by Jenn Stark
I didn’t know how many bodies I punched through, both those I deliberately plowed over, and those that reached me from the sides and even from the back, desperate for their piece of me, desperate to be acknowledged, but flowing away with a new rush of emotion that left me feeling strangely heartened in the end.
I hadn’t saved them. But I’d honored their cry. I’d heard them. Whoever they were to become in their future lives, I’d honored the pain they’d felt in this one.
In front of me, the Moon shone brighter, as if she were rising on one of those surreal evenings when her fullness appeared to hang low to the earth, unnaturally large—
I burst into the raging battle of demons and shifters.
Nigel instantly caught my eye, whaling on a pair of demons, but I couldn’t see Nikki, and I whirled quickly, my hands alight with fire. The demons outnumbered the shifters three to one, so that was an easy place to start, but where was Nikki? Where were the Moon and the Star?
Justice was with the people, but dammit, she needed to be up on stage.
“You bitch!”
Through a break in the crowd, I felt a streak of starlight rake across me. I looked up to see Dixie glaring at me.
“You should still be locked in that prison of those you had failed.” She gestured sharply with her hand, and another score of demons filled the tight space, fire erupting in pockets at the edges. A vehicle exploded, and spectral fire danced along the spire of the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars. A bolt of white fire lanced me through the shoulder, while twin roars of defiance sounded in my ears—feminine and strong. Two women rushed forward from the shadows, both of them surprising me. Judgment of the Arcana Council and Danae, Queen of Swords.
Gamon instantly fell into the fray, slashing and hacking at the demons for the mere joy of it, but Danae drew herself up straight, lifting her arms and tilting her chin, as if compelling the heavens to do her bidding. “You, who must obey me, fight!” she cried.
She wasn’t calling on the heavens at all, as it happened, but creatures from a far more southerly location. A new rush of shuffling bodies surged out of the darkness and flowed around her, converging on the parking lot. Dough-faced golem warriors, their mouths slack, their eyes hollowed out, their bodies rich with the smell of Italian seasoning, pounded into the fight.
The value of a doughboy army. I stared in absolute shock as Sariah’s words floated back to me, offhanded and sly.
Was this why she had saved Barry? Had the vision she’d siphoned off Eshe been clear enough to show a band of golem warriors coming to our aid?
Either way, it appeared that Barry had offered up his demon minions for the use of the Arcana Council, and Danae had taken over from there.
I lunged forward into the renewed battle, as fire raged around us and one building after another exploded, first Death’s tattoo parlor, then Dixie’s chapel. I fought through the inky blackness of demons, gaining new ground, when suddenly an entire swath of demons screamed in front of me, and burst into a shower of primordial goop.
The spatter had barely cleared before Danae saluted me.
“I don’t need the approval of the Council to fight this filth,” she declared. “And this army will serve as well as any other.” She whirled, directing her Gumby battalion to strike again as a group of the horde leapt toward her.
I turned as well, gesturing to the largest of the Syx, who still glowered at the edge of the parking lot. “She’s a fucking human,” I informed him.
Gregori stared at me impassively. “She’s a witch.”
“She’s a human witch. And she needs your help.”
“She doesn’t—”
“Go,” I demanded, gratified to see the big guy finally move as I thrashed forward again.
At length, I came up alongside Nigel, who grabbed me and all but flung me forward. “Get Nikki!” he gasped, before another wave of demons knocked him to the side.
I surged on. I still couldn’t see my friend. A wall of demons rose ahead of me, dozens more than there should be. It was worse than the throng of humans who had called Justice for help. Those, at least, I had understood, while these asshats were only crowding in front of me to keep me from reaching Nikki. Screw that.
I pressed my hand down on the tattoo I’d received from Death nearly two years earlier, a tattoo that connected me to my best friend, my earthbound anchor. In a flash, I was no longer battling my way through claws and talons, but was up on the stage with Nikki, Dixie, and the Moon. Nikki was down on one knee, braced and wielding the same knife Dixie had buried into her gut moments earlier—a wound that was still leaking blood. Beneath Nikki the Moon lay crumpled and bloody, Nikki as her sole protector now. I rushed forward, and Dixie spun to face me.
“My dance card is full today, sugar,” she said with her trademark Southern drawl. “I’ve got what I’ve come for.”
She flinched and turned back, snarling with rage as Nikki landed a well-timed slash along her lower thigh. A long, dark wound gaped open along Dixie’s creamy skin, the blood that leached out midnight blue. I jerked my gaze from it up to Dixie’s face as she flung her hand toward Nikki. My hand came up at the same time, my bright blue fireball lashing out to combat her bolt of crimson flame.
The explosion of the two fireballs connecting knocked me on my ass, the fire bouncing off the stage and skittering into the crowd of the battling shifters, demons, Danae, and the Syx. Screams erupted as the fire caught the fighters unaware, but I could only worry about one thing at a time.
I lurched around to confront Dixie in time to see her draw her blade up high. As she did, the dagger became a flaming sword. She plunged it down in the space between Nikki’s arm and torso.
Nikki struggled to pull the Moon away, but she wasn’t fast enough. The fiery sword plunged into the Moon’s body, and even I jolted from the impact, the unearthly crack of magic. The Moon arched beneath the blade—and expired. Instantly. There was no fight. There was no counter magic.
The bright light bathing the parking lot merely…went out.
I leapt for Dixie, but by the time I reached her, she was gone. I heard nothing but her exultant cry, which was apparently an order, as the brace of demons who hadn’t yet succumbed to Danae and the Syx disappeared a moment later.
I staggered forward another step, then slumped to my knees where Nikki and the Moon lay tangled in a broken heap.
I vaguely heard the sound of footsteps running up, and the rush of smoke. A moment later, the Magician knelt beside me, one arm around my shoulder, the other beneath Nikki. Nikki, who did not breathe. Nikki, whose life essence was burning down to an impossibly low level. I reached out instinctively, my hands gripping her body, the Magician’s as well. And I felt the cool whoosh of air as Death appeared beside us.
“It’s not her time,” I insisted. “She can’t have survived everything she has to die like this.”
“It’s not for humans, even immortal humans, to make that call,” Death murmured, but it was Nikki who convulsed beneath me.
“I’m not going down because of bitch-faced Barbie,” she muttered, with what seemed like the last of her strength.
I choked out a laugh that might also have been a sob. I no longer cared what the rules were. I was Justice of the Arcana Council, and I was going to make my own goddamned rules.
“Miss Wilde,” the Magician murmured beside me, but for once not in a repressing tone. He wouldn’t take this from me, I knew. He wouldn’t let me fail.
I focused all my attention on Nikki until I blacked out.
33
I lay with my body half slumped over Nikki’s, one hand on her shoulder, the other on her hip, my ear pressed to her chest, the faint beating of her heart the only thing giving me hope.
We weren’t in the parking lot of Dixie’s chapel anymore. Nikki was on some sort of gurney, and the room around me smelled sterile and metallic. Bodies moved around me, people spoke, but my attention was fixed solely on the electrical currents that ran or should have
run through Nikki’s beautiful form. They had all been blighted, as destroyed as Roland’s had been, but the damage was far more staggering given the level of magic that Nikki dredged up to fight Dixie Quinn. Every last ounce of her strength had been given over to protect the weak and the vulnerable. She’d given everything she was to protect the Moon. I wasn’t about to give her any less.
I stitched and shredded and infused each blackened snarl with light, power, and fire.
“Miss Wilde.” The words flowed over me with a comforting familiarity. The Magician hadn’t left my side. He’d started to, I had vaguely noticed at one point, then had split himself to be in two places at once.
Something had shifted in me, as well. The Magician didn’t lend his power to me this time, but he didn’t need to. I recognized now that his and my power were one and the same, drawing on the same deep well of primal energy. His stunt in the airplane had begun the shift, a precautionary maneuver I wasn’t entirely sure he’d expected to end up this way. But he’d prepared for it just the same.
How much of this had he foreseen, I wondered? How much had he known?
“The Council meeting begins,” Armaeus continued.
“Fuck the Council,” I gritted back, never shifting my focus from the delicate stitching together of dancing currents within Nikki’s life-form.
“You have healed her,” he insisted, though his tone was as quiet and gentle as I’d ever heard it. “All you have set in motion is coming to pass. It is time to finish the job.”
That got my attention. I pulled away slightly, lifted my chin. We were in some sort of makeshift clinic. It had the earmarks of Dr. Sells, the Council’s private physician. But it wasn’t secreted away in some concrete bunker. Rather, only a few feet away, several members of the Council stood in attendance. Several, but not all. Viktor, Eshe, Tesla, Zeus, and Hera were all absent. Those who remained, along with the Magician, were more than enough. Gamon, Kreios, Simon, the Hierophant, the Sun…and the Hermit. I blinked to see my father for the first time in what felt like months, but he appeared to be lost in deep thought, and I slid my gaze to Death beside him.
Death did not look happy.
“Where are the rest of them?” I snapped, my voice harder than intended.
The Devil fielded the question. “We put forth the summons, and those who chose to respond, responded. We have all we need to make decisions.”
Nikki sighed beneath me, groaning a little, and my gaze shot back to her. I no longer saw the woman who was my best friend, but a mass of circuits and connections, neural pathways that sparked and flared. I knew instinctively she was different than she had been, but she was alive, and the energy that pulsed deep within her remained quintessentially Nikki.
“Nikki?” I tried, and the raspiness of my voice betrayed the fact I’d spoken her name a thousand times before.
“Dollface,” she whispered back to me, though her lips didn’t move. “I’m good. Really. I’m…sorry I couldn’t save the old girl.”
“You did great,” I assured her, blinking rapidly as tears burned against the backs of my eyes. I jumped a little as the Magician curled his hand over my shoulder.
“There’s work to be done, Miss Wilde,” he murmured. “Work that Nikki Dawes can be a part of, now. It is not an easy path, however.”
I straightened, reluctantly pulling away from Nikki, and turned to where Armaeus gestured.
A small collection of artifacts had been laid out on the conference table beside the standing Council members—Simon alone sat, peering intently at the haul. The Moon’s ring, a full moonstone tiara, and the short blade Nikki had used to gash Dixie’s leg.
“The Moon returned to the realm beyond the veil this night,” Armaeus said quietly. “We have the right to raise a new Moon.”
There was no question who he had in mind for the job, and I jolted, my heart filling with a fierce pride, so strong it nearly choked me as Kreios took up the conversation.
“Nikki Dawes is no longer the woman she was but a few hours ago, though in some ways, she has not changed in the slightest,” he said. “You’ve put her back together better than she was before, Justice Wilde. Your skills are improving in that regard.”
I shot a look to Nikki, whose eyes were open now, the softest grin curving her lips as she slowly lifted herself to one elbow—then thought better of it and collapsed back down. Still, her voice was almost jaunty as she spoke, her eyes drifting shut beneath glitter-painted lids. “Best work I’ve ever had done, dollface. And that’s saying something.”
“Yeah, well. This isn’t a skill I want to be exercising too often.”
“It’s a gift. And one for which I am deeply grateful.” The Devil appeared a little shaken as he spoke, and his gaze moved toward Nikki. “There are few humans on this earth as valuable as Nikki Dawes, I think you will agree.”
“Can she handle it?” The question came from an unexpected quarter. Gamon stood with her arms crossed, her face harder than usual. “Ascension is no picnic even when you’re healthy. I still don’t understand what you guys did to me, exactly, and I’m still a little bitter about that. But she’s been taken down to the studs and built back up again in the last few hours. Is it too soon?”
“It’s a reasonable question, but we don’t have the luxury of time,” Kreios said. “If Dixie Quinn is the Star, whether she serves as a vessel for that entity or she has lived these past several years in our shadow gaining information on us, building networks of Connecteds, experimenting with drugs, and exploring the darkest corners of the arcane black market, then we are not in an ideal situation. We have to assume the worst.”
“Bring me up to speed on that,” Gamon said drily. “What exactly is the worst?”
“I think you can already draw those conclusions,” the Magician said. “You’ve fought in your share of wars. We’re missing five seated members of the Council who are arguably the most cunning of our number. We have a rogue Council member who potentially has access to many of our innermost workings. We cannot assume that because Dixie wasn’t in on some of the highest-level conversations that she didn’t know some way of gaining access to them. We have extreme unrest among the Connected community, a mobilized demon horde, an incentivized troop of artifact hunters who are trained to follow the money, an awakened arcane black market eager to see how they can capitalize on this potential new freedom, and the Shadow Court who are poised to marshal the Connecteds of their choice to eradicate the Connecteds they do not deem worthy of inclusion in their little cabal.”
Gamon blew out a breath. “Okay, fair. That’s a pretty bad position,” she acknowledged.
“Dollface.”
I turned back to the woman on the gurney, my best friend, my tireless champion. Nikki’s eyes were open again and lucid, though there was no denying the exhaustion that hung over her face like a caul. For the first time, I saw tiny lines at the corners of Nikki’s eyes, deeper brackets at the edges of her mouth. But I was mostly arrested by the expression in her gaze. She was fully aware of the conversation all around her, and she was asking me a question.
Should she do this? Not could she, not would she, but should she.
I knew it wasn’t for herself that she asked. To the end, she was my best friend. She wouldn’t do anything that would put me at risk, especially a move that would take her from my side. She would let this opportunity pass by her in a heartbeat if it might somehow cause me pain.
That, more than anything, firmed my resolve.
“There’s a whole lot of people who need you every bit as much as I do,” I said, my voice cracking. “And you can’t get rid of me that easily.”
She smiled, a shadow of her usual grin, but there was no denying the return of cocky expectation. Nikki didn’t merely face her challenges, she wrapped her arms around them and carried them with her into the new adventure that was her life. She lay back down on her gurney and flung a long, well-muscled arm over her forehead. “I do believe I’m ready for my close-up, then.”
The Magician moved forward, and Kreios took a position on the opposite side of Nikki’s body, while I maintained my position over her. Arguably, it was a little overkill, even for an ascension, but nobody was interested in screwing this one up. As the Magician spoke, the stars outside the Magician’s fortress flared suddenly, then weakened, the night sky going preternaturally dark. Far below, the revelers on the strip probably didn’t even notice, but I could feel the darkness closing in, surging up. A new moon passing its final stage of darkness.
The Magician began murmuring a song I hadn’t heard before, a song that was different from when I ascended. I shot a look to Gamon, and her face registered surprise as well. Had she and I gotten some sort of rinky-dink ascension package? If we did, I didn’t care. Of anyone I’d ever known, Nikki deserved the best of the best.
Within only a few minutes of this new melody, however, a bolt of pure magic radiated out from the Magician to suffuse Nikki’s body with light. She gasped, convulsing, the electrical charge zipping along newly formed connectors and pathways, filling her with a blue-white light.
The Magician deepened his song, and to my surprise, Kreios’s voice joined in. I had never heard the Devil sing before, but I shouldn’t have been surprised as his full rolling baritone slipped and slid through the room, speaking of wonder and magic untold.
As it happened, the Devil and the Magician weren’t the only souls to sing this night. A new chorus sounded in the far distance, and Simon pushed back from the table, standing and striding over to the windows to peer outside.
“Holy crap,” he muttered. “I mean, they’re still not as awesome as my guys, but this is pretty cool.”