“Of course,” I told the old witch, emotion catching on the words. He had known. He had known this would happen when he tasked me with taking care of Dom.
He closed his eyes again, his other hand fumbling for mine. When he was connected to me on one side and Dom on the other, he said, “Lay me beside my Drake.”
“Yes, Father,” Dom said, pressing her forehead to his.
“Every life has its season,” Yulian murmured.
My heart sped in my chest at the words Catie had spoken to me in my dreams. “And every season ends,” I offered in response.
The barest hint of a smile crossed his lips beneath his bushy white beard. “That it does, son. But every season comes back again, in its own time.”
With two more shaky breaths, Yulian slipped away from us.
Dom’s sob tore through the silent room like a rip in the fabric of time. She threw herself on her father’s chest, sobbing so hard I thought she might break into pieces.
I crawled to join her on the other side and wrapped my arms around her. I couldn’t take away her pain, just like no one could have ever saved me from the pain of losing Catie and Gretchen. But I could sit beside her and hold her shaking body and feel the hot sting of her tears on my skin. Because when a person is grieving, sometimes all they need is someone to keep them on their feet.
As much as I wanted to let Dom cry out her pain, I had to get moving. After a few moments, I gently extracted myself from her embrace and gripped her shoulders, forcing her to look me in the eyes. “I have a Circle to save.”
It took several seconds for her blue eyes to focus on me. When they did, she sat up straighter, her chin jutting like a petulant child. “I’m coming with you.”
“Fuck no, you aren’t. You’re going to stay here with Yulian and wait for me.”
Dom lifted one perfect dark eyebrow. “Excuse me? Do I look like a fucking damsel in distress to you? You’re not walking into the watchtower without me. We did it once tonight. We’ll do it again. Together.”
“They know we’re coming,” I warned her.
“And we’ll be ready.” Dom ripped the sachet from around Yulian’s neck and placed it over her head. “This time, we’ll use magic.”
“What the hell is that?” I asked, eyeing the bulging leather pouch.
“Charms. Lots and lots of charms.”
“Magic can’t enter the Kremlin. I feel like I’ve said this three times, and each time you have a work-around. It’s like you’re magic.”
Dom grinned. “Magic can’t go inside. But it can help us get there.”
We picked our way around the dead demons on the floor and met Raphael by the tower door. He offered me a hand.
I shook it but stared him down anyway. “You’re not coming?”
“This battle is yours,” Raphael replied with a shrug. “I helped you get this far. If I help much more, I might lose my wings.”
“If you did, it might humble you more,” I joked, though in light of everything, it fell flat. “Will you make sure Yulian gets where he’s going?”
“I would be honored, my friend.” Raphael gripped my shoulder. “I admire you, Gadreel. You’ve lived through hell on earth. But I wouldn’t want to be you. I do not think I am as strong as that.”
“You can’t discover how strong you are until life makes you.” I grasped his shoulder in return—just a single squeeze. Solidarity.
“Godspeed, Gadreel. May the grace of God go with you.”
30
I shoved open the front door of the cathedral, catching the edge of the wood on a pile of dead demons.
“What the hell happened?” I asked, using the door as a wedge to shove past the lifeless bodies. As far as I could see, demons littered the Square like small mountains. No movement anywhere.
“The spell must have killed them,” Dom replied, a little awe in her voice. “Every demon the spell touched died.”
“That’s some serious magic.”
“Yulian operated no other way.” She shoved an ice demon out of the way and stepped over a nymph’s body. “What’s the plan?”
“At this point, the plan is ‘don’t die,’” I said wryly, following her lead as we navigated the dead on the front steps of the cathedral.
“Inspiring words, oh wise one.”
“If you wanted inspiring, you should have stayed with Raphael.”
“That golden boy? Please.” Dom rolled her eyes. “I need inspiring, not perfection.”
“Good, since perfection isn’t in my vocabulary.”
I located four of my arrows in dead demons and replaced them in my quiver as we crossed the Square. If any more had survived the battle, they were buried deep beneath the dead. But four arrows was still four more than I’d had.
We were midway across the empty Square, passing darkened tents and fallen demons. Dom whirled around to face me, stopping me in my tracks. She tiptoed, her lips slanting over mine, her hands on my chest. The breath caught in my throat as I returned her kiss. I gave myself over to the sensation—her satin skin, her radiating warmth, her soft hair between my fingers.
This was desperation—the knowledge that we were walking into certain death. But no matter what, we were doing it together.
And if we were going to die, we were taking Belias with us.
“Sorry. Emotions got away from me,” Dom said against my lips. She kissed me one more time and released me. “Let’s do this.”
As we neared the watchtower, I realized that not all the demons had been affected by Yulian’s spell. A crowd of ice demons waited inside the gates to the Kremlin watchtower. They watched our approach warily but didn’t step outside the protection of the courtyard.
“They look a little pissed, don’t they?” I observed.
“We did just disintegrate half their ranks with a spell,” Dom said wryly. “I’d be wary, too.”
“They’re acting like the Square is lava.”
“They’re not exactly smart, Gad. They’re like giant toddlers made of ice with a disturbing desire to smash things.” She motioned at the watchtower. “That stupid building probably protected them from the spell. No magic and all.”
“So what’s the plan here?” I asked. “Because—toddlers or not—we’re standing in plain sight with about forty ice demons staring at us. And who the fuck knows where the nymfa are.”
“The good news is Yulian’s spell killed a lot of the nymphs.”
“Right, like Belias doesn’t have an even larger army of them inside protecting her,” I pointed out. “That’s about forty ice demons that rode out the spell inside the watchtower. How many more nymphs did exactly the same?”
“If we focus on that line of thought, we’ll never keep moving.”
Well, I could admit she had a point. “Okay. So what? You, me, four arrows, and a pickax?”
“I figured we would just toss charms at the demons and bust through.” She made a clucking sound and mimicked tossing a charm.
“You’re batshit crazy.”
“I know.”
“I like it.”
“Good.” She winked and held out a small clay pendant. “Put this on the tip of your arrow. It activates upon impact.”
I slid the soft tip of the clay pendant on the arrow’s head, then nocked and aimed. “Let’s do this,” I said, purposefully mimicking her previous words.
Dom smiled, that wolfish, maniacal gleam in her eye. “Let it fly, Gad.”
The bow twanged as I released the arrow. The weapon flew true. Had it been just an arrow, it would have glanced off the ice demon without any damage. But those tiny clay circles were powerful—the minute one hit the demon, it exploded in a blast of brilliant red. The ice demon erupted into flames, roaring into the night sky as his body incinerated outwards from the point of impact.
The Square was deadly silent in the wake of the ice beast’s death. His companions stared dumbly at the place where he had stood. Nothing remained but a pile of dirty ash on the packed snow.
“Yulian is scary as fuck,” I murmured.
“We’ll raise a toast to that when this over.” Dom dumped a bunch of charms in my jacket pocket, then palmed another. She raced forward with a battle cry, launching the charm in her hand.
I nocked another arrow and joined her.
For several minutes, the Square turned into a lightning show of magical bursts and fiery ice thugs. The charms caused absolute chaos among the demons, who were smart enough to realize they couldn’t use their fists against magic.
But the resulting chaos of stampeding, two-ton ice demons also meant Dom and I had to be quick-thinking and light on our feet. Beyond the demons’ ability to smash us to a pulp with their hands and arms, if we fell under their feet in their mad dash to flee, we’d be liquefied.
Once inside the roaring mass, I switched to hand-thrown charms. The ice demons resorted to flailing wildly in what I guessed was the hope they’d catch one of us in the head and knock us out before we could incinerate them. It turned the watchtower’s courtyard into a kind of obstacle course, made even more deadly by the spikes on their limbs.
I leapt over one demon’s leg and used both forearms to block another demon’s arm, barely escaping a skewer from his spikes, then launched a clay disk at the closest beast. I ducked under another arm, tossing a charm at the demon’s face as I passed beneath.
I couldn’t keep this momentum forever. There were way more demons than we had charms, and at some point, I would reach into my pocket and find it empty. But we were too committed now—in the thick of it, so to speak.
As I threw another charm and lit up the night with a burning demon, I caught my heel on the edge of the sidewalk and went down fast.
Like a bunch of sharks homing in on blood, the ice demons turned on me the minute my back hit the ground. Three of them piled on top of me, and I flashed back to the day I saved Liliya and her stolen bag of food.
Why was it always a pile of ice demons? Did they have no other method of taking down an enemy?
I kicked out and caught a demon in the knee. The blow reverberated up my leg and into my hip, but that particular demon fell away, roaring over his own leg.
I managed to snag my last arrow from underneath me and jam it in another demon’s neck, then when his weight disappeared, I jammed a hand into my pocket and pulled out a charm. I squinted against the blast of magic, but the spell took hold and the demon still crying over his knee turned to ash.
The remaining demon scrambled off me as I lifted another charm.
“Huh. You must be smarter than I thought,” I said to him. I threw the charm anyway.
But when his body vanished in a cloud of smoke, I realized why he’d backed away. He hadn’t been scared of my charm.
A nymph sidled through the crowd with a dagger in hand, her featureless face like a blank canvas pointed right at me.
31
Before I could react, a charm exploded on the side of her head.
As the magic burned across her, she screeched—an awful sound, high-pitched and keening. The nymph burned hotter and brighter than the ice demons. I threw a hand up against the heat wave, protecting my face. But she also burned faster and was a pile of useless ash in seconds.
I whooped, then looked around for Dom and her pouch of charms. I caught sight of her dark hair on the other side of the yard. She hadn’t been the one to save me.
Instead, a familiar smiling face floated into view. Nikolas held out a helping hand. “Gadreel! Good to see you.”
I accepted the hand, unable to hide my surprise. The last time I’d seen the big, bearded man, I’d been deep underground having cookies with his wife and daughter. “What are you doing here?”
Nikolas pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “We’re the backup plan.”
I blinked at the flood of people coming through the gates, armed to the teeth with charms. The yard had become a fierce lightning show, spells exploding on ice demons like an art installation.
“Backup plan?” I was doing that dumbass thing where I repeated everything because my brain couldn’t process.
Nikolas grinned and hawked a charm at a demon headed towards us. “Yulian’s charms were set up to be beacons. If we got the call that you were using them, it meant you needed help. So here we are. Everyone from the Invidia who could physically help.”
I threw another charm over Nikolas’s shoulder and laughed. “That old man. He thought of everything.”
“Is he…”
I shook my head.
Nikolas’s eyes shone in the light from the charms around us. He straightened himself with a brief nod. “Right. Well, let’s finish this one way or another. Head for the door. We’ll handle it from here.”
The fight moved faster now with more manpower. I ran out of charms and switched to my new dagger, slashing at any demon that got in my way. I kept my eyes on the prize—the main doors of the Kremlin.
Before I reached the end game, Dom joined me. Blue ice demon blood soaked her face and neck. I jammed my knife in a demon and raised an eyebrow at her.
She ducked another beast’s thick fist, and I leaned over her to stab the soft spot.
“It got a little messy,” she snapped, gesturing at my dagger and arm, which were also soaked in demon blood.
“Out of charms?” I asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Well, they can’t go inside with us anyway.” She motioned at the three nymphs guarding the front doors. “They haven’t come outside to join the fight.”
“Protecting Belias, I’m sure.” I shoved my sleeves up and readjusted my grip on my dagger. “No telling how many more are inside.”
“One demon at a time?” Dom suggested.
“That’s good math.”
Dom tapped her forehead. “Race you to the finish line.”
I tackled the first nymph, taking her heavy body to the linoleum. We slid across the shiny floor and into the dim interior of the watchtower. Her magic instantly rolled over me, dulling my senses. I fought the desire to become pliant and used both hands to stab the knife in the nymph’s torso, taking extra care to jam it up beneath her breast. The magic dissipated, releasing me from its grip.
“These things are going to be a problem!” I yelled, blocking a blow from the second nymph.
Dom had jammed the knife in her nymph’s eye and was struggling to remove it. “You don’t actually want to screw them! It’s just hormones!”
“I know that!” I swept a foot beneath the second nymph’s legs and took her out. Her head bounced off the concrete.
Dom joined me, jabbing her dagger in the sweet spot. She brushed her hair back and took a breath. “That was fun. Wanna do it again?”
“I can think of a dozen things I’d much rather do again.”
She slammed the front door shut and bolted it, leaving us in relative darkness.
My skin crackled under a film of demon blood as I wiped my blade on my shirt and prepared to move forward.
“There’s no way we’re alone in here,” Dom murmured. She stood close enough I could feel the warmth from her body.
“Depends on what orders Belias gave her goons.”
We moved quickly but silently. I kept every sense in my body on alert, waiting for the smallest change in temperature or fluctuation in atmosphere. But nothing happened—we traversed the whole of the building and descended the stairs to Belias’s below-ground quarters without running into a single demon.
“This doesn’t feel right,” Dom said softly as we crept down the underground hallway. “Too easy.”
“Kinda like it was too easy to get the spellbook?” I offered.
“Kinda like. Why do you think that is?”
I shrugged even though she couldn’t see me. “Complacency. Fifty years ago, Belias was full of herself. I can only imagine what she’s like now.”
The rust-colored door to Belias’s throne room emerged from the dusky hallway. The adrenaline of the last couple hours had
been enough to tamp down my fear. But this was it—this was what we’d been working towards.
And we would only have one chance to get it right.
Dom lifted her pickax.
I reached out and pushed the door open. It creaked on its hinges like an old horror movie, opening to reveal an empty throne room. I held my dagger out as I stepped through the door, my gaze darting into every corner.
The room was massive, but it was also open and unfurnished except for the giant stone and ice throne on the dais. I had a flash of memory—I’d found Belias here the day of the rift. She had been standing in front of the dais, working the magic that built her throne. The floor had molded to the seat, and ice had grown around the chair in crystalline spikes sharp enough to draw blood.
She’d ripped one of those spikes off to stab in my leg.
But now, the room appeared to be empty. Our footsteps echoed on the floor, ice cracking beneath our feet.
I exchanged looks with Dom but didn’t speak. The queen was here—I knew she was.
I could feel her.
I came to a halt in front of the throne and scanned the room. Dom drew up next to me, doing the same on her side.
A rush of cold air brushed my left cheek.
I whirled and lifted my dagger, my heart pounding, fear coursing through me.
Belias knocked my dagger from my hands with a vicious smile.
32
“Well, well. Look who we have here.” The demon queen took a step around me, her pale eyes scanning my body.
She looked exactly as I remembered her. Her long white hair hung loose around her petite frame. Her skin had the same satin consistency as a human’s, but she was tinged blue from head to toe—like a frozen human body. She wore a skin-tight, floor-length gown with an obscenely high slit that exposed one shapely thigh. Ever the one to flaunt her beauty, our brutal queen.
The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Page 37