by Lucy Auburn
Iva said, “I’m sorry,” and slashed her own knife down the pale flesh of her arm, her blood spraying across my face, the door, the ground. “Occludolos.”
I screamed. The dagger slipped from my limp hand. I reached out to catch my little sister as she fell, her mangled arm streaming out blood unabated.
“No!” Both the woman at the gate and I cried out, for different reasons.
My sister’s blood swam in rivulets towards the glowing gap.
The door closed on the woman’s fury.
Iva’s eyes fluttered shut as she slipped away, towards a place I couldn’t follow.
My dark hunter senses calmed all at once, telling me that the danger had passed. But I knew better, and I sobbed with fear and grief, picking Iva up and carrying her towards the light just outside. Her pulse was thready and weakening beneath my fingertips.
“Stay with me,” I whispered, tears falling down my face. “Stay with me, Iva. Don’t you dare go anywhere.”
It should’ve been me. I’d made a fatal mistake, I realized: I aimed my blade at my enemy. But I should’ve pointed it straight at my chest, and carved out my own heart with its sharp tip. Maybe if I had, she wouldn’t be fading away in my arms.
Selena
I tried to rise, even as Petyr’s strong and comforting hands pushed me down. “You’re still healing,” he warned, a frown on his face. “You look like shit, Selena.”
“I have to help them.” In front of us, Elah and Leon were driving Beelzebub back, but he was a demigod and they were just fae. “It’s my fault he’s here.”
“Give me ten more seconds,” Petyr insisted, “I’m almost done healing you.”
“Fine.” I began to say the countdown. “Ten, nine...”
I leaned back on my elbows, doing my best to relax as he knit my flesh together. I’d never felt the ambassador’s Anyana-given healing powers before now. His hands were warm, but the power itself was cooling and strange; the wound itched and chilled as he healed it. I felt like it was turning into an old scab in an instant, my cells regenerating and coming together.
Behind us, Tae Min was using a dagger to kill the few soul eaters left in this part of the graveyard, but the flow of them was abating. I wondered why.
“Three,” I said pointedly, slowing down my words to give Petyr a chance to finish up. “Two... I have to help them.”
With a sigh, he pulled his hands away and gave me a sharp nod. “Fine. But don’t get yourself hurt again.” He held his hand out and pulled me to my feet, adding at the last moment, “It’s good to see you again, Selena.”
There was a look in his eyes, a similar one to what I’d seen there when he took me to the Realm of Light for the first time. It felt strange to remember that was only a few months ago; the whole thing felt like an eternity now that I’d been to Hell and back. So much had changed for me, while it seemed like little had changed here on Earth in comparison.
Though my pulse still fluttered at the ambassador’s warm touch and charming smiles. Too bad I knew things between us were even more of an impossibility now that my maternal parentage had been revealed to me. I didn’t think the light fae Elders would approve of their ambassador getting involved with the daughter of the Queen of Hell.
“Thanks,” I murmured, pulling away from him and trying to put some distance between us. “I’ll try not to get hurt again.”
As I passed Tae Min, who was pulling his knife out of the final soul eater, he looked up at me and gave me a grin. “It’s good to see you back. Go get ‘em, Selena.”
“Will do.”
Standing, he reached down to wipe his face with the bottom of his shirt, and I had to tear my eyes away from the surprising physique hidden beneath. Battle was not the time, even if that old familiar hunger was coming back now that I was on Earth once more.
“Here.” Tae Min handed me his dagger, which seemed familiar. It must have been one of Naomi’s seemingly endless supply. “I’m not very good with it, anyway.”
I wanted to point out that he seemed to have done well enough for himself, considering he spent his days in a lab, but a roar made me whip my head around. Elah was flagging, and Beelzebub was gaining the upper hand in their fight. He had one of his great pale wings outstretched towards the knight, and before my eyes he slashed poor Fira across the neck.
So I left reunions behind and flew into action.
The dagger was helpful, but I knew it wouldn’t do much in close combat with the demigod. Instead I used it for another purpose: distraction. Balancing it in my right hand and remembering all the things Naomi taught me during my short apprenticeship, I whipped my arm back and loosed it in a great arc of movement that started at my shoulder and flowed smoothly down to the snap of my wrist. Whizzing through the air, the blade struck the great giant in his wing. Beelzebub roared and turned towards me, his fangs bared.
“Back for more?” Leon’s beast raced at him, and he smacked him to the ground with a careless hand. “This time I’ll make sure you don’t get up again until you’re ready to serve me.”
I eyed Leon’s beast long enough to make sure he was okay; he’d tumbled to the ground and was panting and limping, blood crusting his fur in a few matted places, but there was still fight in his eyes.
It was time to end this thing, once and for all. And as the only one in the fight with the blood of a crazed, half mad goddess running through my veins, I had to be the one to do it.
“I serve no one,” I said. At my right, Elah had dismounted his injured mare was raising his flaming sword, the power of it flickering after a long battle, but I shook my head at him. I faced Beelzebub alone. “You’ll find out soon enough that it was a mistake to follow me through that gate.”
Beelzebub stretched out his wings and curled his hands in front of him, power flowing off of them. I knew his moves by now: he was going to try to trap me in the earth.
But you couldn’t sink someone who was taking up the same space as you.
Heart hammering in my chest, I ran straight towards the demigod. Elah yelled a shocked warning as I pushed through the dense power whirling around Beelzebub and forced my feet to step inside the curve of his wingspan. A surprised look rippled across the demigod’s cruel visage, but only for a moment. He recovered quickly and smirked as he curled his wings around me, their shudder-inducing claws pressing against my back. The demigod had me in the circle of his body, convinced I was trapped there on accident.
What Beelzebub didn’t know was that I’d practiced a certain move from a little movie called Dirty Dancing enough times to drive my parents crazy. I knew how to jump into a man’s arms.
Forcing caution to the wind, I put all the power in my body down into my legs and leapt across the space between us in a fluid arc. I threw my arms around his shoulders and wrapped my legs around his waist. He stumbled back a half step and roared, the sound and the fury of it whipping my hair around my shoulders.
I tried not to wimp out at the sight of his six-inch long fangs.
“Take this.”
Clasping my hands on either side of his head, I opened my mouth near his and drained every ounce of energy that I could get. The last times I’d done this, I must have held back, because he’d recovered.
This time I threw caution to the wind. I reminded myself that my birth mother sat on a throne in an infinite realm that was hers to rule, and her cruelty ran through me. I let the sleeping monster inside me roar to life and feed her insatiable hunger.
Beelzebub, realizing what I was up to, made his own last-ditch move. He struck me with his greatest weapon. He sank his teeth into my neck and tore my flesh apart.
The pain was white-hot and unbearable. I barely heard the shouts of my allies behind me, though I felt the distant heat of Elah’s flames as he tried desperately to free me from the demigod’s vicious wings. I wanted to scream, to let go of Beelzebub and stumble away. But I’d seen the face of evil in Hell and survived it. I had to survive this too.
Instead of pull
ing back, I wrapped my hands around his neck, pressed my mouth to his pale white skin, and drank until I felt his strength flag. Until his jaw parted and his fangs slipped out of me. Until he fell backwards, my legs still wrapped around him, and I fell too.
The entire time all I could think was that if I let go of him, if I stopped draining his strength, he would stand back up and put my friends six feet under. He would destroy everything I’d ever loved or could love, until he’d broken me to his will. So I pushed through the unimaginable pain, through the horror of my blood coursing out of my flesh for the second time in minutes, and I kept a hand on his neck. I made myself take from his spirit until I felt heavy and sick with it.
My hands trembled. Despite myself, I slipped forward, eyes fluttering closed. I laid against his slack body, chest-to-chest, and felt the undertow grab hold of my mind and pull me down. I fought it, like I’d been fighting every day for what felt like so long.
But for the first time in a while I wasn’t alone.
Elah said, “I’ve got her,” and pulled me back. I tried to protest that Beelzebub would waken without me, but his strong arms lifted me up. “There’s so much blood. Is he out?”
I heard Leon’s voice. “I’ve got him. Petyr, can you—”
“Let me look at her!” A woman’s cry, piercing through the fog in my mind.
The last thing I heard as I slipped away was the voice of someone whose love I didn’t deserve.
“Selena.” Cool hands pulled my hair back from the wound, just like they’d pulled my hair back as I vomited the last time we were together. When I betrayed her. “I’ve got you, Silly. Time to go home. Don’t you dare die on me now.”
I slipped away, but had one last thought before oblivion rose to greet me.
The hell gate.
I hadn’t even closed it.
12
Petyr
I couldn’t close the wounds, no matter how hard I tried. “There’s some kind of poison,” I said, shooting Maggie a troubled look over Selena’s prone form. Elah had reluctantly repositioned his arms on her so I could look at the bite marks. “My powers don’t work well on fae-induced wounds like these.”
The witch grimaced, but despite her love of her daughter she never faltered as she put a prison spell over the prone demigod’s body. “Get her stable and get her back to the Collective,” she said, “I’ve got this one.”
Just as I was about to round everyone up, I realized that I hadn’t seen Naomi in a few moments. Frowning, I scanned the battleground around us, including broken tombstones we were going to have to answer for, and realized that I didn’t see any of the dark hunters.
That was when she stumbled out of the mausoleum a few dozen feet from us, falling to her knees with a broken sob. Her sister’s body was in her arms, and they were both covered in blood. I felt the warmth drain from my face.
“Naomi!” Grabbing Tae Min, I handed him my travel ring and told him, “Take care of Selena. You and Elah get her stabilized and back to the Collective. Leon?”
The beast had shifted before I even said his name. “I’ve got that ring you gave me still. I’ll help Maggie take Beelzebub to a cell,” he said with a grimace. “Go take care of her.”
I ran to the dark hunter as fast as my feet would take me, wishing I was half bird and not half tree. My father’s strength and healing powers were the only hope of saving the dark hunter’s life if all that blood belonged to her, but only if I got there in time.
“Petyr!” Seeing me, Naomi stumbled to her feet and careened in my direction, holding her sister’s body up despite her clearly flagging strength. “Her heart—I think she stopped breathing.”
I reached out as soon as we were close enough, touching Iva’s cold form. “She’s still alive, but barely. Where is the wound?”
“The inside of her right arm. She slashed herself open from elbow to wrist.”
We knelt together, Iva between us. I saw an unfamiliar panic on Naomi’s face and realized that I’d never really seen her afraid before, in all the time that I’d known her. At least not like this. I laid my hands on Iva’s injured arm and felt that familiar cooling sensation as my powers called to her cells, knitting and rebuilding broken things.
“Since the wound isn’t supernatural in nature, I may be able to save her. But she’s lost a lot of blood.” Closing my eyes, I dove into the deep repository of my abilities, which had been tapped out significantly by the unexpected battle. “I’m going to have to summon my ancestors to heal her. Can you watch my back?”
I heard the telltale sound of blades being drawn from their sheaths, and wondered as always how the woman kept so many sharp objects on her without accidentally stabbing herself. “I’ve got your back.”
Before I went under, a last question occurred to me. “Crane?”
“Dead,” Naomi said sharply. “They did it to close the hell gate.”
Then we would have bigger problems to solve after this.
But first, the dark hunter’s little sister had to be saved. And to do that, I would have to use the part of my Anyana powers that sometimes scared me.
I breathed in deeply through my mouth, then out slowly through my nose, all the while with my hands on Iva’s arm. I felt her pulse begin to come to life as my powers knit her back together, but it wouldn’t be enough if her body lacked blood and vitality.
So I stilled my body, slowed my breathing, let my pulse drop, and became one with nature around me. I heard the voices of the birds; my voice became the sigh of the wind between the tree branches. My chin dropped down to my chest, and my body temperature lowered significantly.
For a moment I almost felt like bark was growing on my skin. Naomi made a soft, sharp sound, but it was meaningless to my ears, which were knots of wood in the trunk of an ancient tree.
I heard my ancestors’ voices. They spoke as one, in words not meant for human ears. My father was among them, unbound by time and space, reaching across the veil through the realms.
They saw the girl at my fingertips and gave her some of their shared vitality, sucking energy from the ground below and sun above to restore life to life, blood to blood.
And then they gave me a warning, of dark things to come, and a day that would pass sooner than they’d hoped: a day when Hell itself would walk on Earth. I listened, letting their woven stories flow through me, strangely urgent with alarm. The trees lived for millennia without a single fear, but this they were afraid of.
Godspring.
When they were done with their warnings they drew their branches away. My father said goodbye to me, and my heart ached with longing to know him more, but it wasn’t my time yet. I was still flesh and blood, while he was something much different and more ancient.
Slowly but surely, I returned to my body. I felt pins and needles crawling up and down my arms and legs. The voices of the trees turned from words into meaningless whimsy. And my heart beat, soft and painful, aching for a woman who even now might be dying because I couldn’t heal her.
But I’d healed the girl beneath my fingertips. When I opened my eyes and looked down, Iva was staring up at me, her brow knit with confusion. There was a flush to her cheeks, and other than the bright pink scar on the inside of her arm, no evidence of what she’d given to close the gates of Hell.
“Shit, Petyr.” I looked up at Naomi, and saw that there was fear in her face as well as thankfulness. “I thought for a second we’d lost you. I swear you grew roots.”
I smiled at her to cover up my own discomfort; one day, I would grow roots, after all. “Speaking to the trees requires becoming a little less... human.”
“Thank you.” She reached across to take my hand in hers, and I covered my wince of pain as her squeeze sent more pins and needles shooting up my fingertips. “I thought she was going to die.”
Iva yawned, murmuring, “What’s going on? I had the strangest dream.”
Naomi made a face, and for a moment I almost thought she was going to yell at her little sis
ter. But then she sighed. “We’ll talk about it later. For now, we have to go back home.” She looked up at me. “We are going now, right? They took Selena somewhere while you were out of it, but I didn’t see. Was that blood from the thing that she attacked, or...?”
I answered her truthfully. “Selena was bit by some kind of demonic demigod. She lost a lot of blood, and I couldn’t heal her. They took her back to the Collective.” Licking my lips, I tried not to show too much fear outwardly, but I could see from the stricken look on Naomi’s face that she’d realized Iva’s fate wasn’t the only one in danger today. So I added, “If anyone can save her, Tae Min can.”
“Great. Let’s go then.” Naomi was about to reach out to take me hand when I laughed ruefully, and she glared at me. “What’s so funny?”
“You’ll have to drive,” I explained with a quirk of my lips. “I gave my travel rings away, and my driver’s license is expired.”
I just hoped we got there in time, even though I knew there was nothing I could do if Selena succumbed to her wounds.
Tae Min
I wheeled Selena down the hallway on a gurney, my intern Sarah at my side. Sarah was new, but thankfully already used to the chaos of the fae world. She hadn’t blinked when I’d radioed her letting her know to expect us in the ambassador’s office in about thirty seconds—or when she walked in and saw a horse standing next to me, and a knight carrying our patient.
“Do you have to bring her?” I’d asked Elah about Fira, and he just gave me a baleful, narrow-eyed look that could’ve burned through flesh.
Thankfully, blackfyre horses used transportation magic easily. She hadn’t bucked or reared as Petyr’s borrowed ring flashed us across the city in a nausea-inducing tunnel of light and sound. Elah was taking her to the Collective’s menagerie now, having reluctantly handed Selena over to me and Sarah when I insisted he couldn’t heal her with his sword. This was my domain, and I’d be taking over now.