by M C Ashley
“Are you crazy?” Zea asked. “She could use it against us!”
“We have her true name,” I said. “She has a fragment of the whole. This can work. We need time to act.”
“I don’t know, Blake…”
“Trust me,” I said, preparing an invocation. “It won’t work to the extent we want it to, but it’ll provide enough of a distraction to hurt her. Prepare to see nothing at all. In absentia luci, tenebrae vincunt!”
I gathered the light around Zoë, forcing it away from her. To the human eye a dark void was left in her place. The gathered light formed into a sphere near myself. This was only phase one of the plan. The rest relied on Zea.
“You seek to bind me against the Laws?” Zoë asked. “I knew you were weak.”
“The Laws only apply to humans, fang face,” I said.
“Then I’ll just have to kill you first. You can’t even see where I am!”
“I don’t have to. She does.”
“What?” Zoë exclaimed.
I heard a collision within the void and watched as Zoë was forced out of the void and onto the floor.
Zea appeared out of the void also and shouted, “Zoë Slinden, pledge yourself to my will and lose all control!”
An invisible wave hit Zoë’s mind, causing her to spasm on the floor, while Zea pressed her mental assault. Zoë was as strong as I’d suspected and fought off Zea enough so that she could stand. The two stared each other down as the unseen psychic battle for control of the vampire’s mind raged. Zea held a hand to her head and cringed. I didn’t expect her to win; she didn’t need to. All I needed was for Zoë to be stationary.
“Fiat lux!” I yelled.
The sphere of light left my side and rocketed into Zoë’s body. The point of impact lit her up and incinerated parts of her skin.
But before the invocation could finish the job, Zoë flashed forward and elbowed me in the throat. She then slashed Zea’s right arm. I breathed quickly, hoping to recover and managed to get away from Zoë when she attempted to knock me out again. I rushed over to Zea’s side and picked her up. Zea quickly managed to support herself.
“Why didn’t it work?” Zea asked, holding her arm. “I controlled her mind. I felt it.”
I mentally kicked myself. “Of course it didn’t work,” I said. “There’s something else inside of her head. We couldn’t fully control her because it’s there.”
“What do you mean something else?”
“When we were in the mansion I saw a flash over her eyes. That means there’s something else in her head besides her mind.”
“But what?”
“I have no clue.”
Zoë sped up to catch us and I barely forced Zea down to the ground in time to keep her safe, but was too slow, earning a fresh wound from a talon strike beneath my neck. I grabbed the wound above my clavicle and worked a fast healing invocation to seal the wound. However, I knew it was weak and wouldn’t hold up long. I looked over at Zea—she was favoring the right side of her body.
This was bad. There was nothing stopping Zoë from killing us.
Zoë lunged at us, but a sudden gale crossed her path, sweeping her off her feet and into the floor. I looked to my left to see Clooney, bloodied, but still able to fight.
“Heal up and wait for the chance to strike,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”
I coughed, too confused for words. I fell to the platform floor, desperately attempting a better invocation. I babbled an incoherent mess that was supposed to sound like “Medice, cura te ipsum”, but instead sounded closer to a drunken tirade.
Graciously, Zea had managed to fare better than I had in healing herself and moved to my side, performing an invocation I couldn’t hear to seal the wound for good. Nodding my head, I looked her in the eyes and sighed.
“That was far too close,” Zea said.
“Yeah,” I offered.
“All of my life I have trained to fight and protect myself, but nothing has prepared me for this day, Blake. How are we supposed to win this?”
“We’ll find a way, sweetheart. We must. Gather your strength. We’ll be patient.”
She gave out a weak laugh. “Hypocrisy at its finest, I believe.”
I smiled and looked out to find out where Clooney and Zoë had ended up. They were fast, inhumanly fast, and my eyes could barely register what was going on. I knew it couldn’t possibly be happening that quickly. I chalked it up to my eyes being too weak to relay what was happening with any bit of accuracy.
Zoë followed Clooney relentlessly, almost hitting him every time she swiped at his body. He proved to be just fast enough to avoid her. I stood still, trying to heal myself. This had gotten worse, even with their arrival. Zoë was too powerful. Even after fighting her dream-self I had grossly underestimated her abilities. I had no idea how to counteract her tenacity. What were we supposed to do?
“No worries, Blake,” Clooney said. “I have things under control.”
The voice was vague, like it wasn’t actually coming from him. I gazed over to their fight, finding that he had hidden a teleportation circle in the crowd. Just how long had he been watching us?
Reaching the circle, Clooney activated it, appearing several feet away on top of a platform that had once held sacrifices for the Feast. I wondered what his plan was, seeing that Zoë could simply follow him when she used the circle to teleport to his position. However, when she activated the circle, she let out an unearthly shriek. Part of her body had lodged itself in a building that hadn’t been there a moment before, making me realize what had happened.
Without any of us being the wiser, Clooney had used an illusion invocation. I looked to my right and saw him smirking, watching Zoë fall from the building, her left arm now a permanent fixture of the building. Her stump left a blood trail on the bricks as she fell down to the ground in pain.
“No way,” I said. “That was brilliant.”
“Managed to say it right as she hit me,” Clooney said, as he held his side, trying to heal the wounds from her attack. “Gave her a nasty surprise, didn’t I?”
Teleporting into a solid substance was a surefire way to create an untreatable loss of limbs. It would take a massive amount of evocation to even heal the stump. I cursed my inability to attack her now. Had I been at full strength I could’ve used the brief reprieve to strike the finishing blow.
“At least it bought us some time,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Had better days,” Clooney said.
“Thanks for the assist.”
“My pleasure, my friend.”
I smiled. Enigma though he was, I could at least know when he was being honest.
Zoë yelled into the night, wailing at her inability to fix her now permanently broken sword arm. But still she didn’t fall. Held together by more willpower than I had ever seen in a vampire before, Zoë glared at us, summoning a magical field around her body that resonated in the air, clearly charging up for some blast.
I cringed. She had been holding back. She’d lied about being a mundane. She knew how to use evocation. Why hadn’t I even considered the possibility? Why hadn’t I questioned the talons and arm blade? Vampires like her weren’t supposed to do that without sufficient magical training. Was some sort of mental manipulator at work here?
I gathered my strength, attempting to heal myself enough to put up a fight when she came to attack us. But before that could happen, I heard a voice ring out beside me.
“Incineration Wave!” Zea shouted out.
A massive vortex of fire filled the air and descended on Zoë’s position, crafting a continual blaze that caused the air to burn with a magnificent fury.
I stepped back, singed by the flames, but not hurt. I ogled it, hoping the fire had killed Zoe, but when I witnessed a massive figure moving out of the inferno and heading straight toward Zea I rushed forward, summoning Ageg just in time to block the blow. However, the force from the blow sent me backward into Zea, propelling us both to the g
round. I gripped my fist, pain flowing through my body.
“Did you think you could kill me with such a pitiful flame?” Zoë asked, moving toward us slowly. “I am the master of this land and I decide when I die! No one decides my fate!”
“I do!” a woman’s voice cried out from behind us, just as another, brilliantly designed shower of pure fire raged above our heads, not burning us, even though it was barely inches away from our faces.
The fire collided into Zoë, decimating the area around her and enveloping her in its flames. I held my hand out in front of me, trying not to get blinded by the light. When I opened my eyes, I turned around to see who had invoked this magnificent inferno.
Behind us, a column of flames swirled in the air, maintaining a silent vigil over its originator. A lithe figure moved forward from the wall, fire engulfing the air around her, while her body showed no signs of suffering from the heat. Her green eyes blazed in the night, a fortitude of conviction behind them. I saw a smile appear on her lips.
“Burn in Hell!” Cinderella yelled, incinerating her former employer.
Chapter 23
Cinderella pressed her attack, incinerating part of Zoë’s armor. The vampire did her best to avoid getting singed again. She stared at her former slave with uncertainty in her eyes, flabbergasted at the sudden betrayal, an emotion I shared.
A hand tugging on my hand made me aware of Nathan, who stood beside me.
“Well, Blake, if you had just listened earlier when I was trying to talk to you, you would have found out that I placed a mental block in Cinderella’s mind,” Nathan said, with arms crossed and a smirk to rival my own. “Zoë hasn’t been in control of her mind since we exited Cinderella’s dream.”
“So she’s been there, biding her time,” I said. “Waiting to strike. Even after all of that? The torture she’s been through. That’s why she couldn’t look me in the eye. I’d have known what happened and that would’ve tipped Zoë off.”
“We really left an impression on her, she said. She’d never had anyone who cared about her before.”
I smiled. At least something had gone right.
But Cinderella was inexperienced. She used too much power in her attacks and had no concept of defense, which Zoë had now noticed. Aiming, I fired a round in Zoë’s good arm, causing her to stumble as Cinderella hit her again with another blast.
Zoë growled and she glared at us, daring us to attack. She seemed to be mulling over some terrible decision. I held the others back from striking, not knowing what to expect. If she was really Christened, then she could just as easily send a final release our way the moment we killed her. But there was something off about her. These evocations she used were wild, almost as if she didn’t understand what she was doing.
“I have had enough of this!” Zoë shouted, holding out her left hand, as her ring and medallion burned brightly in the night. “Beleth come to my aid!”
A dark fire descended from the sky, erupting over Zoë’s body. A harsh gale picked up, flinging Nathan and me to the ground. Clooney uttered an invocation to calm the wind, reaching out to grab Cinderella before she could fall.
“Good save!” I shouted.
“To lose a lady of such exquisite beauty would be a disservice to the world,” Clooney said, causing Cinderella to blush.
Zea rushed to my side and picked me up. I lifted Nathan with me. We all stared at the black fire to see a devilish metamorphosis. Zoë’s skin healed and her arm rejuvenated itself out of nothingness. Her talons sharpened in the radiant heat, now turning into a stronger, diamond-like material. Her face contorted downward, her once beautiful features overtaken by a bestial menace that roared into the dark night of the Feast. The black fire extinguished itself, revealing a figure that stood over eleven feet tall and boasted sharp fangs that protruded from its mouth. It looked at me and let out a war cry.
I shivered, feeling some unholy wave of madness descending on Vice City. I trembled, having never felt such a force before. What was happening?
“Zoë?” I asked, stupidly.
“Zoë is gone, only Beleth remains!” it shouted greedily with a masculine voice, summoning a chain of otherworldly fire at us.
Zea erected a shield in time to counteract it, but it shattered the moment the fire touched it. We forced ourselves to the ground to avoid getting hit.
I yelped as the burns penetrated my skin, sending my neurons into overdrive. This pain was impossible. It coursed through my very being, terrifying me with its power.
Managing to resist it better than me, Zea helped me to my feet and grunted in pain. I stared into her eyes, unable to speak at first.
“What kind of fire is that?” she asked.
“It’s not fire!” I shouted. “It’s hellfire!”
I had never seen it before. The only reason I knew about in the first place was because of my father. Although our invocations were naturally strong against demons, they were all but required to be. Demons harnessed powers that could bring even the strongest Psionic to their knees if they weren’t careful.
And hellfire was their strongest attribute. I didn’t pretend to understand the living situations of the demons in their down time, but from what we had gleaned from years of research, Hell wasn’t a resort for them where they spent their time torturing the souls of the damned. No, Hell was just as much of a punishment for them as it was for those who had denied the truth. To have lived there millennia, constantly bombarded by physical and spiritual pain, it was all but unfathomable to me. Yet they survived their punishments only to become stronger, using whatever means they possessed to escape imprisonment.
Hell was meant as a punishment. Hellfire was a taste of that punishment, which they stole and harnessed for their own purposes.
I had no desire to experience that for another moment. My skin still burned and I knew I was suffering from second degree burns from where it had hit me.
“What do you gain by doing this?” I asked. “Why do you work with Zoë?”
“For my own benefit of course!” Beleth answered. “I work to gain what we have been denied for years!”
“And what’s that?”
“Freedom from His persecution!”
“But how did you end up working with Zoë?”
“The Collective and I agreed to terms and a father must always look after his own daughter, must he not?”
“These non-answers are starting to piss me off,” I said, trying to buy us time.
“I gave her power beyond her wildest dreams,” Beleth went on, “furthering my own aims, but now the time has come for me to reveal myself to the world!” The demon roared triumphantly. “Now is the time for my people to return to the world and take what is rightfully ours!”
“Well this just got more complicated,” I said, earning me a “Shut up!” from Zea.
She gazed at Beleth warily, checking it over for any weaknesses. I took a more direct approach.
“Tenebris regni!” I yelled, blasting the demon with a dark bolt of energy that made it stagger for a moment.
But any victory I’d received was temporary and Beleth charged up more hellfire, blasting it at us and forcing me to duck again. I could feel the unholy blast singing the clothes off my back. Holding Nathan under my arms, I looked him in the eye and tilted my head away from the fight, hoping he’d take the hint once the hellfire dwindled.
“Adamant Faith!” Zea shouted, crafting a stronger shield from the air, preventing the hellfire from reaching us, but when I looked at her, I saw her tensing up.
She needed someone to distract Beleth enough to give her more time to empower the shield. I rushed forward, shouting out “Ageg!” as Nathan retreated from the stage again, hopefully listening this time. Firing an arrow at Beleth, I watched in shock as it bounced off the demon’s ebony diamond skin.
“Oh crap,” I said, barely moving out of the way as Beleth’s diamond blade nearly sliced me in two.
Ageg dissipated from sight and I used my free hands to
crawl around the stage, avoiding being a part of the next Collective shish kebab special. Before Beleth could reach me, Cinderella leapt in front of me and crafted a spinning vortex of flames that staggered Beleth. She held out her hand to me and I accepted it. She helped me run away. I looked back to see the flames had done little to Beleth’s skin, but it did seem to shake its head. As if some part of it had been irritated by the flames.
“Well done, kiddo,” I said. “Reckless. I like it.”
Cinderella blushed. “I just reacted,” she admitted. “I’m not used to this.”
“Stick with me, red, and we’ll see if I can’t fix that.”
“Red?”
“It’s your working title nickname. Once we get some sponsors I’ll change it just before release to the one that fits my cinematic creativity.”
“What?”
I laughed. Good, someone else to play with. This ordeal might be worth it yet.
Finding a place to rest, I watched Clooney draw a short blade I hadn’t seen before and used it to block Beleth’s strikes. But it was far too tiny to be used repetitively.
“What can we do for him?” Cinderella asked.
Zea sent forth a blast of water that cooled the flames around Beleth for a moment, but they quickly returned, hotter than before.
“Working on that,” I said.
“I’m so tired,” Cinderella said. “I’ve never used so much.”
“You need to conserve it. If you’re not careful it’ll leave you open to attack,” I said, right as Beleth picked Clooney up and flung him over to the other side of the stage.
Seeing that it was about to finish him off, I shouted out, “Sensitivus tactus!” and an unseen explosion of energy knocked Beleth into the stage, drilling it downward.
Parts of the stage crumbled from the amount of force I’d put into the attack. It felt good to have my lack of subtlety work with me for once.
Beleth turned to glare at me. Clooney feebly picked himself up. Talented as he was with illusions, the man was not designed to take a hit. Providentially for him, I was too stupid to understand the weakness of my body, and charged forward, ready to prevent Beleth from reaching him again. Beleth pushed itself free of the wreckage and raced after Clooney. I picked up speed to intercept it. But right as I approached Beleth, it turned to smirk at me and double-backed with speed I couldn’t counter. However, instead of going for me, it instead went straight to where I had been: to a now defenseless Cinderella.
