by Karen L Mead
She looked into Dmitri’s sympathetic face. “Where is she?”
He gestured to the back; well, they did have two couches.
In the break room, Aeka was lying on the other couch. Her armor was gone, replaced by still-damp pajamas. A rough blanket had been thrown over her. To Cassie’s mild surprise, Serenus was sitting at the plastic table in the center of the room.
“Hello, Cassie,” he said in a low tone.
“Hey,” she said with little energy and walked over to Aeka. The girl was alive, but the state she was in was something other than sleep; something deeper. Even Cassie, who at this point still had no medical training, could see that.
“As you may have already surmised, she’s in a coma.”
Cassie put a hand on Aeka’s slumbering face, then leaned down and touched her forehead to the blond girl’s. She frowned.
“I’m trying to give her magic, but I don’t think she’s accepting it.”
Serenus sounded tired.
“I wish I could help. I was sure months ago she had lost her magic for good, only for her to summon that…that shell, that armor, the moment she needed it. Even I don’t understand how her magic works.”
“What happened to her armor?”
“I never saw it. Apparently when Sam pulled you both to the surface, the armor was gone. Perhaps it was an illusion.”
“Where is—” she began, then Sam popped into the room. He was certainly making use of his teleporting ability, now that he could use it again.
Sam’s eyes widened at the sight of her, then he pulled her into a hug.
“Thank god. After what happened to you, I didn’t know if you’d ever be yourself again.”
“It was her. She pulled the portal into herself,” Cassie said. “She knew this was coming, too.”
“She could have given us a hint,” Sam said, eyeing the comatose girl with a complicated expression. Cassie shook her head.
“No, she couldn’t. Because if she told us what was going on, I would have tried to stop her, and that would have been bad. Because this was the only way to stop them. I couldn’t do it.”
She knelt back down and talked softly to Aeka. She hoped that Aeka could hear her on some level.
“You’re still better than me at everything,” she said quietly. “I finally proved I could grow a tail, and then you just had to go and shut down the Watchers’ portal all by yourself. Not cool.”
“Where were you?” Serenus asked Sam.
“It seems I, ah, killed Azrael. Temporarily. So I delivered his body back to Realm, to Belial.”
Serenus was quiet for a long moment.
“It’s funny, words do come out of my mouth. I say things like ‘Sam, stop murdering your own kind,’ and I’m pretty sure I pronounce them all correctly, yet somehow you fail to get the message. Should I try semaphore, perhaps?”
“His essence is intact, he should be fine. He was going to murder Cassie, I didn’t have much of a—”
“You should’ve let him kill me,” Cassie said, caressing Aeka’s beautiful hair. “Now she’s trapped fighting them, forever. That’s why she was sleeping so much…she was saving her energy for this.”
“I’ll pick you over her any day,” Sam said.
When she looked at him with pain in her eyes, he continued.
“I’m grateful for what she did. If she really saved us from them—assuming this is over— I’ll always be grateful. But I think this is what she wanted. She didn’t seem to want to live. You do.”
“It doesn’t matter if she wanted it or not, she didn’t have a choice,” Cassie snapped. “If she’s fighting them, it can’t be in this world. It’s somewhere with different time. She could be fighting them forever.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Serenus said gently.
She turned to face him.
“I wish I was wrong. But I said the Watchers would come when the rain started, and they did. Nobody told me that, I just knew. Ever since my wings came in, I’ve known a lot of stuff I didn’t know before. And right now I know she’s been fighting for…longer than I can even wrap my mind around. That’s what it takes to keep them from opening the portal, you have to fight them constantly.”
After mentioning her wings, she tried to touch her own back to confirm that they were gone. When Aeka had taken the portal, and all that came with it, out of Cassie’s body, the need for her wings had disappeared. She couldn’t help feeling a little sad about that, then feeling guilty that she wished to keep them, knowing what they symbolized.
Sam knelt down next to her and put a hand on her knee.
“Well, if you know so much, do you know if there’s anything we can do for her? Maybe we can go where she is. Maybe we can send help.”
“We’re about to.”
“What?”
Cassie felt all the strength go out of her and leaned against Sam for support.
“That little girl…I think she’s there…I think we are helping her, through the generations….”
Then it hurt to think, so she just cleared her mind. She listened to the sound of Sam breathing, trying to shut out everything else.
That worked for about a minute, until Jay threw open the door.
“Guys, it’s bad out there.”
Sam looked at Cassie, panic in his eyes.
“Did she fail? Are the Watchers coming through?”
Cassie looked up at Aeka again and frowned.
“She’s still fighting. I don’t understand how—”
“It’s not the Watchers, it’s the…what do you call ’em again? Phantasms.”
“What!?” Cassie and Sam both said in unison. They shot to their feet and nearly collided painfully. Cassie ran out to the front, where she’d have a better look.
When she reached the front window of the shop, something was visible in the sky: something bright and orange and glittery, something it hurt to look at. A phoenix, a hundred stories above her, breathed a jet of flame, and a building halfway across the city was instantly turned to slag. All over the city, there was screaming.
“How is this possible?” Sam asked, behind her. “The only way to summon them right now is with the Rod of Moses, and we have it!”
“Young Mr. Latif has it,” said Eugene. He pulled a frightened Ethan into his chest. “And where is Khalil? He was here earlier.”
“Better question,” said Miri, her already-pale skin white as milk. “Where’s Dot?”
Chapter 58
“We’re going to kill all the humans on Earth…why?”
Dorothy was annoyed. Usually, humans she glamoured were quiet and obedient. This one was full of questions.
“Because they are killing the trees. They are killing the entire planet, and I have given them enough chances to stop. I cannot bear it anymore.”
They were standing on a branch of a giant redwood, overlooking the city. The tree wasn’t really there in the human realm, but in the Faewilde: little pockets of altered reality that beings like Dorothy could enter at will. Nevertheless, Dorothy had the power to weaken the curtain between realities, so creatures spawned here could enter the other world if she wished it.
Khalil blinked twice in rapid succession. He was trying to maintain his usual personality even under the spell, and he was getting strange results.
“Oh yeah, the environment, that’s a tough one. Hard to keep that carbon footprint down. I bought those cloth bags that you’re supposed to use instead of the disposable ones, only I forget to keep them in my car.”
Dot’s smile was strained.
“Khalil—”
“And sometimes, when I finish a box of granola bars, instead of walking outside to put the box in the recycling bin, I just plain throw it out. And batteries, they say you’re not supposed to throw them out but the city recycling center won’t even take them, like you have to literally mail them to someone if you want to recycle them or something? And with glass jars—"
“I forgive you. Now, eat this.”
She held up a gorgeous, honey-colored apple.
“I’ve been saving this for thousands of years, all for a day like today. This will make you strong enough so you can summon the Phantasms.”
Khalil blinked again.
“I’m summoning them?”
“Yes.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you love me, and that is what I want.”
That seemed to puzzle him for a moment. A sad expression came over his face, despite the fact that his eyes were glowing with the fever of glamour.
“Will Miri be okay?”
Dorothy was surprised at that.
“She’s the one you think of? That disgusting vampire that actually enjoys being an undead? What do you see in her? Oh, never mind, it’s none of my business. Just eat the apple, now. No more dawdling.”
She bit one side of it herself and held out the other half to Khalil, who took a loud bite. The sound of his teeth piercing the skin of the fruit was like a whip cracking. A few moments later, he was full of magic not his own, and ready to summon.
“So, how do I do this?” he said, holding out the Rod. Dorothy guided his arm down, so it was pointing toward the city.
“Make sure they know they are to target the humans and their structures, not the trees or non-human animals. You can imbed that in your commands.”
Khalil had no idea how to summon the ancient Phantasms, but he was holding the Rod of Moses, and the Rod knew. The Rod was made with intelligent magic, but not quite intelligent enough to tell if the wielder was being manipulated by a sly fairy. Demon magic, the Rod was built to detect, but fae magic was too alien to register.
“Cerberus: Come on down!” Khalil shouted.
From the tip of the Rod, a gargantuan beast leapt out of nothingness, landing on the tree branch that Dorothy and Khalil were standing on. It looked like a giant, three-headed Pitbull…if Pitbulls had glittering, tawny skin and blade-like protrusions on the back of their legs. If the creature had weight, it would have likely broken the branch, but as a Phantasm, it had no mass. After bracing itself for a moment, it jumped off the branch, fell hundreds of stories and hit the ground running, starting on the highway and jumping on top of an overpass.
“Huh. Big dog. Now, how many of these things am I supposed to make?”
Dorothy just smiled.
Chapter 59
Thanks to Sam’s deal with Azrael, hundreds of demons were in the city, awaiting the arrival of the Watchers. Those demons were now trying to fight the Phantasms with limited success.
First of all, they had expected to fight a different enemy. Second, a lot of their curses seemed to be on the wrong frequency and passed harmlessly through the giant beasts. Some demons (and half-demons) naturally were on a similar frequency, and their curses found purchase; not enough to kill the Phantasms, but enough to at least affect them on some level. Quickly, the demons who could touch the Phantasms with their magic were shielded by those who couldn’t, the latter using all their power to create barriers to protect them all from the beasts. With the help of thousands of familiars, the barriers were holding up, except the Phantasms were making short work of the city while the offensive demons struggled to make a difference. Half of the major buildings in the city had already been destroyed, along with their inhabitants.
On the ground, dozens of demons had been killed by the rampaging Cerberus, who was running down the major roads and trampling everyone it could see. Cars and buses drove right through it, but people were crushed and eviscerated under its claws. People started trying to hide in their cars, which did protect them from Cerberus, but then they were vulnerable to the huge area attacks of many of the other beasts. Or they could be eaten up by one of the smaller, lizard-like Phantasms, which now swarmed the streets.
Really, there was nowhere to hide; it really wasn’t much safer being inside than outside. The casualties were already in the hundreds of thousands.
It was at this point in the battle that Sam appeared before Belial; he’d had to spirit his entire entourage away to safety a hundred miles away, via teleportation, and doing so had taken time. If the Phantasms succeeded in killing all the demons, then it wouldn’t matter where his friends were—the beasts would come for everyone eventually—but at least it kept them safe for the time being.
A group of demons were gathered on the top of the Morse building, tasked with taking down the Phoenix. The one demon who could hurt it, ironically a half-demon college student from Maine, was surrounded by twelve other half-demons, most of whom looked frightened out of their wits. For his part, Belial was contributing the aid of his flies, which tormented the Phoenix. Flies might not sound like tough opponents due to their size, but when they were cursed creatures (and millions of them at that), they were a lot more formidable. They bit at the Phoenix’s largely insubstantial head; the creature must have been able to feel them, because it was holding off on attacking while it frantically tried to dislodge them.
“Oh, you,” Belial said as Sam dropped down next to him. “Thank you for killing Azrael’s form and making this even harder than it already was.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
Belial’s worn face looked at him like he was the most loathsome simpleton ever to walk the face of the earth.
“No one knows what’s going to happen, Son of Sammael. That’s one of the reasons why we hold off on wastefully injuring each other, because we never know when we might need one another. Your stubborn overreliance on violence could be responsible for the end of reality as we know it.”
Sam was going to respond defensively, then realized that the demon lord was completely right. The drone of Belial’s flies was incredibly loud, so he had to practically yell to be heard.
“I promise you: If we survive this, I won’t ever make that mistake again! Do we know where they’re coming from?”
Belial looked like he wasn’t ready to move on from the blaming-the-Son-of-Sammael portion of the conversation, but after a moment, he gestured in the general direction of the Sodatown neighborhood. “They all seem to be popping into existence from over there. Does that knowledge help?”
“Yes. It’s a forest fairy causing this, so I’m guessing we’re dealing with an invisible tree.”
A confused expression crossed Belial’s face. A giant ice raven passed overhead and tried to destroy the group on the rooftop with a frosty blast of energy, but Belial put up a hand and a tawny-colored, dome-shaped barrier came to life; the ice melted into streams against the heat of the barrier and the raven moved on, seeking a softer target. There were still plenty of buildings left to destroy.
“How did a fairy…never mind, we don’t have time. Do you have a plan to find her? Fairy magic is…difficult.”
“I do. Please do your best to hold down the fort here while I cut the production line for these things,” Sam said.
Belial gave him a withering look at the idea that anyone was really succeeding at “holding down the fort,” at this rate, but nodded.
“Go. Redeem yourself.”
Sam transported himself to the streets of the blue-collar neighborhood, where complete panic had taken hold. Some people were trying to engage in looting, only to have a close run-in with a Phantasm and then start running like hell in any direction they could think of—not necessarily one that led out of the city. Pandemonium reigned to such an extent that Sam didn’t even bother to hide his ability to teleport into the middle of the street.
He took a deep breath.
“Vladmira! I need you!”
The bat was at the park nearby and began flying in his direction.
Yes, master?
She was talking to him again, mind-to-mind. He didn’t have time to marvel over it.
“I’m looking for a tree made by that fairy, you know the one. I can’t sense it because it’s totally alien to me. Can you find it?”
That depends.
Sam was shocked by the hint of defiance in her utterance.
“What do you mean ‘that depends’? The fate of the world is at stake here!”
If you promise to abandon the harlot for me, I will do this thing for you.
“The harlot?”
The fish-monster girl. You know exactly who I mean.
Sam looked around. Across the street from him, a Jeep-sized lizard monster skittered over the pavement, only to bite the entire upper torso off of a helpless construction worker. The legs stood up on their own for about a second, then slowly fell over into a garbage heap. Sam shuddered.
Vlad, if you help me stop these things, I’ll do whatever you want.
Very well.
Overhead, Vladmira and a swarm of her most loyal followers combed the sky for the presence of fairy. Vladmira may have been a demonic familiar, but she was also a natural creature of caves and forests; she had much more of an affinity for any kind of forest magic than Sam himself did. It didn’t hurt that she had taken a liking to the fairy and had spent a fair amount of time with her over the past week.
After what seemed like hours, but was in reality only about five minutes, Vladmira circled over Sam and settled on his right shoulder.
The strange tree should be right near the place where the red-plumed one sang his ugly birdsong during the long winter.
Despite the horror of his circumstances, Sam couldn’t help but smile slightly at that. Clearly, the “red-plumed one” was what Vladmira called Dwight, due to his strawberry-blond hair. He popped back into Realm, touched down in the cave area where he had helped trap Devon a few days earlier, then materialized in front of the Warehouse, the club where Dwight’s band had performed.
He looked around and tried to reach out with his magical sense, feeling nothing of note. He still had the problem that he just wasn’t suited for breaking into fairy hideouts. Frowning, he reached into his back pocket and took out two heart-shaped leaves; leaves from the new tree that Dorothy had created in Cassie’s backyard.