Torchlighters

by Megan R Miller

  And then the stonework in the circle rippled like the surface of broken water and a head shrouded in a corona of limp dark hair began to emerge.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In Ancient's Name

  “This is the Voice of the Night, reporting in for what might be the last time. I’ve had several brave souls call in talking about how the sick and elderly have passed from their lives tonight, as if their tenuous grasp on life has faded with the wisplights.

  I know that there have been reports all over the city of imps vanishing from their summoners graps and everyone seems to be afraid.

  I want you to know that I hear you and that it is alright to be scared and angry right now. Stay tuned in. As long as we have a signal, I am right here with you and I’m not going anywhere.

  For these next few hours, be they the darkness before the dawn or our very last ones, let’s take a moment to celebrate our city and how far we’ve come. Take it for what it is.

  We’re Mistriev’s first City-State. We were the first to start mass-producing anything. The first to start accepting people from every island. Not all of our accomplishments have been worth bragging about, but we’ve made our mark and the rest of the world cannot deny us.

  I’ll be taking calls. Please, reach out to me and reach out to each other. I love you, Daelan City. Hold fast. This world is going to go on with or without us, but we will not be forgotten.”

  Power radiated off of the thing in the center of the circle. Blood and brick rippled out from him like water as his narrow shoulders emerged from what should have been solid floor.

  Even Tess’s rhakshasi had come in a pillar of heat and light. There was no light, here. Instead, Lazrael seemed to drink it in. He rolled his head, body twitching down to the very fabric that made it up, and that was what broke his hold on Callum enough to drop to the floor.

  He could still see the figures below through the slats in the brickwork. He crept along, keeping his balance with one hand on the low wall as he met the stairs and moved down them a little at a time. Lazrael had emerged to the elbows now.

  His arms were bound tight to his body, his movement more serpentine than human. All of the lights and sounds of the chamber pulled inward toward him. He was the center of all of it. He was death and yet life could not exist without him.

  “Lazrael,” Lena echoed. Her voice was soft and gentle, commanding and adoring in the way a mother could be. “I call you to my side. I offer you my humble sacrifice in exchange for your services.”

  Her one arm gestured around the circle at stunned cultists. There were fourteen of them, still gripping the daggers that slotted so easily into the altars before them like over sized keys. As Callum reached the base of the brick stairs, he realized they were struggling, all of them, and yet they couldn’t move.

  A trap glyph glowed softly beneath the one nearest to him. In the curve of one of its sides he could make out the sigil for ‘human’.

  “I give you the souls of mixbloods,” she said. “Seven half-angels. Seven half-demons. And a man and woman of each the blood of Liftha and Tuath. The blood of Izan and Hueva. The blood of Anish and Gaia. The blood of Yama.”

  As she spoke, glyphs flared beneath each cultist like a spotlight. Callum could see more clearly now that he knew what to look for that she was right. There were seven men and seven women and they were staggered among the bloodlines, barely discernible beneath the depths of their hoods.

  How long must it have taken her to gather them? A man and woman, each. He imagined her going to them one at a time, telling them of the honor she was to bestow upon them, how important it was to have a hand of each line for the summoning. How they must have believed her without reservation under the sway of her magic, as he had.

  Lena’s eyes had taken on a fevered cast, her bloody lips curved upward in exaltation. Lazrael’s hands were free now, corpse pale with fingers twice the length of the palms. He crossed his arms before him with his palms facing outward and his head lulled to one side.

  There was a silence beneath the vibration of magic. The floor stilled again beneath Lazrael’s feet. From the back, he looked almost like any other man. He was tall, yes, and whip thin. He lifted his head to Lena.

  This was it. Callum could either stay where he was or he could move and risk drawing this thing’s attention. His feet did not want to move. Every inch of him wanted so badly to remain where he was, or go back the other way. To keep this ineffectual foot of brickwork between him and this thing his half-sister had called here.

  But people were going to die. And if he did nothing, Callum was going to die with them.

  He forced himself to his feet.

  He felt the sentiment echo through his ribcage, not a sound at all but an impression. There was no word, only a concept. A deep certainty that this being was so old Callum’s life did not even measure as a length of time to it. He had been born, and would age and die and to this being it would be of no consequence.

  He knew in this moment, with no barrier between them, that he was dealing with something so vast his mind could barely brush the edges of its presence. Like black water bleeding into the night sky. His eyes would not be enough to find the opposite shore, the end of this thing.

  And it was in pain.

  “You called on death.”

  The words came from too close. For a fraction of a moment he thought someone had come up behind him and then he realized they had been spoken in his voice. His eyes were wet. He strode forward in slow methodical steps.

  “Do you accept my offering?” Lena asked. Her voice had become insistent and afraid.

  Callum Trezza. It is a fraction of your name. A fraction of your spirit. The body still walks but it is missing something vital.

  The barely healed wound in his chest stung white hot and he stopped in his tracks. For a moment he was both here and bleeding on the bricks outside of the Ninth Gate. He and this unfathomable being shared that moment through his eyes, and he felt it through Lazrael’s.

  It was like being given half a thimbleful of wine. Barely anything, but enough to taste its sweetness.

  I offer you this wisp of soul, that which is already yours and was ripped from you. I offer you this in exchange for your service.

  The heat in his blood roiled and sang.

  Or, I might give you what you truly desire. I can remove the rest, take what is human in you and make you afrite. I may make you powerful. Shape your body into the demon your soul yearns to be. Such is within my power to give.

  He knew the words. The sentiment was shaped to a razor fine edge, a pointed mockery of the litany a summoner gave to its called demon.

  What would you have of me? Callum wondered. He pushed the thought in the direction of the entity and its slender shoulders shook slightly. He realized a moment later that Lazrael was laughing.

  Allow me use of your body, Lazrael said. Be my conduit and avatar. There are those that would give their left arm for the privilege.

  You mean to use me to end her, Callum thought back.

  “Lazrael,” Lena said. Her voice had become strained. She gripped the edges of her altar hard until her knuckles turned white. “Do you accept my offering?”

  A wave of frustration that was not his coursed through Callum. There were no mistakes in this circle. There was no weakness to exploit. This tiny insignificant thing had trapped him as easily as she might have an insect. She dared.

  “No,” Callum said. His word was nearly silent, but it rolled over the brickwork, pulled to the center of the casting circle by the same force with which Lazrael drank the light. “I do not accept your offering.”

  He wasn’t sure whose words they were. He continued to walk forward, agonizingly aware of the gaps in his own spirit as his body cracked and changed around him. The horns were his. The claws, his. The fire, his. But this was not his flesh, his hair, his voice, his sight.

  He was no cambion in this moment but an unbound demon as his blood bubbled and burned. He felt the fire
coursing down his shoulders, the seems of his white button down splitting along the stitchwork.

  It was an afrite that met Lena at her altar. When he spoke, it was with two voices.

  “Lena Haywood,” he said. “You looked into the void and called the name of Death. Now let me give you what you longed for.”

  She felt the pulse of power even from behind the iron door.

  “I wish I had more time to talk to you,” she said. “I have questions. But my son is in that room and he’s going to need me.”

  The seraph moved between her and the door, his presence thrumming.

  “I can’t allow this,” he said. He spoke without words. “Our shared blood compels me to protect you.”

  “You share his blood too,” Ophelia said.

  There was a soft warble of disagreement. A moment of uncertainty. A bitter anger.

  “Not anymore,” the seraph said.

  Panic rose. Ophelia pushed forward, trying to shove past the seraph but his wings pushed open, blocking her path.

  “He who is called Lazrael has changed his blood,” the seraph said. “My blood does not compel me to save him. But he lives.”

  “If you won’t do it for him, do it for me,” Ophelia said. In her peripheral vision she could see Tess, with her head tucked under one arm. Not looking up must have been one of the hardest things she’d ever done. “Blood or not, he is my son and your grandson. If he dies here that will wound me far more deeply than my death ever could. Do you understand?”

  Another warble, softer this time.

  “No,” the seraph admitted, “but I can accept.”

  He pulled back through the door and his light faded. Ophelia stood for a moment in the sudden darkness of the room. Alban was still screaming, clawing at his face.

  He was broken. It was the state the seraph had left her mother in, once upon a time.

  “Tess,” she said, softly, “you can open your eyes now.”

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  Ophelia exhaled and pressed a hand against the iron door.

  “All we can do now is wait.”

  Her remaining hand caught one wrist as he came at her. His other hand went around her throat. As her eyes met his, he saw real fear there.

  He could feel the tenuous thread between them. There was no room in the world for Lazrael. He did not belong here. Callum, as he was, did not belong here. The thrum of death was an echo around him and in that moment he understood what it had cost his grandfather to stay with Nona Trezza as long as he had. Why it was so strange that Tixi had wanted to be here.

  This world ached.

  His claws trembled.

  He flexed them and freed Lena from it.

  For a moment, there was a swell of triumph from Lazrael, and then the spell clicked into place and he was gone from Callum’s being. He lifted his gaze into the empty eyes of the void.

  “I hold you now,” Callum said. His voice was a low rumble.

  You cannot hold me here forever. Send me back.

  “How?”

  The cultists standing around them had withered and become dessicated. They stood like statues, dead and immobile, everything that they were pulled inward by this impossible being.

  The intensity of that pull had grown so strong that Callum didn’t notice the light of the seraph moving towards him until it was nearly on top of him. His afrite’s eyes didn’t even need to narrow in the face of that potent holy light.

  Lazrael raised a hand and in a moment what was left of the six flapping wings was only a flurry of feathers and a mist of silver blood.

  Feel the power, and reverse it.

  For a moment, Callum felt the pull of temptation. If he kept this creature, this being that was powerful enough to simply snuff out a high ranking angel, what could he do for the rest of the city? If he kept this demon’s blood, he wouldn’t just live for a century longer than he would have otherwise but he would be undeniably powerful.

  He had no prayer of keeping control over this being.

  “Make me what I was,” Callum said.

  It bargains, Lazrael considered back at him. It bargains and it asks only to be what it was? It doesn’t beg for a dead man returned or ask for immortality? It doesn’t request power? Fortune?

  “If I did,” Callum said, “would you give them to me?”

  He felt Lazrael considering him. Finally, the figure in the circle shook its head.

  A soul once taken cannot be restored. Only reborn. You will be mine someday the same as anyone else. I have given you power and yet you ask for me to take it back and I have no dominion over money. Yet, it never stops the proud from asking.

  “Give me back that which is mine,” Callum said, “and I will release you.”

  I accept your offering.

  He could feel the current of power around them. He remembered swimming with Sam as a child, and going around and around the outside of the pond. The water had started moving on its own after a while, making it hard to swim against. The magic in this room was very much like that.

  Lena had been powerful, that much was true. Right now, however, Callum was a full-blooded afrite and he had a boost from the part of his soul Lazrael held. A little at a time, he reversed the flow.

  As the circle pushed back and Lazrael started to sink back into the brickwork, Callum felt the humanity leeching back into him.

  The thrum in the room died down. The cultists at the alters spaced around the circle crumbled in their robes. From what little metal still stuck out of those altars, he could see the glyphs there had died. Lazrael had taken their souls with him.

  As his black hair vanished into the brickwork, and Callum felt his body settle, wounds and all, the metal door on the mezzanine opened.

  “Callum?”

  His mother’s voice echoed over the chamber. At that moment, his feet faltered and stopped supporting him. He dropped to his knees. The sounds of her footsteps echoing down the steps dominated the world around him.

  Once again, he found himself lying on the bricks with his mother, worried, pulling his head into her lap. It took all the energy he had left to give her a smile.

  “It’s alright,” he said. “We’re safe now.”

  Callum blacked out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Epilogue

  Ophelia didn’t leave Callum’s bedside until he woke up. The bloody feathers on the floor of the chamber made it clear enough what had happened, and she couldn’t help but stew a little on the strange emptiness that gave her. She barely knew her father. She’d never even learned his name.

  And yet she had a child right here in front of her that she needed to focus on.

  No, she reminded herself, even as she stroked his hair. A grown man. He had been for some time. Even grown men make mistakes.

  “You alright, Ophelia?” Joey asked. He was leaning in the doorway and straightening his tie. He stepped over to her and leaned down to kiss her forehead. She squeezed his hand.

  “He’ll be fine,” she said. She said it every time someone came by the room. “What happened in there just took a lot out of him. Ely is convinced it’s just exhaustion.”

  “She’s not a doctor yet, you know,” Joey said.

  Callum stirred and this time, Joey’s hand squeezed hers as his eyes opened. The expression on his face was somewhere between a grimace and a smile.

  “How long was I out this time?” he asked. “Hopefully no funeral?”

  Ophelia made a soft sound and reached out to hug him to her.

  “Ma,” he said, making a half-hearted attempt to pull away. “Stop smothering me or I might actually die of suffocation.”

  “What happened in there?” she asked, holding him at arm’s length. So Callum told them.

  “This is a bad idea,” Corvin said. Sam sat on the other side of the kitchen table and held Corvin’s left hand as his right drew nervous lines on a sketch pad in front of him. “Have you talked about it at all since…?”

  “There’s been
a lot going on,” Sam said, softly, “but we’re not waiting any longer. He owes me one. After what Callum pulled, the whole of it, he owes me at least hearing me out.”

  He hadn’t spoken to his father, no, but he’d spoken to Corvin a lot. He was sure he could spin this.

  “And it had better be a good one,” Joey said from the doorway. Corvin visibly flinched. Sam squeezed his hand and got to his feet.

  “Dad,” Sam said, putting as much steel as he could manage into his voice, “Corvin isn’t like the rest of his family. He’s a good guy. I’ve loved him since I was in school. I never told you because I was afraid you’d react exactly how you did.”

  “Do you want to step into the next room to have this conversation?” Joey asked, raising a brow.

  “Anything you can say in front of me, you can say in front of Corvin,” Sam said.

  Joey sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  There was a low screech of wood on wood as Corvin’s seat skittered back and he stood, turning to face Joey as well.

  “I’m also standing right here,” he said. “So you can talk to me, as well.”

  His dark eyes were serious. Sam came around the table to stand beside him and take his hand again.

  “Look,” Joey said, “I don’t want to be insensitive, but we have to look at the facts here. The Gate Street Players unraveled after your mother died. I killed two of your family members personally. If somebody had done that to my kin, I wouldn’t be able to think of anything but getting back at them.”

  “It’s a good thing I’m not you,” Corvin said. He released Sam’s hand and took a step forward. Joey straightened and Corvin only stopped when they were almost touching. From this angle, Sam could see their eye contact. It was strong. “I don’t want to pretend I want to be your best friend now, but I’ve had more than my fill of bloodshed for one lifetime. I’m done. If you want to kill me you do it here and now, or else this is over. I’m not going to stop you, but I never want to worry about this again.”