Ink & Fire

by R. K. Ryals

  I don’t need to know the details. What I need is to keep my sanity. Some secrets are better left with the Court and its members. How many secrets are they hiding for others in the town? How many of us are they protecting? How many of us are they trying to save?

  The importance of Havenwood Falls—what this place means to me—is bigger than any word. This town is my mother. This town is the fairy tale my mother couldn’t be. They kept me safe, even when I couldn’t always keep myself or others safe.

  My head hangs.

  “Harper,” my aunt pleads.

  I was a child. I have to keep reminding myself of that. I have to.

  A steely determination settles over me, and when I lift my face, I know my eyes are full of fire and hatred. The archdemon and his lackey will be destroyed. I’ll make sure of it.

  When I look at Lucas, my gaze locking with his stormy eyes, I think I know what it’s like to live where he does. In the gray area among blurred lines.

  Chapter 11

  “We have a visitor,” Lucas says.

  A few minutes later, a series of knocks sounds on the shop door.

  Aunt Eloise rushes upstairs. Voices murmur. Footsteps sound on the stairs.

  Saundra Beaumont is the first to appear, Eloise fast on her heels.

  Serious brown eyes scope out the room before settling on Lucas. “Our wards were tripped. According to some of the shifters, it’s a demon. A female. I’m guessing yours.” Saundra’s gaze swings my way, her eyes softening when she sees me sitting on the floor, my face swollen from tears. “Oh, Harper.”

  Her eyes return to Lucas. “She’s stirring up the shifters, and I’ve had calls from some of the demons in town who’ve sensed her, too. They’re about as happy about this as we are. They’ve found peace here in Havenwood Falls, and I’m not letting an asshole among their kind ruin it. We’re all prepared to stop her. What’s it going to be, angel?”

  “She won’t come into town,” Lucas replies confidently, his gaze finding me. “She wants Harper, and I want Levi.” Gesturing at me, he adds, “We’ll take this into the mountains.”

  “Don’t be stubborn, angel. Your arrogance gets you nothing when dealing with evil. You’re going to need some help.”

  “Only if it gets desperate. This is my fight. And hers.”

  She’s obviously not happy with Lucas’s response, but there’s a strange respectful relationship between the witch and the angel, and I don’t know if it’s because they knew each other before this incident or if they’d heard about each other through supernatural channels.

  “We’ll be ready to step in,” Saundra warns, turning, her gaze falling on the table. On Desi. She freezes, her eyes widening. “I thought I sensed something. What the hell is that?”

  “A weapon,” Lucas answers, grinning.

  Sighing, Saundra presses a hand to her chest. “I think it’s better I don’t ask. Especially today. No one has ever accused this town of being dull.” She gives Lucas a firm look. “If that thing does more than stay a bat, you better get it registered with the Court.”

  “It’s a mace,” he corrects.

  “Hmm.” With one final bewildered look, Saundra rushes up the stairs.

  I can’t quit staring at my aunt’s apartment. At the wild walls and strange dolls. I hear things—my aunt talking with Saundra in the shop, Lucas moving around the room upstairs, and the heat blasting from my aunt’s furnace—but my scope of the world has narrowed to me and the pictures on the wall.

  I find myself among the painted sketches.

  “Harper?”

  Lucas is talking to me, but I can’t look at him. My body feels like a ship caught on rough seas, in danger of capsizing.

  My portrait—a rendition of me at least ten years younger than I am now—frowns at me on the wall, the eyes blinking. Around it, the other pictures come to life. Some of them reach for me. Others dance.

  I am hallucinating.

  “Harper.”

  My body catches fire.

  Voices consume me.

  Someone screams, the sound shrill and desperate, the wild wail full of pain and hopelessness. Grief and anguish.

  The screams belong to me.

  “All right,” I hear Lucas say, “I’m going to need your help after all. The demon is already calling on Levi. We’ve got to move fast.”

  Someone looms over me. Saundra, maybe, but she doesn’t look like Saundra. She looks like a watercolor version of herself, all fuzzy and blurred around the edges.

  I taste blood in my mouth.

  Pain lances through my stomach.

  Someone lifts me. “It’s going to be okay,” Lucas whispers against my ear.

  I wonder if he can promise me that. I wonder if sacrifices are ever meant to be okay. I wonder if I was ever meant to be okay.

  My world slips away into nothingness.

  Chapter 12

  I am lost to a world of dreams.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time for you,” a deep voice says.

  Even though I’ve never heard his voice, I know who it is, and I hate him. Levi.

  A forked tongue dances in front of my face. “Do you feel it?” Levi asks. “Power.” He inhales. “Ah, it feels good.”

  A serpent large enough to be a dragon slithers into view. Straight out of darkness. There is only him and a black backdrop.

  “We finally meet, Harper Sinclair.”

  “Where am I?” I ask.

  “Dreams,” he answers. “The horror of the Infernum without actually being here. Maddeningly dark, isn’t it?”

  There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. Only blackness.

  “Why?”

  He laughs, circling me, his tongue hissing. “Because you have the power to pull me free.”

  “I don’t,” I protest. “My family . . . we don’t have that kind of power.”

  “You do.” He sounds so sure of himself.

  Anger wells up inside of me, and I spin, trying my best to keep up with him as he moves. Faster and faster we go.

  “You made me do terrible things,” I call out, my voice shaking. I have a bad habit of crying when I’m angry.

  “You could be so much more than what you are, Harper,” Levi tells me. He stops so abruptly, I almost fall into him, his large, reptilian eyes glowing red. He has silver scales, and they shine even though there’s no light to make them glow. “You were born from darkness. Just like the demons here. A human born to the underworld. Your soul for power,” he offers. “Give me your humanity, and you’ll never feel pain again. You’ll never know it.”

  “Harper.”

  Somewhere beyond the darkness, someone calls my name.

  Levi hisses, his fangs flashing. “Choose!” he yells, all patience gone.

  “You will die,” I tell him, my voice frosty. “For what you’ve done to that man when I was small. For what you’ve done to people. You will die.”

  I suddenly wish I knew the man I’d given the message to. What his name was and whether or not he had a family. Maybe it’s better he stays unknown to me, but there is power in knowing a name. A power that lets people put things to rest, and I want to put him to rest. I need to put him to rest.

  “You will die,” I promise.

  Levi’s eyes glow. “You would have been magnificent.”

  Fangs dripping, he lunges for me.

  I fall into another dream.

  I am inside a tent. Other than a circle of lit candles, an athame, and a snake—a large dark boa constrictor—there is nothing in the space except a cloaked elderly woman sitting cross-legged in the center of the candles. The snake slithers around her, easing his body through her legs and over her clothes. Squeezing her. Loving her.

  Long, stringy silver hair surrounds a face as craggy as a mountain. The woman’s eyes are closed.

  It’s hot inside the space, the air so thick and heavy, it’s hard to breathe. I catch a whiff of stagnant mud and sulfur.

  A rustling at the tent’s entrance draws my attent
ion.

  Two figures duck inside.

  I gasp. My parents.

  The woman’s eyes pop open. “Why have you come to me?”

  My mother—a woman I’ve only seen in pictures—steps forward. Her stomach is swollen, her long brown hair pulled protectively around her shoulders, her green eyes glowing. She looks too young to be my mother. She looks like me. I look like her.

  My dad is a study in opposites. Auburn hair. Brown eyes. Slender and athletic. A pair of glasses sits perched on his nose, the spectacles softening a face that would otherwise be rugged.

  “We need help,” my mother pleads.

  The woman waves at her candle-lit circle, and my parents join her. Heads bent, they whisper frantic words I’m not meant to hear.

  “Stop!” I beg them. “She’s going to hurt you.”

  I am nothing and no one.

  The elderly woman lifts the athame, pulls the ceremonial knife free from its sheath, and places it against my mother’s stomach.

  I can’t look.

  I can’t look away.

  Lifting my mother’s shirt, the woman grins, baring rotten teeth and gums glistening with spittle.

  “Don’t!” I beg.

  She plunges the athame into my mother’s pregnant belly.

  If she screams, it’s lost to me.

  “Help me,” I cry.

  Chapter 13

  “You’ve got to quit thrashing, Harper,” Lucas murmurs.

  I wake inside of his arms on top of the mountains, a waxing crescent moon hanging among a backdrop of tiny sequins. Air puffs from my lungs into a dark sky, the world below white and brilliant.

  “What happened?” I am cold. So very, very cold.

  Setting me down, Lucas pulls my coat tighter, his body supporting mine when I stumble, my legs weak. “Gillian did a ritual on the mountain.”

  “Gillian?”

  He frowns. “That’s the name of the demoness your parents approached. She moves fast. By the time the Court realized she was here and Saundra got to us, she was already in a trance and drawing blood. She needed your energy to pull Levi from the Infernum.” He lifts my shirt, and even though I don’t see any claw marks, I know they were there. I felt the pain inside my aunt’s apartment.

  “Did the Court send someone to stop her?”

  “A few shifters came, mainly to keep an eye on her. We didn’t want to stop her. We needed her to finish it. Levi needs to be destroyed before he can cause any more danger here or anywhere.” Slipping his arm around my waist, he assists me through the snow and up onto a ridge. Pine trees look like looming monsters in the night, their angry shadows prowling on wind and frozen ground.

  There, sitting comfortably among the white powder, is a young woman. Midnight hair flows down her back, the strands framing a pale face, red lips, and eyes as black as her hair. She’s covered in dark leather, from the pants encasing her slender legs to the crop top wrapping her chest. Evidently, the cold doesn’t bother her.

  Glancing up, she grins, her eyes taking on a red hue. “It’s about time you joined me,” she greets.

  “You’re not her,” I say.

  Gillian looks nothing like the woman I saw in the dream. She looks nothing like the woman who plunged a dagger through my mother’s pregnant belly.

  “Glamours are beautiful things,” she replies. “I was a lot more repugnant when I stole you from your parents.”

  Anger writhes like a flame inside of me. She senses it, her gaze lifting to mine.

  “Oh my, you are precious.” Standing, the demon saunters toward us, confidence lending an exaggerated sway to her hips. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to see how you would turn out?”

  Pausing a short distance away, she studies me. “I’m not disappointed. What a beautiful creation I’ve made.” She glances at Lucas. “You’re too late. I’ve already summoned him.”

  “No,” Lucas replies, surprising her. “I am just in time.” He steps toward her. “You see, I don’t play games. I was flying with angels and fighting with demons long before you ever blinked into existence.” Lucas’s gaze searches the ridge. “Come to me, Levi. You called. This time, I won’t send you back to the Infernum. I will destroy you.”

  From the edge of the woods, the massive silver serpent from my dream slithers into view, his scales flashing as he moves. The only thing human about him are two arms protruding from his reptilian frame.

  His forked tongue tastes the air, his red eyes finding me. “It’s a pity you wouldn’t offer me your soul.”

  “What did you do to me?” I ask, and I don’t mean the ritual Gillian performed or the dreams I had because of it. We’ve known since the first mark appeared on my skin that Levi planned to use my psychic energy to manifest into the mortal world.

  I mean other things. I mean dark things. I mean plunging a knife into my mother’s belly kind of things.

  Levi lunges for me, fangs glistening, so fast I don’t have any time to react.

  Lucas blurs past me, his hand catching the beast by the neck, his body suddenly glowing, a golden light surrounding him. Massive wings spill out of his back. Six of them altogether. All of them on fire. His pupils lighten, his angry eyes going colorless, white and terrifying.

  “This is between you and me, demon,” Lucas growls.

  He throws Levi. The serpent rolls in the snow, his body coiling.

  Hissing, Levi rights himself, his snake-like form growing in the night. Fire shoots out of his mouth. “The audacity you have is astounding. You have friends among my kind, and yet you felt the need to lock me away. You will pay for that.”

  “I could have killed you, Levi. I showed too much mercy by letting you live.” From somewhere I can’t see, Lucas produces a long, flaming sword, a feral grin spreading across his face. “Let’s dance.”

  An object whizzes past me, and I barely have time to sidestep it when Desi appears, the mace slamming into Gillian’s surprised face.

  I shriek, taken aback.

  “Never turn your back on a battlefield,” Desi sings.

  Gillian came for me while the demon and the fallen angel were fighting, my distraction a weakness I can’t afford.

  I am way out of my league. They all move too fast for me, they’re stronger, and they have more power. I am a puppet being forced to join a battle I don’t know how to win.

  Gillian stumbles backward, her hand swiping at her face. Blood beads up from a gash on her forehead, the crimson fluid smearing where she’s touched it.

  Furiously, she kicks at the mace, and it rushes away from her in the snow, leaving a trail of turned up white powder. “Damn you, Destroyer,” she hisses.

  Her gaze finds mine, and I know, even before she sends me flying, that I’m no match for this fight. I’m no match for the massive serpent, flaming wings, and glamour-spelled woman.

  I know even before I go flying that I’m going to die.

  Power hits me like a brick wall, the force of it throwing me into the air before shoving me into the snow, the weight of it stealing my breath and pressing me into the ground.

  A howl rises from the forest, and a wolf emerges from the woods. Ric Kasun. Even from a distance, I know it’s him. Behind him, Saundra Beaumont steps free of the trees, her face angry. Other faces emerge with them, but my vision blurs as I struggle to breathe.

  Gillian ignores them, her laughter loud on the echoing ridge as she approaches me.

  Desi rushes through the snow, plowing a line directly under the power shield holding me captive, and a bright light flares. Sparks rain down around us, and I cover my head. The power’s weight no longer suffocates me.

  “Remember where you came from,” the mace growls.

  Something lands in the snow beyond our small circle, the force of it shaking the ground. Fire flames outward, so bright I have to look away, and I know by the golden hue coating the ground that it’s Lucas.

  Shaking snow off of himself, the fallen angel rises, a glorious sight, the size and breadth of him t
oo much for human eyes. He’s discarded his shirt, his fiery wings coating his skin in undulating flames.

  As a bare-chested Seraph in full battle mode, Lucas is magnificent.

  He launches himself into the sky, his blazing wings barely moving as he glides up, his face fierce when he roars, the sound filling the mountains. It sounds like thunder in the night, and I wonder if that’s how the Court will tell this story one day.

  The night when thunder fought thunder in the mountains.

  I stumble to my feet.

  “Remember what you are!” Desi yells.

  Gillian stalks me, circling me like a predator.

  What am I?

  Raising her hand, Gillian clenches her fist. Once again, I fly into the air, my back slamming against the trunk of a bare oak tree, before being dragged up the rough bark.

  Pain rips through me, and even though I try not to scream, it comes out anyway.

  Desi soars into the scene, flitting from side to side like an annoying house fly before swiping at the demon’s feet and knocking her onto the ground.

  My back slides down the tree.

  Snarling, Gillian grabs the mace and throws it into the night, and I watch, horrified, as it sails over the side of the mountain.

  When she turns back to look at me, Gillian’s eyes are the color of blood. “Pledge your soul to Levi and this ends, Harper. All of it.”

  “What did you do to my mother?” I ask, losing sight of the fight in the sky.

  Gillian smiles. “I gave her what she wanted. I sank my blade into her womb, destroying what was killing you, before using my power to give you new life. You should thank me. You are here because of me.”

  “I lost everything because of you.”

  “I could take away your pain,” she offers. “Pledge your soul to Levi and this ends.”

  Burning heat sears my back from the scrapes and gashes left behind by the tree, and I grit my teeth against the hurt. “I’d rather die,” I finally manage.

  Gillian marches toward me, a ball of red flame forming in her hands. “Maybe you’d rather die, but would you trade your soul for your angel’s?”