by Tessa Cole
The demonic magic grew stronger, and more strands, thick as rope, shot up from the ground.
“Shit.” Marcus swerved, avoiding a red pillar of power shooting out from the middle of the road.
I slammed into the door and Kol slid into me, the touch of his skin against mine burning, all that demonic magic raising his body temperature.
My buzz blazed hotter, suddenly turning his body heat from searing to freezing. He gasped, his wide eyes, filled with hellfire, locking with mine, and my buzz started to consume the magic within him.
Marcus swerved again. The sudden movement jerked Kol off me, and I grabbed the door handle to stay in my seat. My buzz released him, but I couldn’t help fearing that it would have consumed all of his magic, not just Ibizual’s excess.
And from the look in Kol’s eyes, he feared that, too.
The SUV fishtailed off the road, rattled over the uneven grass, and scraped against a squat tombstone. Marcus growled, yanked us back on the road, and floored it. Ahead, the magic of the manifesting seal blazed like a miniature sun.
We were almost there. Gideon just had to hold on a little longer.
More pillars of magic exploded from the road, and a massive one slammed into the bottom front of the SUV instead of passing through.
The impact tossed us into the air. My head hit the side airbag, and Kol crashed into me. Then he smashed into the ceiling, and I was jerked hard against the seatbelt before being wrenched around and around and around.
Chapter 24
The world whirled and jerked, blurry, dark, and edged with burning red magic. The windows shattered and showered us with glass. Agony screamed through my neck, chest, and gut, and I couldn’t catch my breath. We smashed through tombstones, careened off a statue, and crashed to a jarring halt.
Everything was muffled and spinning, and my buzz was burning me up.
“Guys,” Gideon said through the earpiece. “Status.”
I tried to respond but couldn’t make my thoughts turn into action.
Someone groaned, and I struggled to focus my eyes to see who it was— Hell, just to see anything clearly.
The SUV lay upside down on an angle, with the driver’s side edge of the roof dug into the ground. My head pressed against an airbag, and red magic pooled around me, the source of my burning and the reason I couldn’t tell if I had any serious injuries, since its fire was all I could feel.
Kol was gone and panic clenched around my heart. Please, God, be alive. The idiot hadn’t put on his seatbelt after helping me dress. Ahead of me, Marcus hissed, and I dragged my attention to him, struggling to make my sluggish thoughts speed up.
“Sit. rep. Now,” Gideon said with a gasp, and blinding white light flared somewhere ahead of us, his fight obscured by the spiderweb of cracks in the front windshield, the airbags, and a toppled-over angel statue.
“Here,” Jacob said. “Essie? Marcus? Kol?”
“Here,” Marcus groaned.
“Kol got ejected.” I fumbled with the seatbelt release.
“I’m here,” Kol gasped through the earpiece.
Jacob shifted in the seat behind me, and the SUV shuddered, showering gravel—? No, stone and concrete from the crumbling mausoleum wall we were wedged against.
“Essie, you’re bleeding,” he said.
“I am?” I couldn’t feel anything but my buzz, the fire as powerful as when the archnephilim had been trying to pull wings I didn’t have from my body.
“How bad?” Marcus asked. He fought with his seatbelt then gave up and sliced through the belt with a claw. “I can’t smell anything other than the reek of the demonic magic.”
My seatbelt catch released, and I slid, head and shoulder, into a chunk of broken tombstone.
“The brand isn’t draining me,” Gideon said. “She’ll live. Now get out. All of you out. Now.”
Ibizual’s magic surged, and the ground shuddered. Someone moaned, but it didn’t come through the coms.
“Get out!” Kol cried.
The SUV crashed back into its wheels, jerking me onto the bench, and a skeletal hand clawed through the broken window.
“Oh, shit.” Marcus kicked open the driver’s side door, snapping it off its hinges and sending it flying to the crumbling mausoleum wall.
I scrambled back and wrenched on my door but couldn’t get it to open. The skeletal hand ripped out the airbag blocking most of the window across from me, and my pulse stuttered. There were dozens of animated skeletons—? Zombies—? They moved too fast to be real zombies— God, I had no idea what they were! They pressed against the SUV, their claws screeching against the metal and tearing into the airbags. While hundreds more rushed toward us and more climbed out of their graves. Ibizual’s magic bathed them in a sickly red aura and glowed from their eyes. They moaned and screamed and hissed, in varying stages of decay, some only skeletons, some skeletons with filthy tattered clothes, and some with rotting flesh.
Kol stood about thirty yards away surrounded by them. He sliced and jabbed, but his movement was stiff and slower than usual, and his expression was strained. Without a doubt he’d broken something, probably many somethings, when he’d been ejected from the SUV, and all his magic was focused on healing him.
You really think you can stop me? Ibizual asked in my head, and he howled with laughter. I’m a prince of celestial darkness.
The zombie-skeleton across from me lunged through the window, clawing at me. I wrenched back but its claws sliced into my thigh. I drew my Glock, and fired into its head. It howled and blue lightning swept around its body.
With a growl Marcus ripped off my door, and I tumbled out of the SUV.
How much ammunition do you have? Ibizual taunted. You should have accepted my offer.
Marcus grabbed my arm and jerked me to my feet, and I pressed my back to the mausoleum wall to get my bearings. My body burned, my buzz slicing out of my back, enveloping me and still devouring Ibizual’s demonic magic. The inferno threatened to consume me, and no matter how hard I concentrated, it was still the only thing I could feel. Blood stained my jeans where the creature had clawed me, but I couldn’t feel the wound and I couldn’t feel the other injury Jacob had mentioned.
Jacob kicked open the rear door and dove into the closest group of zombies, punching one into another behind it while drawing his sword with his other hand.
“Go,” he said. “Get her to the seal. I’ve got your back.”
I fired at a zombie lunging for Jacob, making it stagger long enough for Jacob to decapitate it. He wrenched back to face me, his vampiric intensity capturing me and making time stutter in my head.
“Go,” he snarled, and the claim seized my muscles and jerked me toward the manifesting seal despite the press of creatures between me and it.
“Shit, Essie.” Marcus shoved ahead of me and drew his sword. He barreled into the closest zombie, ramming it into the two behind it, and gutted the one beside him. But more pressed in, replacing the ones he’d knocked over.
A zombie leaped onto Marcus’s back, more skeleton than zombie. I grabbed it around the neck, wrenching its head back before it sank a mouthful of sharp teeth into his neck. It snarled and dug its claws into Marcus’s shoulders.
My buzz surged and the magic around the creature swept into my hands. The creature thrashed and screamed, then Jacob jerked close, grabbed the creature’s head, and ripped it from its body. It went limp, and I yanked it off Marcus’s back.
How much more of my magic can you consume before you burn up? Ibizual laughed. And you can’t control it, can you? Your very nature will destroy you.
I twisted out of the way of a zombie’s claws and aimed for the head of another one, but the bullet grazed its skull. Jacob decapitated one beside me, then wrenched around to face the horde surging in behind us.
“Kol, we need you,” Marcus said, shouldering a zombie back and impaling another.
“Trying,” Kol gasped. He rose above the group surrounding him — he must have jumped onto a tombs
tone or something — and somersaulted over the zombies’ heads onto the back of a weeping angel statue. The zombies closest to the statue wrenched around and clawed at him and he was back again trying to slice his way through the group.
Marcus snarled and hacked another two in front of us. “This isn’t working.”
Blood seeped from a deep gash on his biceps and another on his thigh. His chest heaved from the exertion of fighting so many zombies. The fountain stood less than a hundred yards away, but it could have been miles for all the progress we were making. We were barely holding our own, let alone moving forward.
Then the pressure within me pulsed with such force it made me gasp. I stumbled over a toppled tombstone and fell to my hands and knees.
The seal had formed.
Red magic undulated around me and surged under my skin. I fought to stand, to stop my buzz from consuming Ibizual’s magic, but the fire within me just burned hotter. I had to get to the key, get it out of Logan’s possession, and join my magic with Gideon’s. It was the only way to stop this.
You can’t stop this, Ibizual hissed. You won’t even live long enough to see me free.
Jacob grabbed the back of my vest and wrenched me to my feet. “Gideon, fly in. We have to get Essie to join you.”
“No.” I shot a zombie in the chest as another one tore its claws through the back of my vest. “Protect the seal.”
“Fuck,” Marcus growled. “Jacob, you have to grab her and run. We have no choice.”
Jacob flipped the grip on his sword so the flat rested against the underside of his arm then grabbed me and threw me against his shoulder with an arm under my butt. “Grab my neck and protect your face.”
Marcus roared and dove into the group ahead of us, crashing through the press of zombies. I holstered my Glock and grabbed Jacob’s neck as he barreled after Marcus. The zombies howled and clawed and threw themselves at us. A set of wickedly sharp claws swiped at my head, too close for comfort, and I buried my face into Jacob’s neck to protect my eyes.
Pinpricks of pain bit through the fire consuming me, and the zombies’ howling grew stronger. Jacob’s muscles bunched and released beneath me as he ran and dodged and heaved them out of the way.
He grunted, his muscles contracting, then he stumbled. His grip on me tightened and he wrenched to the side. My foot bashed against something solid — likely a statue or a tombstone — and Jacob heaved to the side again, loosening my hold around his neck.
Claws dug into my vest and yanked me out of Jacob’s grip. My shoulder crashed against something hard and I tumbled to the ground. A zombie lunged on top of me and sank its teeth into my neck with a pain that sliced through the fire and the pressure. But that fire, my buzz, raced through the magic animating the corpse, consuming it, and the zombie collapsed on top of me.
Jacob yanked it off me — hopefully not realizing I’d already killed it with magic I shouldn’t possess — and killed another zombie as it swiped at my legs. He grabbed the neck of my vest and wrenched me up to my feet and shoved me behind him in the direction of the fountain.
I stumbled but managed to catch my balance. We stood at the edge of the fountain’s wide concrete deck, beside one of the many stone benches placed around its perimeter — what my shoulder had struck when I’d fallen. The whole thing was enormous, with a vast space to stroll around, a large bottom basin, and a smaller second one above it. Water sprayed from the center in gentle arcs, filling the top basin then pouring over the edges into the shallower bottom bowl.
The seal, a complicated glyph of pulsing magic, floated in the air at waist height, almost hidden by the edge of the fountain from where I stood. It sat a few inches from the lip of the upper basin and blazed blood red, a deadly star in the dimming light reflected in the fountain’s undulating water. And between me and it were Gideon and Logan, which didn’t really matter since it wasn’t the seal I needed to get to, but the key in Logan’s possession.
Blood splattered the white concrete around their feet and an automatic pistol lay a few feet away under one of the benches. With a roar, Logan smashed his fist into Gideon’s gut, grabbed his arm, and flung him, one handed, at the fountain. His wing and shoulder smashed against the lip of the upper basin, and spinning, he crashed into the water and lay still.
My pulse stuttered. Gideon wasn’t getting up. He had to get up. But I wasn’t frozen in agony and his brand wasn’t draining me, so he had to be all right… unless of course I couldn’t feel the drain through my burning buzz.
Which didn’t matter.
No matter how much everything within me screamed that it did.
Ibizual had to be stopped at all costs, even if that cost were the lives of me and all my guys.
I’ll still be free, and you’ll still pay that price, Ibizual said. Come. Now. And I knew the command wasn’t for me.
“Yes,” Logan hissed. He yanked the key, a small red pulsing jewel, from his pocket and ran toward the seal.
I drew my gun and prayed I could make a good enough shot to seriously slow him down. I was too far away to catch him before he reached the seal, and I couldn’t afford to cast the light strike spell to slow him down and risk not having enough juice to destroy the key.
Gideon staggered to his feet, and my heart soared. Water dripped from his wings and clothes, and his face was battered, one eye almost completely swollen shut. I couldn’t sense his exhaustion through the brand or with my empathy because of the fire burning me up, but I could see it in the tight line of his jaw and the heave of his chest with each heavy breath. With a guttural yell, he dove at Logan, but the vampire was still going to get to the seal first.
I fired — please let it be enough for Gideon to reach him first — and hit Logan in the center of his back. Blue lightning swept around him, and he staggered.
Gideon crashed into him, tackling him to the ground, and the key flew from his hand and tumbled over the concrete.
Ibizual roared with fury, and the agony threatened to bring me to my knees, but I screamed back at him, a sound of desperate, primal rage, and ran toward the key. No way in hell would I let him win.
The key hit the edge of the bottom basin, stopping in a thick pool of red magic, and began to pulse with rapid, fluttering beats like an unsteady heart.
Logan rammed an elbow into Gideon’s face. He lurched back, then rammed a spear of light into the vampire’s chest, drawing a howl of pain.
A zombie dashed past Marcus and dove for me. I twisted out of the way, fired at it, but kept running. My shot missed the creature, and it seized my ankle. I slammed to the ground, catching myself on my left arm — the one with the already injured shoulder so I wouldn’t drop my Glock. Agony tore through me, screaming up my neck and across my chest. My arm gave out, the entire limb numb, and I knew I’d broken something, probably my collarbone.
“Essie,” Gideon gasped, and Logan shoved Gideon off him, sending the angel crashing into a bench in the opposite direction of the key.
The zombie sank its claws into my thigh, and my buzz devoured more of Ibizual’s magic, the fire blazing through the pain. With a screech the zombie convulsed and collapsed, and I kicked it off me and scrambled to my feet.
A little more and you’ll burn up, Ibizual said, and a rope of magic swept around my legs and sank into my skin, fueling the inferno.
Another rope disappeared into me. I screamed and pushed forward. Get the key. Only a few feet more. Stop this.
More zombies rushed for me, and Jacob ran into their midst to hold them off, while another group boxed Gideon in.
Logan jumped to his feet and bolted to the key. I dove to grab it before he could. But he didn’t lunge for it and kicked at my head instead.
I twisted, slamming my broken shoulder against the ground, sending more agony screaming through me.
Shit. I dropped my Glock and grabbed the key with my good hand.
Logan seized my arm and wrenched me up, but Gideon barreled into him, and we crashed into the bottom basin. My
head hit the wall of the second basin and darkness fluttered across my vision. Logan shoved my head under the water. It was only a foot deep, but that was more than enough to drown me.
I thrashed against his grip and clutched the key underneath me, desperate to keep it out of reach. He snarled, his face distorted by the churning water, and his fingers tightened around my skull. My lungs screamed for air, and the fire within me shuddered with a heavy pulse, a precursor to its final eruption.
A light strike flared and slammed into his back. His grip on my head loosened, and Gideon appeared behind his shoulder, his eyes blazing white, his face battered, ferocious, and terrifying. He wrenched Logan off me and I jerked up, gasping for breath.
“Essie, end this.” Gideon heaved Logan out of the fountain and slammed him to the ground, as zombies surged around him and slashed at his arms and face. “Take my magic and end this.”
My thoughts stuttered over the command. He’d been so adamant about me never using his magic again.
“Essie. Take it!” His magic exploded through the brand, crackling lightning that entwined with the fire of my buzz.
Logan kicked Gideon off him, and the zombies piled on top of him as Logan leaped for me. I scrambled out of the way, but all the power rushing through me made my muscles seize, and I couldn’t get up to my feet.
“Essie.” Jacob dove onto Logan, capturing him in a headlock, and wrenched him back.
The spell to cast the light strike leaped into my mind, and the combined magic within me roared into a hurricane, threatening to tear me to pieces and turn me to ash.
You should have joined me, Ibizual said. I could have saved you, made you powerful, made you a god.
I clenched my teeth and pressed the key between my palms. Gideon yelled something, so did Jacob, but all my concentration was on the spell, on blasting all the magic within me into the key and ending this.
You’ll burn up. There won’t be anything left, Ibizual sneered. Not even your soul.
