Ryan reached for the handle, only to recoil as though burned. “It’s warded. They’re downstairs.”
Which meant the Death King must be down there, too. The unintelligible tangle of mutters didn’t tell me who was on the winning side, though surely a fight would make more noise. If the vampire didn’t have the Death King’s soul amulet, he must have found another way to subdue him. Crap.
Dex disentangled himself from the air sprite and descended beside me. “If you’re looking for a way into the murder dungeon, try the other one.”
“What?” I twisted on the spot, seeing Ryan descending into the first basement. “What’re you doing?”
“Stay back.” Ryan disappeared from sight. A moment later, there came an almighty blast, like a torrent of air magic slamming into a solid wall. The whole house seemed to tremble with it.
“Dammit, Ryan.” I halted at the top of the steps as another tremor shook the ground below my feet.
I dropped to a crouch and peered down, my eyes stinging from the explosion of dust. Below, Ryan had blasted straight through the brick wall of the basement into the neighbouring chamber. Brick dust clogged my throat as I climbed downstairs, coughing uncontrollably. Dex’s bright form appeared to light the way to where Trix had joined Ryan at the foot of the staircase.
Piles of shattered brick lay around a sizeable hole in the wall adjoining a larger basement. Dex’s light bloomed, alighting on the form of the Death King standing inside the chamber on the other side of the wall. He wore his human face, his brows raised in surprise at the sight of us. I climbed over the debris to his side. “What are you doing in here?”
He gave me an exasperated look. “Did you have to step over the line?”
I looked down at the lines of a circle below my feet, almost obscured by the brick dust. Shit. I’d stepped straight into a magical trap. “You might have told me it was there.”
“I might have told you?” he said.
“I’m assuming the spell doesn’t stop you from speaking.” I coughed, the dust burning my eyes. “Where’s the Crow?”
“Somewhere under that wall.”
Oh. Ryan hadn’t just interrupted the ritual; they’d knocked the wall onto the leading vampire’s head. Awkward. Crumpled bricks and other debris covered the chamber. I squinted through the dust and saw a number of figures standing around the outskirts of the room, and they all held cantrips in their hands.
“Was this a ritual to turn you into a zombie, by any chance?” The circle was a complex one, even with half of it obscured by the collapsed wall. Trix and Ryan stepped through the doorway and stopped moving as a dark figure rose to block their path.
The Crow’s face was flecked with brick dust, his mouth pulled taut with rage as he strode over to the edge of the circle. His pale eyes narrowed as he studied me. “You’re a puzzle, Olivia. I have to admit, I thought you died along with Alban. I didn’t know the Order took your memories. Then again, my own memories of that time are… fractured.”
The breath caught in my throat. Had whatever fate had befallen Dirk Alban caused him to end up transforming into a vampire? I wished I’d been able to see more in my memories while I’d been the vampires’ prisoner, but there’d been no time, and if I’d delayed, I wouldn’t have got here in time. Even now, I had the sinking suspicion I might be too late to stop him.
Several bright gleams caught my eyes as the figures standing around the room closed in. Some were vampires, some mages, and I recognised the Fire Element among the latter. His expression was blank, but when his gaze connected with mine, he sneered at me.
Anger brewed inside my chest. He was no better than any of the other scumbags who the Crow had lured into serving him.
I gave the Crow a defiant look. “I’m hard to kill.”
“So I see.” His gaze lingered on the blood on my shoulder. “You’d make a fine vampire… if there was room for another of my kind, that is.”
“A vampire spirit mage.” I forced myself to meet his hungry stare, the combination of the dust thick in the air and the blood loss making me lightheaded. “With the number of people you’ve killed, it’s no wonder I didn’t guess you were anything other than a particularly inventive murderer who likes to target the dead.”
“It’s harder than I anticipated to effectively use this spell on a vampire,” he said. “I’ve lost many brave volunteers to the cause… the spell works better on liches and phantoms, as I’ve found, but I’ve kept refining the spell in the hope of finding a solution.”
I cocked a brow. “Brave volunteers, huh. You really want to use the spell on yourself? You want power that badly?”
“No,” he said. “I merely wish to return to life. I’ve been trying to find a way ever since the unfortunate accident which turned me, and I have no other options left.”
My heart jolted. He was trying to find a way to turn himself into a flesh-and-blood human again? It seemed his claim to purge the undead from the city so the living could walk again was literal. He wanted to turn himself into a living, breathing human, no longer one of the immortal undead.
“Why don’t you want to live forever?” I said. “I’d have thought becoming a vampire would be a sweet deal, considering the alternatives.”
Considering Cobb lost his magic and I lost my memories.
“This curse has its downsides,” he said. “Vampires’ capabilities are limited, but spirit mages once ruled the world.”
“The vampires rule over the city now, though,” I pointed out. “What the hell did you do to the council? Do they know you’re here playing with the forces of life and death?”
“They’re investigating a disturbance at the warehouse, orchestrated by some of my allies,” he said. “The vampire council will have to bow to me when they return to find that I have become myself again and am no longer subject to their rule.”
“So you want to be the Death King, too,” I said. “Like Cobb.”
“Cobb hoped to take Alban’s place,” he said. “To become like him. But he wasn’t strong enough. He lost his magic, and without it, he could never have been as great as I am. He had to resort to taking the power of the King of the Dead in order to gain a fraction of his former glory.”
Keep talking, dickhead. Not that I could do much from in here. My allies, though, were outside the circle. I had to trust that they’d come up with a plan.
“What the hell do you want with the Death King’s soul, if not to take his power?” The man himself hadn’t moved or reacted to the Crow’s speech. I could only assume he was contemplating his next move.
“To remove him, of course.” He turned to address the mages and vampires around the outskirts of the room. “The power contained within this barrier should be enough. Go on. Speak the words of the ritual and free the Death King’s soul from its prison. I’m sure he will thank us for it, before he perishes.”
The others inside the room spoke in unison, a chilling murmur that raised the hairs on my arms. Power surged through the circle’s edges, and the cantrips in each speaker’s hands all glowed at once. The Crow, meanwhile, held up a token of his own. The amulet containing Death King’s soul. Or so he thought.
I backed up to the far edge of the circle. I had until he realised it was a fake to find us a way out, so I needed to act quickly. No normal cantrip would work as long as I remained in this trap, but perhaps I could use one of my other tools.
I tilted my head and caught Trix’s eye from where he stood at the circle’s edge. I looked down to where he pointed. A brick lay half in the circle. The barrier was designed to contain magic, but maybe I could work with this.
I dropped to my knees and scooped up the brick, readying myself to take aim. The vampire continued to chant, holding the Death King’s soul amulet high so it could be seen by everyone in the room.
As the chanting continued, the Death King swayed on the spot, as though drained by an invisible force. What’s going on? I thought it was fake.
The cantrips in the hands of t
he vampire’s allies glowed brighter with every second that passed, so I couldn’t delay any longer. I readied the brick, took aim—and lobbed it straight at the vampire’s head.
He went down hard, cut off mid-chant. I grabbed another brick which Trix had thoughtfully shoved into the circle behind me and hurled it at one of the other vampires.
“Duck!” shouted Ryan.
A current of wind blasted over my head, straight through the circle and into the gathering vampires. They scattered, dropping cantrips everywhere, and chaos broke out.
23
The Air Element’s attack blasted the vampires aside like skittles, and even the Crow staggered backwards, his forehead bleeding where I’d hit him with the brick. Trix jumped in a moment later, hurling a brick at the nearest vampire. The brick struck his forehead with a ringing thud, and he crumpled into a heap.
“Didn’t we already drain you?” one of the vampires said. “How do you have any blood left in you?”
“I’m an elf,” he said, which was enough of an explanation in itself.
Ryan blasted their way through the remains of the door, while Dex flew above the spell circle. “Damn, that’s strong. Nasty piece of work, that. How’s the deadly king holding up?”
The Death King remained stock-still next to me, his head bowed. He hadn’t even noticed the vampires fall, nor that the soul amulet had been lost somewhere in the chaos. What in hell was he doing?
A bright flash caught my eyes. Davies stepped out of the ruins of the shattered wall, his hands alight with fire as he faced off against Ryan. Fire blasted from Davies’s hands, but Ryan dispelled it with a wave of their hands. The flames hit the brick dust, extinguishing on the spot. If they started an elemental duel in here, we’d all be caught in the backlash if we weren’t careful.
I turned to shout a warning, and the Crow’s bloody face loomed above me, looking quite deranged. His hand shot out and closed around my throat. “You won’t get in my way any longer, you foolish girl.”
Panic sparked as his fingers tightened, still vampire-strong. I couldn’t access my spirit magic from behind the circle’s boundary. He could snap my neck in a heartbeat, and he knew it. I heard someone shouting my name, but the sound disappeared as a roaring noise filled my ears.
Images flickered behind my eyes. The Crow’s face beside Dirk Alban’s—Dirk shouting something—blood on my hands, dripping down the walls…
The vampire’s grip broke and he twisted aside with a snarl, away from a torrent of flames. I dropped to the ground, gasping for breath, but it wasn’t Davies’s fire that’d caused him to let go. Brant, who’d crept up to the circle’s edge, pressed something into my hand. My fingers closed on cold metal, too stunned to react.
“Too stupid to die, are you?” The Crow flew at Brant with vampire speed, and the two of them disappeared in a haze of brick dust. Alarm rose thick in my throat, mingling with the smell of burning.
I looked down at the item Brant had given me—a cantrip. The light was too dim for me to see the lines on the surface and figure out what it did, but I had nothing to lose at this point. The Crow’s head rose from the dust, his mouth bloody—and I set the cantrip off in his face.
The vampire fell backwards, gasping, then recovered an instant later. Before my eyes, his fangs retracted, the inhuman glow of the living dead fading from his eyes until they were an ordinary blue colour once more. His whole countenance changed from otherworldly to human, his speed slowing, his features sliding from porcelain to imperfect. Human. Living, once more.
All the sound in the room seemed to fade into the background as the Crow regarded me, a slow smile creeping onto his mouth. “I’ve missed this more than you can possibly imagine.”
A glow saturated his skin, and a torrent of light pulsed out from his palms, knocking back everyone who wasn’t in the circle. My teeth chattered, my skin chilled with the backlash of spirit magic. He was a spirit mage entirely, a vampire no longer—and unlike me, he had full access to his knowledge.
I’ll kill Brant. That is, if I didn’t die myself first. Whatever power source the Crow was drawing from, I didn’t have a clue—there were no nodes nearby—but he was more experienced than I was. And a stronger spirit mage than he’d been as a vampire. No wonder he’d wanted to return to life.
The duelling Elements had vanished somewhere in the gloom, leaving only the Death King and I to face off against the new threat. From the way the house trembled, the Crow would bring the whole place crashing down on our heads if he wasn’t careful.
“Spirit magic and vampirism are not compatible,” he said, cupping a swirling current of energy in his palms. “Vampires require energy to function, so they simply absorb power rather than being able to use it in this manner.”
His hands glowed, and he spun around, blasting another hole in the wall. The guy seemed to want to destroy the place. Yet the circle around my feet remained intact… and now I understood why the Death King had stayed put. Physical objects might be able to touch us behind the barrier, but not spirit magic.
“You can’t stay in there forever.” The Crow’s eyes danced with madness, his mouth bloody from biting Brant, and it hit me that he was vulnerable to any damage as a regular human was now. He must have figured it’d be worth the trade-off. “Come out and face me.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I think I’ll let you wear yourself out first. Right, Death King?”
He still wasn’t moving. What the hell was he doing?
The vampire—no, spirit mage—moved closer to the circle’s edge. “Dead already, are you, Grey?”
The circle exploded. Light burst outward, knocking into everyone within reach. Even Dex flew through the ceiling and out of sight, while I toppled backwards right onto my bleeding shoulder. Pain screamed up my arm to my spine, and a fresh wave of plaster dust blurred my vision.
The Crow roared in fury. The blast had hit him in the face, and when he lifted his head, there was a hole where his nose should be, a dent in his face filled with crumpled bone and stringy muscle. Spirals of energy spun around his hands, and a rush of understanding seared my mind. He hadn’t been channelling an independent source—he’d been using his own life force as energy to fuel his attack. And the spell, like the others which had left a pile of dead liches and phantoms in their wake, gifted the user incredible strength fuelled by the user’s own life force until it gave out entirely.
Brant wasn’t betraying me after all.
The Crow snarled and grabbed for my ankle, but I kicked his hand away from me. His hands scrabbled, still leaking life energy, and the decay was already spreading from his face to his neck. His body was decomposing at rapid speed, his legs decaying beneath him, his face rotting away. I gave him another kick, and his body crumpled into a twitching heap. A scream rose up from his allies as they realised their master was dying, but most had already run. Brant lay unconscious on the floor, while in the cellar bordering this one, Trix stood surrounded by unconscious vampires.
“Dex,” I called to the sprite, who hovered on the ceiling at a safe distance from the battle. “Where are the others?”
“The Elements ran. Well, one of them did.”
Davies. I’d bet he’d run at the first chance of the tide turning on his master. And he’d called Brant a coward.
I stumbled out of the circle—or tried to. Instead, I walked into a solid barrier. Ow.
“Hey, Death King.” I turned to his side and stifled a gasp. A thin line of bright energy pulsed from his hands into the circle itself. He must have been pouring his own life force into the spell all along, intending to protect us until he’d gained enough power to destroy the Crow and his people. Now he was still fuelling it with his own strength, and if he didn’t stop, we’d both be stuck in here indefinitely.
He didn’t look up, no matter how many times I called his name. He was beyond reach, at least from here. But maybe… maybe I could reach him another way. It wasn’t like I had any better ideas.
I slid out of
my body and saw the transparent form of his spirit staring back—but not all of it. A familiar glow drew my attention to the soul amulet lying beside the rotting remains of the Crow.
“You brought your own soul?” I whispered. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“You’re going to have to evacuate everyone before I can break the circle.” His voice was quiet, but audible. “The whole house is going to be destroyed when I do so, and anyone inside might get caught in the backlash.”
“Shit.” I looked up for Dex. “Hey! Everyone, get out! This place is gonna fall down!”
The vampires were already fleeing—those of them who could still stand, that was. Brant still lay half-conscious and bleeding on the floor, and my heart dropped in my chest at the sight of him. I didn’t want to watch him die.
Trix stepped in. Without needing to be asked, he grabbed Brant and threw him bodily over his own shoulder, jogging up the stone steps and out of sight.
I released a breath. “All right. How do I…?”
“Imagine you’re drawing the power out of the circle and into yourself.” The Death King placed a hand on my arm, which startled me as much as it had the first time he’d done it.
I reached for the energy current rippling from the circle’s edge. I could feel the strands of power coming from the Death King and feeding into the barrier around us, and instinct took over. My hands closed around threads, pulling them away from the circle’s edge. Shock jolted up my arms as the same power rippled into me, through my bones. I gasped aloud, the current threatening to carry me into its embrace.
It’s like… a node…
The Death King looked me in the eyes. “Let go.”
I released the threads, and the circle collapsed. Power burst from my hands, blasting through the ceiling and rippling through the house. The remainder of the stone walls fell down, the ceiling blew open, and the darkening sky of the world outside appeared above our heads.
Touch of Death (Order of the Elements Book 2) Page 21