Ink & Fire

by R. K. Ryals

  Stepping aside, she gestures at the heavens, the red blaze dancing in her palm.

  Terror engulfs me.

  In the night, a great firestorm appears in the sky. It’s a conflagration of unnatural light hanging unchecked in the atmosphere. Blue and red sparks shoot up and down a tower of orange flames like fireworks.

  Lucas hovers beneath it, his colorless gaze on the fire. He doesn’t look afraid, but I know by the gleeful grin on Levi’s face and the way the archdemon circles in the air above Lucas, that the blaze between them is Lucas’s weakness.

  Sailing to the side, Lucas avoids the flames, his fiery sword swinging. It connects with Levi’s tail, and the beast roars.

  The firestorm barrels toward Lucas.

  Gillian smiles. “That’s my cue.”

  In a blur, she’s closed the distance between us, her breath on my face, her fingers circling my neck. A familiar athame materializes in her free hand, and she places the point against my stomach.

  Howls rip the air.

  Behind Gillian, wolves gather, Ric Kasun leading the pack. Flanking him are his sons, Conall and Tate Kasun. Even in wolf form, I can tell them apart. By spending most of my days hiking or camping in the mountains and woods, I have developed a respectful relationship with the shifters in Havenwood Falls. We’ve barely talked in the years I’ve known them, but I’ve learned that shifters don’t always need words. They protect me from a distance, and I don’t take any pictures of them.

  Members of the Luna Coven gather with the wolves. Roman Bishop, a lean, tall warlock and a member of the coven’s High Council, watches with narrowed eyes and crossed arms. Flanking him are Ronya Augustine and Addie Beaumont. Both are witches. Addie is the closest to my age, and she nods at me, her brown eyes staring from behind black-framed glasses. She is the only girl who attempted to spend time with me in high school. Even though she says nothing now, her gaze yells, “Fight, Harper!”

  Saundra Beaumont stands before them all, her gaze on me. There’s something violent and powerful about the way she looks at me.

  Lifting her hand, she shakes her head at the wolves and the witches, and I know she’s ordering everyone not to interfere. I don’t know if she has that much faith in me and Lucas or if she’s just biding her time.

  Remember what you are.

  Gillian chants against my ear, the words foreign, and even though I don’t understand what she’s saying, I know when I see the black hole that opens in the air above us what she’s doing.

  She’s opening a portal to the Infernum.

  In the air, fire beats down on Lucas. He doesn’t scream, but I know by the look on his face that the pain is agonizing.

  He falls to the ground. Dead silence fills the area.

  Struggling, I cry out, the sound strangled by Gillian’s grip. He has to be okay.

  Lucas’s head rises in the snow, his gaze meeting mine across the distance, his eyes full of fury when he sees Gillian’s hand wrapped around my neck.

  Even wounded, he is mighty.

  In a blink, he has Gillian in the snow, his flaming sword hovering above her head.

  Remember what you are.

  Growling, Desi suddenly appears, the mace gliding through the snow toward Lucas, no worse the wear for his trip over the side of the mountain.

  My gaze falls on Lucas’s back. One side of his six wings is badly damaged, an unnatural blue-tinted burn coating the surface beneath Lucas’s celestial fire. Flames that can scorch an angel already ablaze is an eerie sight, and I realize it’s a different kind of burn. An injury no earthly creature can define.

  Hesitantly, I step forward, the pull of the wounds on my back making me grimace. “Lucas.” He looks at me, and I reach for him. When he doesn’t stop me, I run my hand down his good wing. Even though the wings are on fire, the flames don’t sear my skin. It’s a cool heat, and I realize it feels exactly like his hands felt when he healed me.

  My fingers slide to the damaged section, and he hisses.

  Above us, the black hole widens. Levi laughs, his serpentine body lowering in the night.

  Lucas reaches back, produces three clear vials hidden somewhere in his wings, and pops off the tops. Before Levi even touches the ground, Lucas downs them all.

  My eyes widen. I know those vials. My aunt sells them in her shop. “What the hell?” I gasp.

  Lucas glances at me and winks.

  Holy water. He’s just downed three small bottles of holy water.

  “I thought—”

  “It does,” Lucas answers, cutting me off.

  The black hole above us shifts, sliding from the air above to the ground below. If I wasn’t so unnerved by the portal and the place I know it leads to, I would have found the way it moved wicked cool.

  Levi slithers from the sky to the ground, his fangs dripping, the fire that hurt Lucas gathered before him. He doesn’t touch it, but he’s able to manipulate it.

  My eyes are drawn to the way it burns, the inferno dancing on the night air as if it’s inside a fireplace rather than out in the open with no wood to fuel it.

  The blaze throws streaks of light over my face.

  “Brilliant, isn’t it?” Levi asks. He leans forward, and I stumble back. “Holy fire. I brought it with me from the Infernum. It’s one of the few weaknesses Seraphs have. Ironic, isn’t it? Considering Seraphs are made of fire.” He sneers. “Then again, the angel trapped me with water, and I was born from the waters of hell. What bears us is often our greatest enemy.”

  His words pummel me, and I hide the gasp that almost escapes my mouth.

  Remember what you are.

  What bears us is often our greatest enemy.

  You were born from darkness. Just like the demons. A human born to the underworld.

  My gaze flies to Gillian, the memory of her driving an athame into my mother’s belly like a nail hammered into my subconscious.

  Remember what you are.

  There’s a reason Lucas can’t hear my thoughts.

  Levi roars, shoving the holy fire at us. We scream, shielding our eyes. My body instinctively falls to the ground, but even though the fire covers me, it doesn’t burn. Like everything else, it feels cool.

  Not all of us are immune.

  Lucas stumbles out of the blaze, his body covered in blue-tinted burns. The fire suddenly flares, and then vanishes, revealing a circling Levi as he edges Lucas closer and closer to the Infernum portal.

  Crying out, I lunge for them, but Gillian grabs me by the ankle, dragging me backward, her hands clawing at me.

  “You’re mine!” she growls. Flipping me over, she crawls up my body, her fingers sliding up my sides. I feel more than see the claws that she digs into me.

  Claws? Was she the one who left the marks on me? Not Levi. Was I simply a part of a ritual she and Levi were doing together? He bled prisoners. She used me as an altar, opening me up to bleed what he killed.

  Her face transforms, her smooth pale skin aging before my eyes until she’s the elderly woman from my nightmare.

  Remember what you are.

  My fingers curl into the snow. The cold is unbearable, but adrenaline pumps through my veins, heating limbs that would have given up already under normal circumstances.

  “I am psychic,” I say through gritted teeth.

  She laughs.

  “I am a spiritual writer,” I continue.

  My fingers begin to move in the snow, writing words I cannot see, power rushing into the ground. Shadows appear over the snow, and even though I am startled by their appearance, I keep writing.

  “And I was born of darkness by a demoness who tied my psychic abilities to demons and the Infernum,” I finish.

  Lucas could never hear my thoughts because the Infernum is the one place a Seraph cannot enter unless he’s imprisoned there.

  I know even before the shadows descend on Gillian that I’ve won. Darkness cloaks her, invisible hands clawing at her skin, causing the same kind of wounds she and Levi had caused on me. She s
creams, and the shadows drag her away, pulling her toward the Infernum.

  These shadows aren’t prisoners. They’re something else.

  “Levi!” she screams.

  He doesn’t pay her any attention. He’s too focused on Lucas.

  “Wait!” I tell the shadows, my fingers still digging in the snow. Word after word after word. “Bring her to me.”

  Gillian slams into the ground before me.

  I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know how I’m doing it. All I know is that the only way to close the portal is to take out the woman who opened it. My chest burns, and it isn’t that I’m sad. It’s that death has become too much a part of me, and I’m afraid of what that means.

  Desi slides through the snow toward me. “You’ve got a lot to learn about what you are, summoner.”

  What he calls me shocks me, and I stare at him. “Summoner?”

  I’m talking to a supercharged baseball bat in the middle of a celestial battle. This has become my life.

  “The spirits you channel, you can control them,” Desi replies.

  Levi and Lucas face off, and I know by the way Lucas staggers, both from pain and obvious drunkenness, he’s in danger of falling into the portal.

  “Can I close it?” I ask Desi.

  “What?” the mace asks.

  “If I kill the demoness, will it close the portal?”

  Desi slides closer to me. “I don’t know. She used your energy and her blood to open it.”

  Lucas falters, and even though I know this fight with Levi is his, I rush to him.

  He tries sidestepping me and goes down in the snow. “Go,” he orders, not unkindly.

  “Get ready!” Saundra calls. Wolves and witches circle.

  In a blur, Levi shoves me aside, and I slide into the snow, just as the archdemon grabs Lucas by the neck. “Do you know what it’s like living inside a place full of so much immense power, and yet you can’t touch it? Do you know what it’s like being surrounded by beings you can’t fight with or destroy? Do you know what it’s like existing in darkness?”

  Lucas simply stares at him.

  Lifting the angel, Levi holds him over the hole to the Infernum.

  I scream.

  Lucas laughs.

  Levi falters, his body coiling, the sudden movement drawing Lucas toward safety. “You have years of unimaginable torture ahead of you, and you laugh?” the archdemon asks angrily.

  For one brief moment, I feel pity for Levi. Because, as ridiculous as his anger seems over a little laughter, I understand where it comes from. I harbor the same hatred for Levi and Gillian after what they did to my parents. After what they did to me. After what they did to innocent lives.

  Lucas laughs again. “You will never win, Levi. Not when there are towns like Havenwood Falls. Not when there are creatures, gods, and monsters who want to coexist together peacefully.”

  Levi throws him against the snow, wraps his hands around Lucas’s neck, bares his fangs, and strikes.

  I don’t have time to get to him. No one has time to get to him. Everything happens way too fast.

  One moment, Levi’s fangs are buried in Lucas’s neck. The next, the archdemon is coiled up in the snow, struggling to breathe, his face as badly burned as Lucas’s body.

  It’s the holy water, I think, astounded. That’s why Lucas drank it.

  Lucas tries to stand and falls. He’s way too close to the portal.

  I scramble through the snow, searching frantically for the one thing I know will help.

  Levi rises, his anger even more palpable than it was before. He lunges.

  A blur stops him, and I freeze. In the snow, a figure stands between Lucas and the archdemon determined to imprison him. This figure isn’t human, although he looks it. Broad and burly, he is every inch the quintessential mountain man, his face covered in a dark, wiry beard.

  I know this man. It’s the man I saw the day I went to Jeanine Turner’s real estate office. The same man who had been watching me outside Coffee Haven.

  “I ought to have known you’d be the reason for all of this fuss in the mountains,” the man says, glancing back at Lucas.

  I continue my search in the snow.

  When my hands close over the athame, I clutch it to me and scurry to the spot where the shadowy creatures I summoned hold down a weakened Gillian.

  Standing over her, I lift the dagger.

  “Don’t,” Lucas calls out. His voice is weak, his gaze locking with mine.

  Levi uses the moment of distraction to plow through the stranger, knocking him aside before taking Lucas and shoving him into the Infernum.

  Anger and grief overwhelm me.

  I’m not fast enough to save him, but the stranger is.

  The mountain man moves too quickly to be anything other than supernatural. With a roar, he reaches in and catches Lucas by the hand, his muscles bulging.

  “I’m not strong enough to keep you for long, you old bastard,” the man growls. “You’d better do this fast or you’re going to be leaving that archdemon in this town, and I can’t have that.”

  Lucas wastes no time. A bright light flashes, glaring and then receding to reveal Lucas and the other man sprawled out in the snow.

  “God, I hate you,” Lucas says, only it’s not Lucas speaking. It’s his body, but not his voice. “Do this fast, Seraph.”

  The mountain man’s body rises, and I know by the way he moves that Lucas is inhabiting it. “You’ve been working out, Elias,” the mountain man teases in Lucas’s voice.

  “Close the portal,” Desi tells me.

  Resuming my position over Gillian, I stand, the athame poised to strike, my hands shaking. The demoness stares up at me, her gaze wide and unflinching.

  “Tell me how to close it,” I command.

  She glares. “You know how to close it, but I don’t think you have the guts to do it.”

  Gillian is everything I could possibly hate in a demon, but she’s right. Protecting myself and outright killing her are two entirely different things.

  Blood and energy. She used my blood and my energy to open it.

  With a cry, I bring the athame down. The blade slashes my stomach, and I watch as the blood drips to the snow below. Falling to my knees beside the demoness, I begin to write in the white powder, letting power run through my veins, spirits whispering in my head.

  The portal begins to close.

  A shriek shatters the stillness.

  In the night, his broad frame standing over the serpent, the mountain man drives Lucas’s flaming sword into Leviathan’s heart. The gurgling sound of blood fills the air.

  For a long moment, no one moves.

  Placing his foot against the archdemon, the man pulls the blade free from Levi’s chest, lifts the sword, and slices off the demon’s head. Even in the darkness, no one misses the smile on the bearded man’s face.

  The portal vanishes.

  An eerie relieved silence falls over the mountain. Wolves meld into the trees. Saundra nods at the mountain man, glances at me, and then motions at someone in the shadows. Men and women, some of them familiar, hurry onto the ridge. They don’t speak when they approach me, their hard eyes on the demoness next to me on the ground.

  Running my fingers through the snow, I watch as the shadows vanish. The men and women grab Gillian.

  “The Court will take care of her,” Saundra tells me from where she stands near the trees. Roman, Ronya, and Addie nod at me. My whole life I’ve known these people, but I’ve never seen them in this capacity. As warriors ready to fight if the need arose. Warriors ready to take down an archdemon if Lucas had failed. Warriors willing to die for the town they reside over.

  The group sent by Saundra, a petulant but restrained Gillan between them, ducks into the forest. The demoness had been eerily silent near the end, and I wonder if she wishes I had killed her.

  Death is too good for some people.

  A bright light flashes, and I cover my eyes. When they open ag
ain, Lucas struggles to stand, his wings gone, their flaming beauty hidden away wherever wings hide.

  The mountain man offers him a hand.

  “Thank you, Elias,” Lucas says, and I know by the sound of his voice, he’s back in his own body.

  “How did you do that?” I ask.

  The men look at me.

  Elias smirks, claps Lucas on the shoulder, and shakes his head. “As the highest order, your boy here can take over the body of any lower caste angel. He was quite the asshole about it years ago.”

  “I was a misguided youth,” Lucas says.

  “You’re an angel?” I ask Elias.

  “A Divine,” he replies.

  Outside Coffee Haven isn’t the first time I’ve seen Elias around town, although I can’t quite place where else we’ve run into each other. I’ve kept to myself too much over the years.

  Lucas stumbles, and Elias steadies him.

  “The both of you could use healing,” Elias points out, his gaze falling to my stomach. It’s probably a good thing he can’t see my back. His eyes slide up, the bright blue depths softening when they fall on my face. “You did well.”

  I replace Elias at Lucas’s side, my eyes holding the mountain man’s gaze. “Thank you.”

  Pulling Lucas’s arm over my shoulders, I wince when it slides across the sensitive skin of my back.

  Elias studies me. “Can you make it home?”

  “I’ll get them there,” a new voice pipes up, and I have to fight not to laugh when Elias looks down to find Desi at his feet in all of his badass baseball bat glory.

  Only Elias surprises me by not being surprised. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, Destroyer. Fly safe.” He glances over at Lucas. “And if you do stay in town, don’t stir up trouble for those of us who like flying under the radar.”

  “Boring lot, all of you,” Lucas grumbles, a teasing glint in his eyes.

  Elias glances between us, a knowing look in his eyes, and then vanishes.

  Taking some of his weight off of me, Lucas gazes down into my face. “Let’s get you home and healed.”

  “What about you?”

  He offers me a secret smile, and I’m tempted to kiss it away. “I’ve got a really long history of not dying.”

  In the night before us, Desi begins to vibrate, the mace quivering violently before transforming into the winged lion I first met in the mountains.