Gem lifted her head and fixed her sights on Mother’s back. But Gem alone couldn’t stop her. Ice was another of Mother’s elements. Gem could only distract her.
“Half-bloods…” Mother repeated.
“Look again at what your creations have evolved into.”
Mother turned to find Gem on her feet, ice daggers palmed, her demon body aglow with icy crystals. Mother approached, her white skin shimmered and her wings fluttered. “Yes… I see now.”
Behind her, Akil stripped his human appearance away, revealing the lava-veined demon beneath and the king’s markings aglow on his dark skin. Whatever he intended to do, he had better do it fast.
Mother extended her hand to Gem. “My child, it is true. There is perfection in your construction.”
Mammon, hurry.
Why was he just standing there? There had to be a point to this deception. Why else would he manipulate Mother with these promises? Damn him to hell. I couldn’t wait for him to screw up.
I sailed over and hovered above Mammon’s blazing hot presence from behind. “Why are you waiting?”
“These marks did not come with instructions…” he thought back.
The marks had been revealed in his demon form, but nothing had happened.
Gem was on her own.
“Yes.” Mother clutched Gem’s chin, lifting her off her feet. “Yes, I see the future now. I was so focused on the failures that I did not see the one success.”
Gem didn’t struggle or cry out. Her gaze was lost under Mother’s attention, as mine had been many times before. How could I have expected Gem to survive when I knew how potent Mother’s touch was? She was just one half-blood girl surrounded by ancients. Gem would fail.
I materialized beside Mammon and pulled my element in, drawing a storm of air through the tunnels. Beside me, Mammon’s fire flared hotter, fed by the oxygen, and so did the king’s marks. I staggered away, struck by the sudden influx of power. My power had bolstered his.
We needed more elements. We needed them all!
“Gem, ice now!”
Mother spun, dragging Gem with her. The entire weight of two worlds slammed down on me. Mammon staggered and hunched low against the force, but I would not bow to her. Never again would I bow to any beast.
I flung open my wings and winked at Mother. “I am air and everywhere.”
A squall of air and Mammon’s fire slammed into Mother, driving her backward. In her grip, Gem’s ice flared, dazzling and jagged. Gem brought her ice blades up, angled them at Mother’s sides, and grinned. “Survival of the fittest… bitch.”
She plunged the ice through Mother’s ribs, wrenching a scream from Mother.
Mother flung Gem away and whirled on Mammon and me, facing my firestorm. We needed more elements. There were too few of us here to fully subdue her.
“Gem, go!” I called “Get the others!”
Mother lifted her hand and shut off my air as easily as tightening a faucet. I grasped at nothing, stripped of power. No, not again. I would not be weak. She had already taken my wings. She would not take my element too. I mentally reached for the veil and summoned the blade.
Mother glanced at Mammon. His fire still raged, and the demon smiled, knowing he was immune.
The blade landed in my hand. Elemental glyphs danced along its length, and the veil energies dripped from its edges.
Mammon unleashed a river of flame. It galloped across the floor and washed over the mounds of dead demons, igniting their carcasses and filling the chamber with smoke. With the blade in hand, sensing her through the air, I lunged forward. Perhaps Mammon and I could do this. At the very least, we could hold her back. Mother yanked the sword out of my hand. It exploded like fireworks. Wayward elements spun into the smoke. Mammon growled a curse. His fire spluttered. This wasn’t working. Everything we threw at her failed.
No element and no sword. What other weapons did I have?
The smoke suddenly cleared, revealing scorched carcasses, Mammon on his knees, and Mother looming over him. “You betrayed me. You lied to me.”
“I told you what you wanted to hear.”
She would kill him. Despite the marks throbbing along his wings and chest, without the other elements, neither of us was strong enough to stop her.
“You are no god,” he said, lifting his head. “You are the mistake.”
She laughed, and the sound made me want to curl my wings around me and hide. But I was not that demon. I was something else, something new. We had all changed. Mother was obsolete.
Chaos entered the room like a hurricane of living darkness.
“Pick on a demon your own size.” The mad queen tossed lashings of chaos that sparked and unmade everything they licked. Holes appeared in the floor and walls, charred bodies exploded into ash, and the markings on Mammon’s chest flared brighter still.
Mother whirled in time to witness the tendrils of chaos hook through her lattice skin and begin to unravel her being. She looked down, watching in horror as the mad queen’s black eels ate at her legs, her waist, her wings, plucking her apart, unmaking her.
Yes. Yes! It was working.
Chaos against creation. Chaos undoing creation.
I caught Mammon’s eye. “Get the humans out,” he thought. “All of them.”
And leave him alone with the two most powerful demons in existence?
His lips turned up. “You will have to trust me eventually. It may as well be now.”
Trust him?
“Your pride has already killed many. Will you let it be the death of thousands more?”
I had never hated any demon more for being right.
Mother let out an enraged scream and directed all her fury at the mad queen. Chaos tendrils recoiled and unwound from unmaking Mother. They reeled back in. The mad queen blinked suddenly innocent eyes, and inside, the little girl she had once been peered out.
This wasn’t working. We needed all of us. We needed a Court.
“Run!” I hissed.
“You!” Mother flung a hand at me.
Air—my air—picked me up off the floor and flung me against the wall, pinning me there. My chest constricted, throat closing. No air. Couldn’t breathe.
“And you…” She tried to lift Mammon but failed, his marks making him immune to her influence. That only enraged her more. “You…” She dashed toward me. “You are the architect of all this deception. You deem yourself above me? You, a simple demon of my creation? It is time you all learned to respect your mother’s love!” She stopped so close I could only see her. Just her. My entire world. “Love me or die.”
A gunshot rang out—such a human sound among all the chaos and snarling elements. Mother’s head jerked to the side and fragments of her lattice skull exploded outward. Suddenly, I was back in my restaurant, watching a journalist put a gun to her head. Only this time, Torrent held the rifle, and beside him, Christian grinned like the hunter-killer he was.
Mother collapsed, and a second later I fell to my knees beside her, gasping all my air back in. She wouldn’t be out for long. The wound was already stitching itself back together.
“Anti-elemental-etched rounds,” Christian declared, sauntering over and giving Mother’s unconscious body an experimental jab with the toe of his boot. “One hundred percent Institute approved.”
Mother’s body crumpled like paper and collapsed into an ashy mound.
Christian staggered back, alarmed. Had the arrogant demon hunter just saved us all with a single bullet? Maybe I wouldn’t have to kill him after all.
“It can’t be that easy.” I used the cracked wall to steady myself. It was never that easy.
Torrent scoffed. “You call what just happened easy?”
Cracks had appeared in the floors, branching out from the mad queen’s holes. My gaze tracked those cracks to where the mad queen stood. She wasn’t looking at any of us and didn’t even appear to care that we’d disabled the deity. She only had eyes for Mammon. He climbed to his feet and
shook himself all over.
“Where’s Baal?” I asked. He should have been close to the queen.
“Freeing the people,” Torrent replied. “His earth element is the only thing that can break open the tower’s cells.”
The outline of white flakes dissipated, swept into the air by a light breeze. Was it over? I crossed the chamber to the open section of wall and out onto the ledge. The pinkish light was fading and the clouds drifted like torn cotton candy. I could just make out the black speck of Reely Nauti on the mass of ocean below.
A tremble shuddered through the tower. Grit rained from the chamber’s ceiling.
“Er… we might wanna leave now,” Torrent suggested.
“Where’s Gem?” I asked and received blank looks in reply. “Torrent?”
“I thought she was here… with you?”
Mammon narrowed his eyes on the dissipating white flakes. “Deception…” he hissed.
Like all “good” demons, Mother had lied.
Chapter 31
We didn’t have the means to accommodate thousands of refugees. The best we could do was point the freed people toward what had once been the city limits and hope whatever authorities waited on the other side would pick them up. Baal ushered the pale and distraught survivors along, using his sense of control to keep them calm.
Gem wasn’t in the tower. I’d searched high and low, found dozens more caverns filled with dead demons, but not Gem.
“Can’t you do that thing you do with the feathers?” Torrent asked once I’d joined him in the cliff house.
I paced. One, two, three, four, five, six. Turn. “Mother destroyed the feather I gave her.” One, two, three—I couldn’t lose Gem—four, five, six. Turn.
She wasn’t at the house either. But Mammon was. He stood where the tower filled the void in the wall.
This was his fault. He had taken Gem to make Mother think she was the answer to her creation problem.
As I approached Mammon, parts of the tower crumbled away, tumbling down its flanks and coming to rest on the old, scarred network of streets.
“Baal is undoing her work,” Mammon observed.
“What did you say to Gem?”
The fire demon rolled his broad shoulders, dislodging ashes from the edges of his wings. “I told her to trust me.”
My smirk held a razor’s edge. Trust him?
“I wish to find her as much as you do,” he said.
“I believe you because it’s what you do. You take what’s mine.”
He snorted and shook his horned head.
Torrent glowered behind him. “Are you going to stand here bickering or look for her?”
The glyphs scrawled on his skin still held, keeping his demon self at bay, but that didn’t make the water elemental any less right.
“I know how to find her.” The mad queen stood in the doorway. She had her hands cupped in front of her, and as we approached, she held them out and opened one hand, revealing a single feather sculpted of ice. “Found on the rocks by the ocean.”
Partially melted, it lay in a pool of water in the mad queen’s palm.
“Water…” Torrent moved and then paused, reconsidering. “May I?” The queen nodded, and Torrent dipped his fingers into the water, then swore. “It’s not working.”
He yanked up his sleeves and frowned at the swirling marks penned on his forearms. He couldn’t use his element without his demon half. Being demon meant letting Kar’ak out to play. “Keep me in line,” he said. “Just make sure I find her.”
I nodded.
He used his wet fingers to rub out one faded mark, then another. On the third, his hand paused, and his invisible elemental touch slithered into the room. One more mark scrubbed off, and Torrent’s human aspect peeled apart, revealing scaled wings and predatory claws.
Kar’ak smiled his slippery smile. “I know where she is.”
The weakened veil at the site of EcoZone’s energy labs let us through into the netherworld and onto its parched and silent landscape.
“The mother is here,” Baal confirmed. He spread his dragon-like wings and sniffed the air. “Already she taints my home with her changes.”
I turned my head, seeking the direction of the fortress.
I had to get Gem back.
Kar’ak gazed at the netherworld spread before us, his eyes taking on a curious appreciative glow. All he had wanted was to return as a prince. Well, he’d gotten his wish.
Mammon slapped the water demon on the back and huffed a laugh when he stumbled forward. Kar’ak was only marginally smaller than Mammon. They were both formidable demon princes. Did I have Kar’ak’s scheming to contend with as well as Mammon’s? I couldn’t afford to care.
Turning to air strained my already weakening element, but I had no choice. I had seen what Mother’s failed experiments amounted to. I would not allow the same to happen to Gem.
“We face her inside the fortress,” Baal said. “All of us.” His chaos queen regarded him coolly. “And we combine all our elements.” The mad queen lowered her chin. “It is the only way.”
Where lessers had scurried and cawed in the courtyard, they now lay dead in Mother’s wake. As air, I followed the trail of rotting carcasses, scouting ahead, spilling in through open doors. The throne room doors hung open. I spilled inside and stalled at the sight I found.
No!
Gem lay sprawled on her back on the glossy glyph-marked table. Frost glittered across the floors and up the walls as though her element were trying to escape.
Ice crystals hung suspended in the air.
Gem.
Her chest had been cleaved open. Mother had pinned her down to dissect her from the inside out. With her body encased in ice, I couldn’t tell if she was breathing. I couldn’t feel her heartbeat. I couldn’t feel her at all.
I was too late.
Shock drenched me. I hung over the scene, hope slipping through my fingers.
I was her guardian.
And I’d been too late.
“Come, my child…” Mother whispered in her sweet, soothing voice. “Come see this creature for what it was… a marvel of two species combined.”
How can I claim to be good if all I leave behind are corpses?
I materialized at the side of the table, opposite Mother, and took Gem’s hand, freeing it from the ice. Her blue eyes were open, unseeing. What had her final moments been like? Had she cried out for me? Had she held on until the last possible moment, hoping I would come like I had in Boston? But I hadn’t arrived in time. I hadn’t saved her. What kind of angel was I if I couldn’t save the ones I loved?
“You killed her.” The words didn’t sound like mine. They had taken on an icy edge borrowed from Gem. Mother had taken my wings, and now she had taken my Gem. Wrath burned like an inferno within.
“Of course.” Mother’s milk-white lips quirked. “But it is no loss. I will craft many more like her.”
“They won’t be her.” Words. Distant. Detached. Spoken because she expected a reply, but my thoughts churned with a terrible vengeance.
Mother’s expression barely changed. She didn’t care that she had ended a life. She wasn’t capable of caring, just creating. “Of course they will be the same. You are all my creations. You are all mine to do with as I please.”
I carefully let go of Gem’s cold hand. She had been the little icy half-blood I’d taught to be human, taught to hope and dream. She had only just begun to live.
I shot out a hand and clamped my fingers around Mother’s throat, yanking her close. The touch burned and crackled, pain lashing up my arm. I didn’t care. Pain was good. I knew pain. Pain made me real and reminded me who I was.
Mother’s glare pulled me in. The lure of her power tried to wrap around me and smooth the pain away, but she would not seduce me again. I was not hers. Gem hadn’t been hers. We had evolved beyond what Mother had made us. She had no claim on us, not anymore.
“You’re just demon,” I hissed.
Her
lips twitched, all the colors of the veil swirled in her eyes, and her whispers started inside my thoughts.
“Mammon, now!” Baal commanded.
Vast dark wings opened behind Mother. The king’s marks sparked alive, burning across the wings’ expanse and tossing out the kind of heat that melted worlds. Mother flinched in my grip and tried to writhe free. Air rushed in through the windows at my silent call. I pulled it from Mother too. She was the veil. That meant her elements were also mine. Air. I breathed it in, dragging it from far and wide, washing it over Mammon’s wings, flaring his fire hotter, feeding his heat.
Mother swung her head back to me. Water bubbled from between her lips. She spluttered and lashed against my hold.
Torrent or Kar’ak. Neither or both. It didn’t matter who.
Good.
Stone trembled all around, reshaping, undoing the fortress walls and sealing us inside a cavern. Baal.
But we needed ice to close the circle. We needed Gem.
I shoved Mother backward into Mammon’s heat. Stone reached out to embrace her, but where it touched her skin, the rocks crumbled to dust. Mother whirled in a flurry of color, flung open her wings, unsheathed her claws, and screamed at the three demons. Kar’ak, Baal, and Mammon held their ground, each ablaze in their element.
“Gem…” I pressed my hands to her face, melting ice under my touch. “We have a deal, remember?” Her head rolled to one side. I righted it and peered into her shallow eyes. “You do not get out of an agreement with me so easily.” I pressed my lips to hers and breathed into her. Her chest lifted, ice cracking. Frost clawed at my mouth, locked on my hands, and climbed up my arms. Breathe. Again, I pushed air into her lungs. Breathe for me. Live.
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