he’d pilfered an Archangel’s most prized possession, “after you were attacked by the hellcnight,” he said to me, “I spent some time in Cnawlece’s library, studying, because you always said I never did. I learned some new spells. Revelare Lucere was one of them.”

  Well, huh.

  “In any case,” Rafe continued, ignoring our stunned expressions, “if it’s cast over a demon, it will force them to reveal their true form. Revelare Lucere is the spell Karanos Onyx ordered the Angels to use to unveil Jezebeth before he was executed. So . . . what’s our plan, then? Find Vodnik, cast Revelare Lucere over him, and if he shifts into Grimasca, kill him?”

  He looked straight at me when he asked it. In an instant, we were back to the first day of the semester. The first day I’d met him.

  I take it you’d rather get this over with . . . Do it right. Put the guy out of his misery without all this pomp and . . . circumvention . . . That’s what you’re telling him, right? So, what about you? Would you do it? Could you do it?

  “Yes,” I said, meeting Rafe’s taupe-eyed gaze. “That’s the plan.” Rafe held my gaze for a moment and then shrugged.

  “Okay, then. Let’s do it.”

  Ari’s signature was chaotic. I was sure it was in part because we were possibly headed into a lethal demon fight, but also because big, ancient spells had always bothered him.

  When we reached Stone Pointe, the dirt courtyard inside the moat was deserted. Considering the weather, I imagined everyone was deep within their own small shelters, hiding behind their door curtain and hoping their thatched roof didn’t leak. We crossed the wooden bridge over the moat and walked up to the keep’s large front door.

  This time I didn’t wait for Rafe to open it for me. I grabbed the iron ring and pulled.

  Vodnik and Zella were waiting for us inside.

  Vodnik sat on a huge bone throne. There was no other way to describe it. The massive skeleton of some immense sea creature had been used to construct the one and only oversized chair in the room. The dead fish’s macabrely twisted spine formed the back of the throne while its empty rib bones formed impressive wings at its side. At the top, nearly three stories above our heads, the leviathan head of this great sea monster towered above the throne and appeared poised to devour every occupant in the room. Its jaws were unhinged and its multiple rows of teeth were still intact. Clearly, the throne had been built to intimidate anyone and everyone standing before it.

  I imagined this was the throne of the giant king who had once ruled here. Because the throne dwarfed Vodnik, its effect might have been diminished but for Vodnik’s signature. It was furnace hot, which made it feel like—to Ari and me anyway—the belly-of-the-beast throne where Vodnik sat was a kiln of white-hot waning magic. I willed myself not to raise my hand up to shield my face. It wouldn’t do any good and would only call attention to the fact that Vodnik’s signature felt blazingly hot to me. Zella sat off to one side, on some stone debris that had fallen from the keep sometime in the distant past.

  Stone Pointe was even more dilapidated than I’d previously thought. Part of the roof was missing, as well as half of one of the back walls. As I’d guessed from looking at the outside, the keep had once been many stories tall. But in present times, much of it had sunk in the muck. Glancing around this crumbling, makeshift throne room, I realized the rest of the keep had long since fallen apart. The floor I stood on, which looked like it may have been reinforced with stone blocks and some sort of lime mortar, was littered with fallen beams, dirt, and dead leaves. Above us, nestled into walls that no longer enclosed rooms, were remnants of the keep’s formerly grand features. Large ornate fireplaces, gaping window holes, iron hooks that might have once held enormous tapestries, deep decorative niches, massive stone carvings . . . There were at least three oversized stories of these crumbling architectural details.

  How fine this keep must have once been!

  This keep must be as old as the Meadow. In fact, Stone Pointe had likely been whole and glorious when asphodel flowers had still bloomed in the Meadow. Hadn’t that boy Paulus from the children’s tale “The Grim Mask of Grimasca” stayed in a giantess’ house? Maybe the giantess’ house had been one of the homes surrounding this keep’s castle. If “Vodnik” was Grimasca, it seemed only too fitting that a demon who was rumored to be older than the Apocalypse would try to take over an ancient pre-Apocalyptic keep.

  “What do you think?” Vodnik said, gesturing to his huge bone throne. “I dug it out of the bottom of the keep last month.”

  I kept my face neutral. What did he expect me
to say? Words like intimidating and impressively disgusting sprang to mind along with over-the-top and can’t possibly be real.

  Thankfully, though, Vodnik didn’t seem overly interested in my reaction to his keep’s decor. “We’re waiting to hear what you found at the Meadow,” he said, eyeing the four of us and Virtus. Zella sat facing Vodnik and looking miserably uncomfortable. I was sure the last place she wanted to be was in a room with three waning magic users. She wouldn’t have been able to feel the waning magic radiating off of Vodnik, but her gut instincts to avoid it were spot-on.

  “Ms. Rust can hear what we have to say later,” I said as casually as I could. I wanted Zella, a defenseless pregnant Hyrke, as far away as possible from the likely line of waning magic fire that would soon erupt. But Vodnik waved off my concerns for his inamorata.

  “What did you find?” he asked impatiently.

  “Nothing,” I said. “But we were attacked by a hellcnight.”

  Vodnik’s eyes narrowed and his signature pulsed. “You’re alive so I gather it isn’t.” Vodnik still had a heavy Avian accent, but he didn’t seem to stumble over his words as much as he had last night.

  I shook my head. “The demon lives,” I said. Vodnik’s eyebrows rose in disbelief. Virtus growled.

  “Two Maegesters, two Angels, and a tiger couldn’t kill one hellcnight?” He tsked mockingly and rose from his throne. Rain poured in through the collapsed parts of the ceiling. Now probably wouldn’t be a good time to tell him that we weren’t in fact Maegesters but rather Maegesters-in-Training.

  Vodnik ratcheted up his signature and I realized “white- hot” had merely been “pre-heat” for him. Ari’s signature fired in response, gaining heat at an alarming rate. Suddenly, it was crackling and blisteringly hot. I felt the spell Impenetrable slip over me just as I was shaping a waning magic shield. But Vodnik didn’t walk toward me. He walked toward Zella, who jumped up from her seat and started backing away.

  Vodnik grinned maliciously. “I know what you said in your complaint,” he said to her, almost near enough to touch her. “And I know what your sister said in hers.” Vodnik grabbed the hem of Zella’s dress. She stifled a shriek. “I know,” he said, pulling her slowly toward him, “because the Boatman told me.”

  “Now,” I murmured to Rafe, giving him the sign to cast Revelare Lucere. I was a second away from blasting Vodnik anyway. It was clear that the demon in front of us was no kind and benevolent patron and I wanted to know which demon we were dealing with.

  I screamed at Zella to “Run!” She looked terrified, but managed to extricate her dress from Vodnik’s grasp before he actually touched her. She scrambled toward the heavy oak doors we’d just come through, but in her haste to get away she stumbled headlong onto the ground. Virtus paced and growled and Zella started shrieking. Rafe began to cast Revelare Lucere. It wasn’t a spell he could cast with the flick of his wrist so while he was muttering what seemed like an endless string of ancient words and phrases, Vodnik had a chance to shape his magic into a great big flaming spear. He threw it straight toward me.

  Zella got up from the floor and mercifully made it to the door. She struggled to push it open. Her legs were cut and bleeding and she clutched at her middle, grimacing in pain. Vodnik’s spear soared toward me, its shaft fiery and dark. I remembered how effective some of my darker magic blasts had been. Fear laced through my veins the way frost forms on a windowpane. Fara cast something over Ari.

  Vodnik’s fiery spear glanced off my waning magic shield with such force, my teeth knocked together. The reverberation of magical spear against shield doubled my vision for a moment. Thank Luck I’d avoided a direct hit. But I underestimated the demon in front of me. Most demons who throw magic (versus shaping it for hand-to-hand combat) need time to “reload.” Most waning magic users weren’t powerful enough to throw two near-simultaneous blasts. Unfortunately, Vodnik (or Grimasca) was atypical. He threw a second, darker fiery spear almost immediately after the first. The second one hit me.

  Right in my thigh, which exploded in pain. I howled and fell to the floor. My face bounced off the corner of a rock, slashing the skin on my cheek. Three inches higher and it would have hit my temple and been the end of me. I looked up and shook my head to clear it. Blood dripped down my cheek, jaw, and neck. Zella finally escaped from the room. Vodnik took a flying leap toward me. He snarled ferociously, wielding a flaming sword that was aimed right at my neck. Ari gave me a look so fleeting and so full of regret that I later thought I might have imagined it. And then he leapt up to meet Vodnik wielding a flaming sword of his own. Rafe finished casting Revelare Lucere over Vodnik just as he and Ari’s swords clashed. There was a snapping, crackling sound and then a burst of fuchsia, gold, and aquamarine sparks filled the air. Vodnik and Ari fell to the ground together and started shifting.

  Both of them.

  I stared in horror as Vodnik’s slick, dark green skin turned translucent and his snake eyes changed from gold to red. His mossy beard disappeared as he grew what looked like an infinite number of jagged teeth in an oversized jaw. But Ari’s transformation was even more shocking. He morphed into a demon that looked like Jezebeth had, with greenish black scales, a long, thick tail, and those half dozen long, ridged, lance-like spirals. And wings. Ari had wings. He’d shifted into a drakon.

  “You botched the spell!” I shouted to Rafe, who looked as stupefied as the rest of us.

  Ari tipped his beast head back, opened his now massively large jaw, and brayed. The sound of it reverberated off of the stone walls and escaped out into the darkening evening. If the people of the Shallows weren’t hiding in their huts before, they would be now. Ari unfurled his wings, almost as if he were stretching them or testing them for the first time. Then he curled them back in and lowered his head toward the hellcnight in front of him. The lance-like spirals were now aimed toward the hellcnight like scythes on reaping day. The hellcnight, whose form had remained humanoid, still held his fiery sword as it advanced on Ari’s drakon form.

  “Exsignare!”—Extinguish his signature—I called to our group, firing up my own fiery weapon, a flaming falchion like the one I’d shaped in the Meadow earlier today. I’d deal with Ari the drakon and Rafe’s botched spell after we killed the hellcnight.

  As a group we converged on the hellcnight. It was over in seconds. The hellcnight rushed Ari. Ari didn’t even spare us a glance. He ran the hellcnight threw on one of his lance-like bone spirals and reared. Gravity impaled the hellcnight further. Ari brought his forelegs to the ground with a thunderous rumble and shook the hellcnight off. The hellcnight’s lifeless body landed a few feet from where Ari stood. I thought he would leave off then but either battle rage or confusion over the botched spell got the better of him and he stomped on the hellcnight once more and then—and this was the part I could never forget—Ari bit the hellcnight’s head off. Some measure of humanity must have reasserted itself then because he did nothing else. He opened his mouth and dropped the head. It rolled to a stop a foot or so from where I lay, panting in shock, the pain in my thigh nearly undoing me. Ari stared at the hellcnight’s head and then at me.

  Ari wouldn’t attack me, would he?

  But then he gave a raucous cry and was gone. He unfurled his wings and flew off. I was left staring at the place where Ari had once stood, completely and utterly dumbfounded. And then the full impact of what had just happened started to sink in. If Rafe had botched the spell, Ari might never be human again.

  I rounded on Rafe, who also still looked fairly stupefied by it all. Suddenly, I didn’t care that Rafe was a powerful spellcaster who had taken an oath to serve as my Guardian. I didn’t care that we’d fought rogare demons and nearly drowned together. I didn’t care that I’d been given the memory of his dead brother’s funeral. Or that he’d been nice to me on occasion, like the night he’d made tea for me when I couldn’t sleep or the day we laughed over me throwing that sandwich tray into the Lethe. I didn’t care that he’d tried to help me learn to control my
fire, or that he knew a stupidly titled spell that could safely douse me when I couldn’t. I didn’t care that his touch had healed me. Or that he’d saved Delgato’s life or that he still tried to make friends with Virtus no matter how many times Virtus hissed and spit at him. I didn’t care that if I cut ties with him he’d never be paired with another ward. That he’d never be accepted back into the Joshua School, never accompany another Maegester into the field again. I didn’t care that he’d spend the rest of his life researching dull, theoretical academic questions in some dusty archive library or that his only company would be an endless stack of books. Because that’s all he was fit for. That was as it should be.

  “You botched the spell, Rafe,” I said, barely repressing my magic.

  “I didn’t,” he said in a hollow voice. And then he swallowed and looked away. “Ari shifted. The spell worked. It just revealed two demons instead of one.”

  I don’t know what I’d expected him to say. Well, that’s not exactly true. I had expected some sort of apology or maybe a vague denial, but not this.

  “Members of the Host don’t shift.”

  “Demons do.”

  “Ari’s not a demon! I know he’s not. Why would he hide something like that?” I said, getting more hysterical by the moment. “What would he possibly have to gain?” I shouted, my voice hoarse with emotion. “We live in a world where demons are worshipped, Rafe. If Ari were a demon, why wouldn’t he want to be adored?”

  Fara placed her hand gently on my arm. “You need to be healed and then we can talk about this.”

  Her calmness frightened me. The fact that she wasn’t aghast at what Rafe had done. Was this just the Angels closing ranks? The cold spot in the pit of my stomach told me otherwise.

  “Fara,” I said, my voice scared. “You know what a botched spell looks like.” I could barely ask my next question. But I had to know.