by Jessica Gunn
Shawn had nearly been killed by demons in a scenario similar to this not long ago—something about visiting Boston with college friends, getting lost, and being confronted by demons looking for a quick hit of human energy. I glanced over at him now, but he showed no signs of panic. Which was good. Because after Krystin’s intense addition to the team, I wasn’t sure I could deal with someone scared of demons.
I leaned against the brick wall. Cold stone bit through my layers of clothing. Damn winter. The cold seeped through everything. I cupped my right hand and called to my power, growing a ball of lightning so large, the sparks crackling around it reached up to my shoulders and face. The power didn’t hurt me, though. It was as if I’d become immune to lightning completely since the accident that had given me this power.
Touching my left hand to the door, I looked up at my team. “Ready to move?” They nodded, readying their Fire Circle blades and magik. “Then let’s get this over with. On three.”
I counted us down, and on my mark, I pressed my lightning hand to the exit door. The door snapped into a dozen pieces, wood and metal splintering with the smell of ozone, and shot into the building. I charged in after it, feet crushing splices of wood underneath them.
Shouts permeated the air as we rushed their first-floor nest. Idiots. I ran headlong into the first demon, grabbing him around the middle and tugging the big guy to the ground. He looked human, save for the burgundy color of his eyes and the magik lying within. The magik that’d twisted his soul dark and extended his lifetime.
Cinnamon scent wafted in the air around us, mixing with sweat and increasing moisture from Rachel’s attacks. She carried a special water canister backpack on her shoulders that contained water for her to draw from. And right now, that water had turned into ropes that strangled two female demons at once.
In my moment of distraction, the demon beneath my body had grabbed on to my shoulders and dug his fingers in roughly to try dislodging me. I grunted against his inhuman strength but held on long enough to call lightning to my fingertips and channel it into his skin. The demon’s eyes widened in pain as his body convulsed beneath mine.
A loud demon roar vibrated in my ears. I glanced over my shoulder. Another demon charged me—a woman this time—with a ring of cement rocks and dirt encircling her hand. Fantastic. An earth-elemental magik, essentially the direct opposite of mine.
I hopped off the demon below me, who was still convulsing, and summoned more lightning to my hand and into a sword shape this time. But as the woman and I rushed each other, something sent her flying abruptly from her path to me and into the nearest wall. A sickening sound of bones crunching beneath dead weight reached my ears and I cringed as I looked for the source of the attack. Friend or foe?
Ah, Krystin.
She danced with a few demons, her sword blade slicing through the air and into their bodies. Deep red blood seeped from her current target as he stumbled, dazed. She kicked him in the chest and against a pillar before reaching into her pocket and retrieving a cedo match. Krystin struck it against her pants and threw it onto the demon. His body immediately burned with a mauve wave of power, incinerating into cinders within seconds.
It confirmed what I already thought: these guys were powerful. Which was about the only reason I could think of why they’d disregarded Jaffrin’s multiple attempts at peaceful displacement.
I nodded a thank you at Krystin for the assist, but her eyes went wide. I turned back just in time to watch the woman launch off the wall, create a pillar of cement to use as a booster, and fly my way.
“Are you kidding me?” I hissed. I swiped a wide arc through the air with my hand, calling lightning to trail behind it, then rushed forward. If I managed to knock away the cement pillar—even a millimeter—she might lose it entirely.
I sent the lightning on its way, the electricity causing the hairs on my neck and arms to rise as it snapped across the distance between us. The demon woman watched the path, but her only move to stop it was to push faster.
My lightning hit and disconnected her from the pillar, but she jumped off and dove at me, a dagger in her hand. I knocked her arm away and took the brunt of the fall, unable to dodge, and we rolled with the impact. Over and over until our twisted forms slammed into something solid. All breath whooshed from my lungs as the impact wracked my entire body. Stars danced in my blackening vision, my head spinning. My arms and neck stung, like I’d been pricked a thousand times by needles.
The demon landed on top of me, and she wasted no time reeling back her arm and throwing her fist into my face. Pain exploded across my cheekbone, but I gritted my teeth and caught her second swing, pushed her arm away, and twisted to break free of her hold.
She tightened her grip. “Don’t think so. You’re starting to get infamous, Ben Hallen. Your thirst for hunting us will get you killed.” She reached back into the air, and dirt and rocks inside the warehouse snaked around her arm like armor.
Not good. So not good.
I summoned lightning again, reaching outside of myself for it, but… none came. My vision swirled with purples and blues, sifting into yellow before settling on an orange sunset background. I narrowed my eyes, trying to focus on the demon’s twisting visage in front of me, waiting for the impact of a rock fist.
Slowly, a hearty laugh broke through the sunset. The demon reached down with her hand over my chest. “How ironic,” she said, sprinkling something right in front of my face.
The dust and pebbles turned into raindrops on the way down, a constant rain that spread from her hand to somewhere above my head. Wetness coated my legs and back, which turned into large waves.
Floating. I was floating, a buoy in a giant lake. Overhead, the orange and yellow sunset danced across the crying sky as the water rose above my ears. I waved my arms, trying to right myself to swim away, but a heavy weight kept me firmly in place, sinking my body millimeter by millimeter down into the raging sea. A cinnamon scent wafted across the tops of the waves like a bright beacon.
Wait. Cinnamon?
Dharksa. I hadn’t taken it, but…
I stilled my attempts to swim and forced a deep breath in past my lips and into my lungs. Held it. Then let go. The sunset dimmed, the waves diminished some, and my eyes narrowed in on the woman before me.
“You drugged me,” I managed to say.
She barked a laugh and climbed off my body. Her words sifted through the remaining sunset in the distance. “You drugged yourself, falling with open wounds onto a jar of dharksa. Enjoy your trip, Hunter. It will be your last. I will not allow you to hunt our kind with abandon.”
The clarity slipped and the waves churned beneath me again, but my mind remained clear enough to realize she wasn’t talking about the routine patrols I did with my team. No, she meant all the extracurricular hunting I’d been doing on the down-low.
The demon woman brought a dagger down over my face, poising to strike. That was when her neck wildly snapped in an unnatural position, the loud crack of it breaking through the toxic illusions around me. The woman’s body crumpled like a wilted flower, pushing me down into the water.
Someone appeared, walking on the surface of the waves. Nate. My teammate.
“Get up,” he said as he reached down.
His hands encircled mine and yanked me to a standing position. On top of the waves. What in the hell?
“You’re on a dharksa trip,” Nate said to me, his eyes swimming into focus. “The best way to get through it is to let it happen, but we don’t have that luxury right now.”
I tried to talk, but my lips were swollen, my tongue too big, and the same lake water that once almost drowned me after I’d been struck by lightning now rose above my ankles. “This is a dharksa t-trip?”
His face swirled like an endless vortex, devoid of eyes and a mouth. I blinked heavily, my eyelids suddenly weighing a thousand pounds.
Why would anyone willingly take this crap?
“Just hold still,” came Nate’s response.
Warmth flooded my body, the sunset turning into a vibrant blue sky that darkened to a gray ceiling. My skin grew hot, burning until sweat poured out from seemingly every available pore. I wiped it from my upper lip, my forehand, my neck—everywhere—and when I pulled back my hand, it was covered in green liquid.
As my vision stopped twisting and turning, focusing on one thing became possible again. Green. I was sweating green?
Nate loosened his hold on my shoulders but didn’t back away. “Oh. Good. I wasn’t sure that would work.”
“Me sweating green was an accident?”
His expression hardened. “The demon knocked you into a giant ceramic jar of dharksa. A lot of it must have gotten into one of your cuts.” He looked me up and down. “You look like you stepped in a vat of slime.”
“Fantastic. How did you extract it from me?”
“Dharksa is basically magik,” Nate said. “A trippy one. I pushed it away from your body with my ether. The monks I trained with might have mentioned something about that in regards to healing, though I’ve never tried it before.”
The ether-shaper monks. Nate didn’t often talk much about his time with them. I’d long assumed some oath of secrecy was to blame.
“Thank you.” I clapped him on the shoulder, then turned to my team. Looks like they’d cleared out the rest of the nest despite the power of these demons. Which really only meant one thing: Jaffrin was right in using Krystin to force us to master our powers. With us, his “magikal insurance” plan for Boston would be a nice ace in the hole.
Shawn had the last demon pinned against a pillar, drawing his blood-soaked Fire Circle knife from the demon’s chest. Despite having no magik like he was supposed to, the guy could fight. I’d give him that.
After dropping a cedo match onto the demon, Shawn cleaned his blade on a nearby couch. The demons had made this dank warehouse quite the home, with even an old TV set up in their makeshift “living room.”
“Well, that was moderately easy,” Krystin said dryly as she too cleaned her blade, then folded it back down for easy concealment.
I looked to my cousin Rachel. “You okay?”
Rachel nodded. “Yeah. This pack was a genius idea, Krystin. It makes everything so much easier.”
Krystin’s knowledge, aided by her Blackwood witch heritage, had given us the ability to temporarily take down Lady Azar and save Riley. Too bad we still had miles to go before Riley was actually safe.
Since the beginning of time, no individual with the Power—an ability to wield both ether and elemental-based magiks at the same time, something that’d normally kill everyone else—had been safe. Most of those individuals had been hunted down and killed.
But I wouldn’t let that happen to Riley.
For now, the United States-Canadian border and an easy understanding between Darkness and the Hunter Circles was keeping Riley from being tracked up North. It wasn’t a surefire guarantee and it sure as hell wouldn’t mean much for long, but I’d take it for now.
Krystin grinned proudly at Rachel. “Anything that helps you. You’re easily one of the most powerful water-elementals I’ve ever met.”
“I assume you’ve met many, too,” I said.
Krystin nodded. “You bet. Family gatherings are oh-so-fun.”
My focus traveled from the conversation to watching Shawn pace the room like he was looking for more demons and obviously coming up short. Jaffrin hadn’t said the nest would be big, and I’d definitely expected more than a half dozen demons, but their power made up for their lack of numbers.
“There aren’t any more,” I said to Shawn. “The place is clear.”
He stopped pacing and glanced at me. “Do demons in Boston generally ignore eviction notices?”
“Only when they think it won’t be enforced,” Nate answered. “And clearly these guys didn’t.”
Rachel slipped her pack back onto her shoulders and adjusted the straps. “We made quick work of them, though.”
“I say we take the rest of the night off,” said Krystin as she stretched out her back. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m exhausted.”
Shawn frowned. Nate clapped Shawn’s shoulder, then headed for the door. For as much as Krystin and Shawn had trained, Krystin still hadn’t uncovered a single drop of his magik. Jaffrin had assured us there wasn’t a mix up. Shawn was indeed the other half of the Alzan prophecy. They were the Son and Daughter named inside of it. And yet… nothing.
How was Jaffrin even so sure Shawn was the other half of this prophecy, anyway?
“Then let’s go,” I said. My team needed rest, and I needed to get onto another job as soon as the coast was clear to teleportante out of our house.
Krystin gave me a fake, ridiculously sarcastic salute and led the way out of the warehouse. I was sure the two of us would butt heads until the day we both retired from the Fire Circle. But all things considered, I was happy to have Krystin on my team. She was a fantastic leader in her own right, even if her arrogance got her in as much trouble as my temper got me.
My wobbly legs, leftover side effects from the dharksa dose, carried me out of the abandoned warehouse behind my team. We were almost all the way down the street and back onto a main road when someone’s phone rang.
Krystin slipped a hand into her leather jacket and plucked out her phone. Lit by a streetlight above the team, her eyes narrowed. She swiped her finger across the screen and spoke into it. “Drew? It’s almost midnight, what’s—?”
Her eyes widened as she started walking back toward me, waving her arm around in the air, as though trying to gather us up with a lasso. “We’ll be right there. We’re already out. Drew? Drew!”
Drew was Krystin’s second cousin and a bartender at Hunter’s Guild, a neutral ground between Darkness and the Hunter Circles. He’d helped us track down the location of Shadow Crest’s lair when Riley had been missing.
Krystin’s horrified expression, amplified by the light shining from above, met mine and she charged toward me. “We need to go to the Guild. Now.”
“We have to check in with Jaffrin,” Shawn said. “The mission’s done—”
“You don’t understand! They’re under attack.” Krystin’s eyes pleaded with me. “Ben, Hunter’s Guild isn’t supposed to be attackable. The protection magiks there, the owners… We have to go.” She held my gaze and I knew in my gut that no matter what my call was, she’d go to Drew’s rescue.
I couldn’t fault her for wanting to protect family. But getting involved in a fight at Hunter’s Guild could prove fatal just by igniting my hand in lightning. The protection magiks the owners had instituted severely punished anyone who caused violence, often with painful backlash magiks.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go. But until we’re sure about the protection magiks being disabled—”
“Don’t use our powers, yes, we know,” Krystin said, hurrying to the center of our group. “It’s probably best no one attacks at all unless we know who our opponent is. Buckle up.”
We all laid one hand on top of someone else’s like some awkward team huddle, and Krystin used teleportante to bring us to Hunter’s Guild.
CHAPTER 2
KRYSTIN
Usually when you teleported to Hunter’s Guild, the teleportante word-magik bounced off the protection magiks surrounding the establishment and dumped you outside of the “shield.” But this time, I felt no such bump and my team was deposited directly in the middle of the inn.
The freezing New Hampshire winter air swept in and draped me in cold. Wind whipped at my face despite the fact that we were inside the building. I looked up, searching for the source of the mega-draft, and… the ceiling was gone. Blown off completely in favor of a clear, star-filled nighttime sky.
Smoke filled my nose, sharp with the scent of still-burning fires. Dust and debris floated in the air, falling out of collapsed support beams. The bar where I’d gotten many drinks over the years had been crushed, split directly in half by a beam lying acro
ss it.
And the auras… the entire place was awash in a singular, spreading dark blue aura that raged like an ethereal fire across the remains. Someone powerful had been here.
As I walked, the aura seemed to sweep down to greet me in tendrils. I swatted them away and followed the destruction to the bleeding and dying bodies scattered across the floor. Moans and cries of pain slipped through the air, unanswered, as it appeared our team was the only other people in the room. And probably soon to be the only ones alive.
“Help the wounded,” Ben said as he stepped carefully around overturned tables and chairs. Blood coated most of the furniture, a macabre, still-wet paint job. A coppery scent hung in the air, overpowering the smoke and fires.
“Oh, god.” Rachel gasped, her wide eyes scanning the area, not resting on any one horrendous vision for too long.
I didn’t blame her. I’d seen the worst of what demons could do. Mutilated bodies. Puddles of blood. Dark magik that they’d allowed to twist their forms and magik into something more. But this…
We spread out across Hunter’s Guild, picking through the rubble and searching for survivors. But there weren’t many, and none that’d survive for much longer. Still, with each new body, I didn’t find Drew.
“Where are you?” I whispered, a hand on my forehead as I surveyed the destruction. Sweat trickled down my neck, raising goosebumps that tidal-waved down my back. He had probably been behind the bar when the fight had broken out.
But who’d started that fight? And, more importantly: how?
I made my way to the bar and climbed over the wood, liquor bottles, and glasses. That’s where I found him.
My heart dropped and breath hitched as my eyes fell over Drew’s crumpled body. The beam lay across him vertically, as if he hadn’t been able to get out of the way in time… and because of the protection magiks, he wouldn’t have been able to teleportante out of the way if the fight had broken out before the spells were taken down.