by Ana Calin
Unless the man finds a way to stun them using their own magic, which requires a very specific and rare skill that only the best mages possess, he has no chance of ever seeing the light of day again. But, despite our protection, as Samael and I walk deeper down the winding underground tunnels, the sirens’ calls return. They accompany us like the wind, whispering close to my ear.
Samael’s ghostly form stops, and swivels around. White eyes hit mine as he holds out his palm as if he wants to hand me something. But what he does is blow something in my face that throws Cerys’ protection right off of me.
The sirens whirl, the air shifting as they twist through it. I bite back the need to kill the bastard. Soon, I promise myself, and activate the fire in my irises so I can see what I’m dealing with. Now that my cover is blown, no reason to keep back the fire, especially since now I can only rely on my own powers.
The sirens take shape in front of me, crammed together in the narrow corridor, their hair floating. There are dozens of them, and sure as fuck there are more filling these tunnels like a pest, because that’s what they are. Even their faces, they’re nothing like in the fairy tales humans tell. They’re distorted, disfigured even. After all, they are suicides that mirror their final sin, but their voices are so seductive that they can drive a man insane.
“The King of Flames,” their whispers lick my ears. “He’s come to save us.”
“Haven’t you, oh great warrior?”
I fix my eyes ahead, on Samael’s departing figure. He’s put considerable distance between us already, leaving me amidst the swirling sirens. I fix my eyes on him, tuning out the creatures’ words. Listening to them could be deadly, because they infiltrate one’s head like earworms. But if I don’t listen to them, they can’t hurt me. Their power is in their voices alone.
More join, floating above me, and between my legs like fish in the sea, making it hard to move forward. I don’t listen to their words, and yet I’m growing rapidly weary. A deep sadness falls over me, like a veil over my head and my heart, heavier by the minute.
A siren whispers Cerys’ name in my ear, and uncontrollable thoughts of her in dire situations come at me like fucking punches. Fire pumps through me so fast that it hurts. I see her lying on the bed on top of blood-soaked sheets, Kareim standing there with a blade in his hand that still drips blood, hatred alive in his crimson eyes.
I force myself to push forward, but it feels like walking through thick sludge.
She’s not here, they’re just playing with your mind. She’s with Draven and Marayke, she’s safe, and she needs you to go on. Focus.
But Samael is fucking winning. He’s too far ahead of me, I can’t see him anymore down the winding corridors, and the sirens’ whispers envelop me like layer upon layer of pain. I crumble to my knees, my own fire consuming me. The sirens can’t kill with their hands, but they’re gonna make me self-combust. Even if I could resist them, there’s no way I’ll get the incantation out of them. Samael is about to win this, and then I’ll be imprisoned for many, many years, leaving Cerys alone out there, to take the wrath of the worlds. And if Kareim gets out before me?
The torturing scenarios in my head become unbearable. I’m already thinking of ways to keep my soul alive if my body dies in order to still watch over Cerys. I’ve heard there are possibilities, but just as I snarl and get back up to my feet, the sirens’ song turns into long shrieking that pierces my ears. They try to hold on to my body, but soon they blast off of me as if someone had thrown a grenade in their midst.
It takes a few confusing seconds for me to understand what happened, but then I see it. It’s the two figures that wore the Glamour Anonymous. Lava breaks out through my veins, crisscrossing my body, a blade of flame taking shape in my hands, ready to take them on. But it doesn’t look like they’re here to fight me. The taller figure of the two, the male, stands with his back to me, his arms spread out, muttering a spell that fills the tunnels with its power, while the woman watches him intently, as if she were learning from him. Whatever they’re doing, they’re not doing it to me, but to the sirens, who scatter with their ghostly hands pressed to their ears.
The blade retreats, the fire in my veins calms down. I wait until the place is clear, and the two figures direct their attention to me. I don’t move an inch as they approach, until the man is just inches away from me. He stops, and the glamour spell dissipates off of him, revealing his identity.
I’ll be damned. Wouldn’t have expected this in a million years.
CHAPTER VII
Xerxes
“Zillard Dark.” I wish I could tell the warlock how glad I am to see him, because my face is all stone and not used to expressing things, but my tongue is none the better right now either. “By the cursed realms, I thought—”
“You sensed Tartarian energy back at the inn, and you thought we were after you.” He winds an arm around his fiancé, Izzy, a witch in training with caramel-colored curly hair and pale blue eyes so uncanny they alone could have been enough to scare off the sirens. “But we were there to help you. We had to keep in the shadows, seem even hostile to you, so no one caught wind of what we were truly doing. I’m sorry about the little misunderstanding at the inn.”
“But how did you know? Did Cerys contact you?”
“No. She didn’t get the chance to with all the crazy shit going on, but her friend Marayke did. You know, the one you had try to kill me the last time we met.”
“When you didn’t come to the wedding, I thought you still held a grudge against me.”
“I’ll probably always hold a grudge against you.” A corner of his mouth trembles up in an attempt to smile, but that’s all he manages. Like me, he’s a deeply controlled being, and his eyes are so black they’re as disturbing as Lucifer’s. His expression only changes when he looks at his wife.
“Izzy and I decided to keep in the shadows, and even used the old enmity between you and me to get information from your enemies.”
“The old enmity that no longer exists,” Izzy hurries to put in.
Zillard looks me up and down as if he were scanning me. “Ever since you fell in love with my sister, your energy has truly shifted. You’re still brutal, and deadly, I can sense that, but somehow, it feels like you have good intent. However, that good intent will be useless unless we make something of it ASAP. Your competitor is almost at the portal. We can’t waste any more time, we have to go now. We might not beat him to the destination, but we might just beat him to the incantation.”
I arch an eyebrow. “You know how to get it from the sirens?”
Zillard smiles. Of course he fucking can. He’s half warlock and half demon. With Hades for a father and a succubus for a mother, Zillard Dark is a beautiful sex demon with powers beyond what is imaginable for a normal warlock or even a mage. If someone has powers similar to the sirens’, then him. It was actually baffling to the entire supernatural world when the news came out that he lost his heart to a human woman, even though it turned out she had serious inclination for witchcraft, too.
We head down the corridor, with me leading the way. I catch speed, a lot of it, fire pumping through my veins, my body leaving a trail of light behind as I run. Zillard can keep up, but he has to pick up Izzy in his arms.
We reach the portal, but it’s too late, and I let out a long frustrated roar, veins of lava swelling in my neck.
“Fuck damn it,” Zillard grunts.
Samael has gotten the incantation from the sirens before I even got the chance. The creatures fill the air, but they seem to have lost their minds, wailing and mourning and tearing their floating hair. I spit curses through gritted teeth. Why didn’t I expect this? Samael is the Archangel of Death. Of course he has ways to dazzle these creatures, much like Zillard. He just waited until he got to the portal to do it, giving them a chance to deal with me. I don’t think he even expected that blowing my cover would get me killed, he just needed to delay me in order to gain advantage.
And that he did. The
portal now swirls like a thick net of spirals in front of us, a black vortex leading to the realm of chaos.
“I have to go in there after him, while the portal is still open,” I tell Zillard over my shoulder, my body already flexing to go into the portal. “But there’s no way in the cursed realms that you’re going with me.” I glance at Izzy. “You have the woman you love with you. It’s your responsibility to protect her much more than it is your duty to help me. Besides, if I don’t come back, the woman I love, and your sister, is going to need all the protection she can get. She can’t lose us both in one go.”
Zillard puts a hand on my shoulder. “Funny to hear that expression from your mouth—not a chance in the cursed realms. Considering that you’re ruling one of them. But you’re right.” He fishes something from his pocket and holds it out to me. “Here, take this.” He pushes a small shiny bottle into my hand, the color of emerald.
“What is it?”
“What does it look like?”
I turn it around in my hand. “Poison.”
His silence is confirmation enough.
“But—”
“Listen, you’ve had to jump from one quest into the next. There’s no time for you to plan, plot or recharge. Take this as a last solution only.”
“Cerys recharged me before this. There are no sirens or Great Smoke in there. Chaos is something I’ve fought before.”
“And the Council probably chose this quest for you because they didn’t think you’d make it so far. But someone sitting in that Council seriously wants you to lose, and you need all the extra aces up your sleeve you can get.”
I scowl at the little bottle. “How do I use it? Does it do anything special, because the creatures I’m going to face in there aren’t susceptible to the same potions as those in our worlds. They function by a very different set of rules.”
“Xerxes, all I can tell you here in short is that a warlock’s gut feeling is his compass. And my gut feeling is telling me that’s what you need in order to get out of there alive, and come home to my sister, the woman who loves you.”
He steps back, giving me space to do what must be done. By what I can tell, the portal isn’t going to stay open for long. Time runs slower outside of the realms, but for creatures like us time still exists, so I’ll still have to move within a time frame, even in the realm of Chaos. I flex, and jump in.
I give in to the portal’s swirling suction, allowing it to stretch time, space, my body and my mind. It’s completely counter-intuitive to let it happen, and every fiber in a normal person’s body would compel them to struggle, save themselves and return to the world they know, but I’ve been through this before. I know better than to fight the current.
I let it pull me in and cast me out into the void, a dark place with a thick atmosphere in which the body is weightless. The first time I experienced the void in Apophis’ world I compared it to swimming deep in a black ocean, at levels where the pressure would crush a human’s bones.
Since I can’t see much ahead of me, I feel for the kind of energy that I’m used to fighting—wraiths. And Samael. He got here ahead of me, but he’s not familiar with chaos, so I doubt that he could actually navigate his way to the prize we’re both here to get. The tips of my ears make fine movements as they listen for the specific hum of chaos wraiths, and soon enough, they pick it up, like antennae. I follow the hum, keeping quiet like a predator stalking prey. After all, this is hunting, only by a different set of rules than in the worlds that I come from.
I discover a cluster, slithering together in a ball like snakes having an orgy. They’re long thin worms of chaos, the wraiths’ semi-physical shape that they take only in this world. In ours, they turn to shadows, and only become physical if one manages to touch them, which doesn’t happen very often.
It becomes even clearer to me why I see Samael as a worm. The closest I’ve ever come to death was during the millennia that I’ve been trying to keep Apophis and Orion at bay from our realms.
Something glittery shows through the occasional loops between the wraiths. I narrow my eyes, zeroing in on what looks like a blade made of light. The Blade of Annihilation, the final item that I need to collect. My heart beats just a little harder, because everything depends on my getting this weapon and taking it back to the Council before Samael does, but that slight increase is enough for the wraiths to sense me.
Their heads snap in my direction, a few of them coming loose from the bundle, while the others squeeze tighter around the blade. I can’t see its light anymore, but they already know I’m here, so no point in hiding. The blade of fire takes shape in my hands, and rivulets of lava crack their way down my skin. The wraiths launch themselves at me, and I throw myself toward them at the same time, decapitating them as I bolt towards the bundle. Fuck, I’ve done this so often before, that it actually feels like home.
More wraiths tear away from the slimy cluster in kamikaze attempts to protect the sword. But the closer I get, the further I seem to be, which means that the cluster is moving the blade away while the others try to stop me. I roar, trying to push through them, but soon the wraiths are too many, coiling around me. I run the fire blade through them, slicing them in half and in pieces, their bodies instantly turning to ash. But their energy is only dissipated, not destroyed. Death doesn’t exist here, which means that the wraiths reform somewhere else, yet too far to stand in my way. The now sliced worms no longer pose a danger, but there are still so many of them it doesn’t help at all.
Busy fighting my way through them and thinking of a way to get that blade before it drifts too far, I forget all about Samael, which is why his flying straight into that cluster comes as a surprise. The wraiths stop moving, as if they don’t understand what just happened. But as the first one twists and struggles like he’s dying, commotion starts among them.
I finally understand what’s going on here, and fuck me. The wraiths are experiencing something they have never experienced before—death. As the Archangel of Death, Samael has brought a whole new experience to this external realm. This was the ace in his sleeve all along. And he’s closer to the blade than I am.
But too much is at stake, I can’t let him have it no matter what. With a roar that gets lost in the void, I push like a tank through the wraiths around me, swinging my fire blade, faster and faster and slashing everything in my way, wraiths vanishing in clouds of ash. At the same time I calculate how much longer Samael has with the wraiths that have now peeled themselves completely off the shining blade, having left it to float in the void, only a few of them still hovering around it. He’s only going to need a few more seconds than I need in order to get to the blade.
The sword of flame retreats back into my hand, blending back with my body. This is it. I go with all I have for the Blade of Annihilation and, despite the chaos worms whipping around my ankles, I power through and finally grip the hilt. Everything around me stills as the blade grows brighter, emitting a blinding light, before it starts to die down and fade to black.
Without its glow, for a moment all that exists is complete darkness. Not a breath, not a ray of light, until the veins of lava start snaking down my body, illuminating a sea of chaos worms wriggling soundlessly towards me. From the side, Samael is staring daggers at me, in what I take is his ‘real’ form. All I can hope is that he didn’t project himself to Cerys like this when he first visited her in the Fire Realm, because he’s nothing like the hideous things people have been seeing.
But I can’t waste another second pondering the tragic destiny of a pretty boy having to live with the many faces of a monster. I need to get out of here fast, and with the Blade of Annihilation. One thing is certain right off the bat—it’s going to be next to impossible, because I don’t just have an army of wraiths all over me, but also Samael to deal with. I can see the determination in his eyes, he’ll do anything to win this.
Time is running out, and the only way out of here and towards the portal is right through the sea of wraiths bloc
king my way. I steel my focus, my body flexing. There’s no way I can fight all of these creatures off of me, so I have to resist them and keep going until I reach the portal.
I flex and shoot forward, like an arrow, arms plastered to the sides of my body, my fist tight around the blade’s hilt. The wraiths latch on to me like jellyfish, stinging and biting, and coiling around me. Claws and fangs pierce through my leather armor, some swipe the daggers strapped to my thighs and slash me with them. I hiss as my blood drips from me and onto the wraiths, turning them into ashes.
Bleeding is my best solution right now, but strength drains from me along with blood. My blood drives the wraiths away, scared of the fire, but the portal is still far away, and about to close. It shrinks by the second, the spiraling vortex inside it swirling faster and faster.
An invisible claw grips my heart as I realize that I’m most probably not getting out of here. This must be how my enemies in the Council envisioned this. If I made it as far as this last quest, my undoing was never supposed to be death, but the inability to ever return to the Flipside. With an inaudible roar and a surge of will I slash my wrist on one of the blades at my chest, and pour lava onto the rest of the wraiths holding on to me. If I make it back, I will probably be more dead than alive, but it’s the only way to free myself, and move faster.
But, at the last moment, Samael appears in my way, forcing me to stop. His lips move. He’s saying something to me, but the void doesn’t carry sound. I realize that this right here would be Apophis’ best chance to take me out once and for all. I’m bleeding heavily, and the Archangel of Death is on his side. If Apophis joins, I won’t be able to fight all of them, not even with the Blade of Annihilation. I could probably take two of them at the most, but I would still be going down.