“Yes, you were meant to be his final sacrifice, and Henna interrupted him.”
It looks like it somehow worked. We never found Banner’s body, just ashes. This cosmic thing must have taken it over. Sounds like Banner was his perfect host.”
“So, why did he have to make a pact to take over Banner’s body? His power is immense. Why not just take the host?”
“I don’t know. There seem to be rules to this whole thing that we’re not aware of, but I’m beginning to think the High Witches know much more than they’re letting on about this dimension and the creatures that inhabit it.”
“Well, we need to get out of here fast and find out what they know. He seems to have gathered enough support. And now he’s invited his comrades to join him and procreate and become all fucking powerful so they can purge this world.” She snorted. “Humanity has its flaws, but it’s the flaws that make you unique and interesting.”
Purge sounded ominous. “We need to find out more about what form this purge is going to take. He has an army of supernaturals, around fifty at least, just in that room. It can’t be all he’s got. There have to be other secrets hidden in this place.” I was back on my feet. “We need to get out there and explore some more.”
“With those brown robes patrolling the place? No. What we need is for the IEPEU to storm this place and put a stop to this,” Mira said.
How long had it been? I glanced at my watch. Shit, the damn thing was dead. Dead. Oh fuck. What affected analogue watches this way, aside from the battery dying which I know it hadn’t because it had been issued by the IEPEU specifically for this case, and the batteries would have been checked.
“What, what is it? You’re face has gone pale.”
“I think there may be some kind of electromagnetic field around this place.”
Mira’s eyes narrowed. “Enough to make your time keeping device fail.” Her eyes widened. “Enough to disrupt our trackers.”
My heart sank. “We can’t wait for them to come to us. We’re going to have to find a way out.”
15
“Paimon!” Mira grabbed my cuffed wrist. “The psychic waves this emits are completely alien to your planet. There is no way this Malachi would have shielded against it.”
Hope flared in my chest. Focusing my mind, I sent out the message. “Paimon, can you hear me. Mira and I are in danger. We need you. We need you right now.”
Nothing happened and Mira growled in exasperation. “It has to work. Maybe he is punishing me for avoiding him.”
“No. He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t leave us in danger just to prove a point.”
Mira arched a brow, but then shrugged conceding my point. “Yes, you are right. Despite my anger toward him, I cannot deny that he is a noble soul.”
As if summoned by her generous thoughts, Paimon appeared before us, but he wasn’t alone. A female clung to his arm. I recognized that beautiful, regal, pale blue face.
Alara.
Paimon glanced about. “What is this place?”
Swallowing the bitter lump in my throat, I answered, filling him in as quickly as I could on our current predicament, including the fact that Malachi now had Aaron in his clutches.
Alara released Paimon and walked around the room, examining the books and the paintings. “It is a quaint habitat.”
“It’s not a habitat, it’s a prison.” Mira snapped. “The door may be open but there is nowhere to run. Guards patrol and everyone is brainwashed.”
Alara’s blue eyes hardened. “I do not believe I addressed you, sentinel.”
Mira bristled, her body vibrating with the need to dismember.
An answering lick of anger flared in my chest. How dare this Alara speak to my friend that way. “Mira’s no longer a sentinel and she can speak when she likes.”
Alara looked to Paimon as if expecting him to butt in and deliver a smack down. His lips tightened, but he didn’t say anything. Just as well, because otherwise I would have unleashed on him. He’d given me this cuff in good faith, and I’d used it because this was an emergency, but he’d brought his bitch along for the ride. Argh. I hated that this still bothered me so much.
“I can get you out of here,” Paimon said. “But I can only take one at a time.”
Mira folded her arms across her chest. “In that case, you better take Alara back first.”
“Wait. We may need her.” As much as it pained me to say it, four was better than three if we had any chance of getting out of this place and taking Aaron with us, because there was no way I was leaving without him.
Alara’s frosty expression thawed somewhat.
“You wish to save your friend, Aaron?” Paimon said. “He must mean a great deal to you?”
Was he fishing? Did he think we were lovers? Fuck it. Let him wonder. “Yes. He does.”
Alara’s lips twitched. “I would be happy to assist in this mission.” Her hand went to her hip where a curved blade sat snug in its sheath. “It has been too long since my blade tasted blood.”
Was it creepy that she reminded me of Malina? “Most of these people are innocent. They’re in thrall to a cosmic god called Malachi, so if we can avoid bloodshed that would be great.”
She shrugged. “Very well, there are many ways to incapacitate without maiming.”
“Alara has trained under the general of her royal guard for many years,” Paimon said.
Was that a hint of pride in his tone? There was no time for jealousy if we wanted to survive.
“You say that your friend’s mind has been tampered with?” Alara said.
“Yes.”
“Then he will not come with us willingly, and accosting him may alert the other guards. Not to mention, you have no clue as to where his quarters are.”
All valid points, and if the roles were reversed and I was her, I’d point out exactly the same things. If Aaron wasn’t my best friend, I’d be doing the sane thing—getting my arse out of here and coming back for him later. But he was my friend, and there was no way I was leaving without him.
Paimon stepped back and held out his hand to me. “We will slip into the in between and search the facility.”
Alara glanced at his hand and then up at me, her expression suddenly closed. Did she know our history? Did she know how we felt about each other? The thought made me feel sick and dirty. This was his betrothed and I was nothing, could be nothing to him.
I turned to Alara. “Would you mind if I hitched a ride with you?”
Her eyes flared in surprise and then she nodded. “Of course not.” She held out her hand and I slipped mine into it.
The world flickered and then turned gray. We were still in our room, but a haze hung over everything making it difficult to decipher much detail.
Paimon appeared a moment later clutching Mira’s hand. Of course, with her powers muted she wouldn’t be able to walk the in between without assistance. But her tense jaw and stiff back told me she wasn’t happy about having to make friendly with the lord that had fired her arse.
We slipped through the door and out into the gray corridor, it was like walking through dead mist. The haze didn’t touch my skin, and there was no scent or texture to anything. Alara maintained a grip on my hand as we took the stairs to the upper floor. The brown robes had to be somewhere on this level. We walked past the room filled with sleeping Yaksha and stopped. There were three closed doors.
“I need to check inside.”
Alara nodded and pulled me through the door. The room was empty, just two beds and an empty bookcase. The next two rooms were the same. Spare rooms waiting for more families perhaps?
We slipped by the meeting room where Malachi had been speaking to his brethren. The door was wide open, and the room was empty. Paimon took the curve in the corridor up ahead. Alara quickened her pace to keep up. More empty corridors and closed rooms—once again all empty. This was getting us nowhere.
Paimon stopped. “Carmella, I can sense the cavernous nature of this facility. With
out direction, we could be searching for hours, and if time is of the essence for this purge, then surely your focus should be on getting back to headquarters and briefing them on what you’ve discovered.”
My gut tightened and I reflexively squeezed Alara’s hand.
“Paimon,” Alara said. “Just a few more minutes. We do not leave a man behind unless there is no other alternative.”
Paimon sighed. “The guard motto. Yes. Of course.”
I shot her a grateful glance and she offered me a tight smile. A flight of steps and one more corridor later hope was beginning to flag. Where were the brown robes? Had they finished patrolling already? We were on the third floor of this building, not a single window so far, not in any of the rooms. The place was like an underground hive, and who knew, maybe that was exactly what it was. Alara tugged me to a halt.
“What is it?”
“Paimon, do you sense it?” Alara asked.
“What is it?” Mira echoed my question.
A light appeared in the gray, swirling like a helix of DNA, it expanded and blurred and then took form. A woman or a man, I wasn’t quite sure. The features and the body were androgynous, and its eyes were lemon shaped and slanted.
“I thought I sensed an unassimilated presence,” the creature said. It looked about. “What is this place?”
“Who are you?” Paimon asked.
But I recognized that voice. “Yule. You’re a cosmic being.”
Yule turned its attention to me. “Malachi does not detect you, which means his control is not infallible. You are fortunate he does not suspect. The humans who resisted him have been incinerated.”
“What?”
So, some humans had been able to resist him. But that meant it wasn’t my supernatural hybrid nature, or Mira’s other dimension nature that had protected us. Maybe our brains were just wired differently. It would explain why not all the supernaturals from the red zone had made it here. The ones who’d resisted had been torn to shreds by the ones he’d managed to get his hooks into.
Yule nodded. “You intend to escape?”
“Um, yes.”
Another nod. “That is wise. But there is no exit from this place without Malachi’s approval. No windows or doors. To leave, your body would need to be broken down into its subatomic particles and channeled above ground. Only a cosmic being can achieve this.” Its gaze lingered on Paimon and then shifted to Alara. “I sense you are different. Not human, not cosmic and yet you are able to shift through time and space.” It made the connection. “You came to retrieve your comrades. Good. Then leave now and alert your human authorities. Evacuate your reality before it is too late.”
“Evacuate? We can’t evacuate a whole reality.”
“If you do not, then you will either die or be assimilated. The souls of those who resist the assimilation will be absorbed by Malachi. He has developed a taste for such things during his sojourn on this plane. His connection to humanity has corrupted him, and yet he does not see it, and now I fear others of my kind are being drawn to this dimension. If this reality falls prey to Malachi, then other realities will surely follow.”
“You don’t agree with this, do you?”
“No. And neither do our elders.”
“Then why don’t they do something. Stop him.”
“Because that would require interfering with the natural order. If Malachi’s plan succeeds, we will say it was meant to be, and if Malachi’s plan is somehow thwarted, then we will say that was meant to be also.”
Anger flared in my chest. “Well, that’s just plain stupid.”
“Our race is as old as time. Enlightened, ancient and without tether. We have watched over the cosmos forever. Our duty is to record but never intervene. Each universe, each dimension, every reality is a different branch in a cosmic experiment and our task has always been to keep a record of the rise and fall of every civilization. Humanity has many forms, but here, in this dimension where humanity is most fragile and most primitive, it is also the most beautiful in its complexity. I believe that this is what has lured Malachi and seduced him. He says he desires to enlighten humanity but in truth he desires to be human.”
“But he can’t. Can he?”
Yule smiled wanly. “No, never truly human, but if he has truly found his vessel, then he will be tethered to this plane for as long as he desires.”
There was something in her tone, a clue and then it struck me. She’d said if he has found his vessel. In the meeting, the others had assumed Banner was his vessel. “But you don’t believe he’s found his vessel.”
Her smile deepened. “No. I do not. His rash actions smack of desperation. The act of a man on borrowed time.”
“I don’t understand why he didn’t take a body before this?”
“I do not know. But I suspect there was something preventing his access to this plane. He was merely an observer until recently.” She turned to glance behind her. “My brethren come. You must leave this place. Go now while you can.”
“I can’t leave without my friend, Aaron. He’s a brown robe.”
“In that case, he is lost to you. The brown robes have the strongest connection to Malachi. He has infused them with an iota of his cosmic energy. They are his eyes and ears.”
“There has to be a way to break the hold.”
She shook her head. “No. There isn’t. Only Malachi can release them. And he won’t. Not willingly. The connection grants him power and a stronger foothold.” She melted back into the gray. “Leave now, I will distract them.”
Alara pulled me into her arms, and the scent of jasmine filled my head. “I’m sorry,” she whispered and then we were fragmenting into a billion pieces.
***
We were above ground, in the middle of nowhere, just grass and trees and the moon taunting us from behind a cloud cluster.
“Where is it?” I scanned the countryside. “It’s here, right under our fucking feet.”
“Yes,” Paimon said. “I can sense life down there.”
“Where are we?” Mira turned around in circles.
“I don’t know. But we need to find out. We need to call in the IEPEU.”
Paimon grabbed me around the waist. “Alara, Mira, wait here. We will shift to a road and look for clues as to our location.”
The world fragmented and then re-converged. We were on the side of a slip road. “There’s a sign.”
Derbyshire.
Light from a small service stop blinked at me from between the trees. “Can you drop me off there? I need to call in.”
Paimon whisked me to the service station, materializing around the side of the building out of view.
“Thanks.” I made to head off and he grabbed my elbow.
“Carmella. I didn’t mean to bring her. She just grabbed hold of me as I shifted to come to you.”
The pang of pain and flutter in my pulse were absent. In its place was nothing but weariness. “It’s okay. I’m glad she was there.” I smiled. “She’s nice.”
Paimon blinked down at me in surprise.
“Now, go get them while I make this call.”
He opened his mouth to say something else but I was already turning away, focused on the mission at hand. I had a phone call to make and we had a purge to prepare for.
16
The whomp, whomp of choppers and the buzz and whirr of high tech machinery filled the silent night with activity. We huddled on the outskirts at the edge of the woodland watching as the IEPEU did a sweep of the area.
Murdoch stood speaking to a technician who was wearing a headset, and Melody and Kevin broke away from another tech to jog over to us, battling the wind churned up by the choppers overhead.
“We’re having trouble getting readings,” Kevin said. “The electromagnetic field around this place is disabling most of our tech.”
“But we are able to ascertain the depth of structure. At least 0.80 kilometers.
I did the math in my head. “So what? Half a mile?”
Paimon had been right to be wary about exploring the whole structure. “Is there any way in? We need to get back down there. We need to get Aaron out!”
“Negative,” Melody said. “Your cosmic friend was right. The place is inaccessible aside from shifting in or out.” Her gaze flickered to Paimon, her expression turning speculative.
Inaccessible to everyone except the djinn it seemed. With their help, we could save our people. We could get Aaron back. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“You think they’ll go for it?”
They had to. “Only one way to find out.” I turned to Paimon and Alara. “We need your help. You’re the only ones that can get our people out. We need a bunch of djinn.”
His brows shot up.
“I think it’s time our people spoke to your people about an alliance.”
Paimon’s lips tightened. “You know the situation with the council. There is too much dissent, and the last thing you would wish to do is stir up the faction that wishes to claim your world.”
“Well, the way I see it, if they don’t help us there may not be a world left to claim. If the cosmic gods get their claws into it first...”
“Paimon,” Alara said. “There is another possibility we must consider. What if this threat finds its way into our world? We have enough to deal with without having to worry about a secondary threat. Surely working with the humans to eliminate it now will benefit us all.”
Paimon’s expression was speculative. “Yes, you’re right of course. But I doubt the council will see it that way. However, we must do what we can to convince them otherwise.”
Doh, hadn’t I just said that? “Paimon, we need to organize a meeting with your council. We need an alliance, and we need it now.”
◆◆◆
The tracker was out and the muting chip had been removed also. The back of my neck healed in seconds.
Mira stretched and morphed back into her adult avatar. “That is so much better.”
The doctor on call that evening tried to grasp her wrist to take her pulse and she shook him off.
Embracing Magick: an Urban Fantasy Novel (The Witch Blood Chronicles Book 3) Page 9