Raven's Rise (World on Fire Book 3)

by Lincoln Cole

  “Nida!”

  He wanted to lean down and hug her but felt terrified to move her or do anything that might inflict more damage.

  “Haatim,” she said, then coughed. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Nida. I …”

  He had no idea how to explain. What could he say? So much had happened, so many things had gone wrong; where could he even start?

  She held up her hand to stop him. “I knew everything that happened,” she said. “The entire time.”

  “Don’t talk.” Haatim tried to use his hands to staunch the bleeding.

  It was her. The real her. After all this time, here she lay in front of him, alive and present.

  And dying.

  Tears streamed down his face when the realization of what that meant sunk in. After all this time, trying to rescue his sister and save her from this fight, now he had to watch her die all over again.

  “We can fix this.” He reached down and grabbed her hand. “We can get you to a hospital, and they can save you.”

  Nida closed her eyes, gasping and slipping away. When she opened them, he saw not only resignation and understanding there but also contentment. “It’s over,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Nida. No.”

  “I love you, dear brother.”

  Then she closed her eyes again. He held her in his arms, crying, as another few moments slipped past.

  And then she stopped breathing, and had gone forever.

  ***

  Abigail’s body went still. Her eyes stayed open but looked vacant, and blood ran down her face and chin. She lay perfectly still, leaning back against Frieda, and stopped breathing. Frieda let out a gasp of sheer emotion. It had finished.

  “What did you do?” Dominick asked, pulling back and staring at Frieda with a look of disbelief, which anger soon replaced. “What the hell did you just do?”

  “Dominick, there wasn’t—”

  “You killed her. How could you?”

  “I tried to save her—”

  “After everything we’ve been through, how could you do this to her? To us? To all of us! God damn it, Frieda.”

  “I didn’t have a choice. She knew that.”

  “I don’t believe you. There is always a better way to—”

  Suddenly, it felt like a brick wall had hit Frieda in the stomach, and she went flying backward. She hit one of the old wooden pews and collapsed to the ground in a pile of broken wood.

  A cloud of dust hung in the air, and when it cleared, she saw Dominick lying on the far side of the room. He appeared unconscious, and his mouth hung open.

  Dazed, and disoriented, she staggered back to her feet and tried to figure out what had happened.

  Abigail stood in the center of the room, face locked in an expression of rage and agony. She still convulsed, eyes barely focused, but Frieda knew in that instant that they’d lost all hope.

  The poison hadn’t killed the demon, only hurt it, but that didn’t offer the worst part: Only Surgat remained. In obvious pain, it tried to push the poison out of Abigail’s system, and this left the demon distracted and disoriented. Frieda knew, though, that if the poison didn’t kill it, then not much time would elapse before it had made a full recovery.

  Abigail opened her mouth, and a guttural roar poured out. She reached down and retrieved Arthur’s sword from the ground, but then dropped it with a sudden hissing noise. Where the metal touched her flesh, it burned.

  Frieda drew her pistol and fired, but the demon moved too quickly, running to the side and diving out through the hole in the wall.

  Chapter 33

  Haatim heard a sound and glanced behind him. Abigail came flying out of the wrecked church. Only one wall still stood, which looked on the verge of collapsing too, as the structural integrity of the building broke down.

  “Abigail!” he shouted, but she didn’t even turn over to look at him. Then Abigail disappeared, sprinting through the forest and back in the direction of Raven’s Peak. She moved fast with unnaturally long strides. For sure, something had gone wrong.

  He stood, exhaustion washing over him and making him wobble. Then he attempted to give chase. It proved of no use, though, and even if she hadn’t run much faster than normal, he never could have caught up. He’d ended up too broken from his recent exertion even to try.

  He felt a chill when a gust of wind whistled past. More movement came from behind. Dominick and Frieda came out of the church and headed toward him, climbing over the rubble of the building. Frieda supported Dominick, holding him under the shoulder, and in her other hand, she carried Arthur’s sword.

  “Why do you have that?” Haatim asked.

  “The demon left it.” Frieda nodded toward the forest. “I think that touching it caused the creature pain.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “Not that I know of.” She held up the sword and looked at it.

  Dominick clutched his head, and blood ran down his face, and he appeared dazed.

  Frieda noticed the body on the ground, and her face fell. “Nida.”

  Haatim closed his eyes. “Gone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s Okay. The demon didn’t get her. What the hell happened?” Haatim asked.

  Dominick looked at him, at a complete loss for words.

  The expression on Frieda’s face, though, shifted to one of despair. “It didn’t work.”

  “What didn’t work?”

  “The thing she injected into Abigail.” Dominick shook his head and jerked free of Frieda’s support. He wheeled around on her. “What the hell was it? What did you inject her with?”

  “Poison,” Frieda said. “It should have killed her.”

  “It what?” Haatim felt shocked and confused and more than a little hurt at the idea. He took a few steps toward Frieda. “What the hell?”

  “The idea didn’t only come from me,” Frieda said, backing away slowly and holding up her hands. “Haatim, I promise you, we had no other way. Abigail knew that. She appreciated the risks, and this offered the only chance we had.”

  “The only chance to what? Kill her?” Haatim said. “What the hell happened to saving her? This is insane.”

  “It meant the only way to stop Surgat.”

  “He got inside her.” Haatim nodded. “Nida told me as much, but you still had no right to try and kill her.”

  “We couldn’t let Surgat out into the world.” Frieda pleaded with her eyes. “Please, you have to understand.”

  “Oh, I understand. You felt willing to kill Abigail to stop the demon. Well, did it stop him?” Haatim gestured toward where Abigail had disappeared. “Does that look like the demon got dealt with?”

  “Haatim.”

  “You convinced her that killing herself had become necessary to try and deal with a demon that your family helped to create? And, you didn’t even tell us what you planned to do. What the hell? Do Dominick and I matter to you at all? What, did you think that we wouldn’t notice she’d died suddenly?”

  “Abigail didn’t want me to tell you,” she said, a defeated look on her face. “Either of you. She made me promise. She thought that if you knew, you would try and stop her.”

  “That’s because we would have,” Dominick said. “Because that is a ridiculous plan. You knew that this could happen and still brought Abigail out here?”

  “She had full awareness of the risks. We decided it better to confront the demon on our terms than to run and hide. We couldn’t wait this out because the cult would never have given up.”

  “You mean you decided.”

  “We. Abigail planned it as much as I did.”

  “And she’s certainly in her right mind. You brought her here and served her up on a platter for Surgat.”

  “Not that simple. It should never have come to this.”

  “Well, it did.”

  “I wanted to stop the ritual and save her before this could ever happen. The poison remained her last resort. I don’t understa
nd why it didn’t work. It should have.”

  “It didn’t, and thank God,” Haatim said. “You tried to murder her.”

  “She knew the risks and still chose to face the demon.”

  “Only because she thought she could save Arthur,” Haatim said.

  Frieda froze. “What?”

  “Nida told me that Abigail came for that reason alone. Mitchell lied to her and said it would be possible to use Surgat to bring back Arthur. He worked with Nida the entire time.”

  Frieda shook her head. “No. Not possible.”

  “Well, it happened. He played us. All of us. And now, Abigail has gone.”

  Frieda stood silent for a long time. “This isn’t productive,” she said, finally. “I understand that you both feel furious with me, and I’m sorry for misleading you, but right now, we have bigger problems. We had no other plan that could stop Surgat, and it failed.”

  “You thought poison would work?” Haatim asked. “I watched her recover from having her stomach torn and a gunshot to her hip in a matter of days.”

  “This poison should have worked,” Frieda said. “And it almost did.”

  “Then, why didn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. You said Mitchell worked with Nida. Maybe he found out about the poison and warned her.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. In any case, it doesn’t change the facts or how desperate our situation has become.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Now we have a pissed-off super-demon and no real weapons,” Dominick said.

  “So, what do we do?” Haatim looked from one to the other.

  “I don’t know,” Frieda said. “I think it headed somewhere to enact the second part of its plan.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A summoning,” Frieda said. “It will create a portal.”

  “A portal. Why? I thought they didn’t need a portal to bring Surgat here.”

  “Not for Surgat.” Frieda pursed her lips, and then said, “For the rest of his demon army.”

  ***

  They jogged back to the car, moving silently through the woods and pushing a brutal pace to get back as fast as possible. Though all in a hurry, Haatim doubted that any of them had any clue what they should do next.

  Lost in his thoughts, he tried to come to terms with everything that had happened. None of it made sense, and he felt more hurt by what Abigail had done to him than he cared to admit.

  He had talked about what would happen after this ended, fishing for information and trying to instill hope for a possible future. She hadn’t even proven willing to tell him that she planned to take her life if things didn’t work out. Nor had she told him that she had become the vessel that Surgat intended to use upon his resurgence into the world.

  She had lied to his face, letting him think that things could work out and have a happy ending. Did she not tell him because she didn’t trust him? Or because she wanted to protect him?

  Did it even matter?

  Whatever, she had kept something huge and life-altering from him, and that hurt. He’d thought he’d broken through her shell and found the woman beneath, but now he didn’t believe he could trust anything as far as Abigail was concerned.

  Or Frieda, for that matter. She had withheld so much from them these last few weeks and months. Her secrets ran deep and went back decades. Anyone that good at keeping secrets always had an agenda.

  Part of him—a fairly large part—just wanted out. This life had gotten thrust upon him, and his only consolation to the screwed-up-ness of everything came from thinking he could trust his new friends. Abigail, Frieda, and Dominick provided the bedrocks upon which he built his new world, and now, two of them had shattered. Could he still trust Dominick?

  Did he even feel willing to try?

  He didn’t know. As soon as this all finished, he would need to do some serious soul searching and decide how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

  They made it to the waiting car, and all climbed inside without a word. Each of them absorbed in their thoughts and dealing with the somber situation on their own. Dominick drove, and they soon got back on the road and headed toward Raven’s Peak.

  It had begun to rain, only a light sprinkling, and it grew colder. The day darkened as storm clouds continued to settle in above them, and before long, it would pour down. He leaned his head against the cold window, still exhausted from his encounter with Nida’s demon but recovering somewhat.

  However, as he sat there, he realized that not everything he understood about the situation added up.

  “Something bothers me,” he said, sitting up again and rubbing his face. He spoke directly to Frieda in the passenger seat. “How long have you known?”

  “About what?”

  “About Surgat and Abigail. When did you know she provided the vessel?”

  Frieda sat in silence for a moment. He assumed she sat there trying to decide whether or not to lie. At this point, he just expected her to withhold the truth.

  Finally, Frieda admitted, “Since she was a little girl. Arthur found her, and I came in after to try and determine what they’d attempted to do. When I realized, I felt horrified. They didn’t have the blood, but since she was so young, they thought they could do the ritual without it. I couldn’t believe they would do something like that to a child.”

  “It didn’t work?”

  “Arthur interrupted their ritual, but not before they had managed to do significant damage to her. I knew the correct thing to do was tell the Council and the Church.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “They would have killed her without a moment’s hesitation, and I couldn’t do that to Arthur. He had just lost his entire family, and saving this young girl had great importance for him. I had to choose between my position on the Council and the man I loved.”

  “And you chose Arthur?”

  “I chose both of them. It didn’t take long before I loved Abigail almost as much as Arthur. By then, I’d committed and would do anything to protect her.”

  “Did Arthur know?”

  “Not for a long time,” Frieda said. “I prayed that I had gotten it wrong and made a mistake, and for years, I wondered if maybe I had. But then, when she got a few years older, she changed.”

  “Changed?”

  “The essence of Surgat, which the ritual transferred over, struggled to assume control; though, in his weakened state, he couldn’t dominate her fully. Instead, he tried to corrupt her. I thought I could solve the problem using old cult rituals if I only had enough time. I—”

  “You performed the ritual on Arthur,” Dominick said. “But you didn’t tell him what it really was, did you?”

  She shook her head. “No, I didn’t tell him everything. I explained to him that it had risks involved, but I didn’t tell him the whole truth. I think he still would have gone through with it, even had he known what it would do to him eventually. I thought that with enough time, I could find a way to fix both of them. I believed I would manage to remove Surgat and put things back to normal.”

  “And then you lost Arthur.”

  “Which proved bad enough. But I never counted on Aram and Mitchell working with the cult. They manipulated Aram, and they played us. If I had to guess, Aram first got guided to the cult through Mitchell with promises that they could bring back Nida. The entire time, they had this as their end game. They strove for this for all these years.”

  “That’s why the Church wanted to kill Abigail.”

  Frieda nodded. “I never told them the full extent of Abigail’s condition, but I suspect they realized what I had kept from them when the Ninth Circle went after the blood. When they understood the risk, they ordered our deaths. They assumed that if they killed Abigail before she turned into the half-demon, they could end this without unleashing him once again.”

  “They nearly did in Cambodia, but she survived.”

  “Yes. She survived. They will realize their failure soon e
nough, though many civilians will die before they can stop Surgat. Our mistakes … my mistakes will cost the world a lot of pain.”

  “What makes Abigail different?” Dominick asked. “Isn’t she just possessed?”

  “It goes beyond that. She merged—what the Church would call integration. Or nearly so. I think Abigail remains in there for now, but when the demon finishes destroying her, it will absorb her entire existence and use it to gain power. Her soul will get consumed completely, and the demon will have full access to all its capabilities within her body.”

  Dominick blew out a breath. “That’s why she tried to kill herself.”

  Frieda nodded. “Yes.”

  They continued down the road in silence. The rain had picked up and worsened. Beyond the storm, though, he picked up something else. At first, Haatim had a hard time understanding it … like a feeling in the air around them. As if they had left the world behind and entered somewhere else. Some other plane of existence.

  Maybe they had. It seemed impossible to tell what would happen now, and the closer they got to the city, the stronger that feeling became.

  Haatim felt angry at Abigail for withholding such important information from him, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that despair underlay the anger. The thought of losing her left him terrified, and the knowledge that she’d felt willing to take her life, even if it did seem the only way to stop this demon from destroying her soul and taking her completely, ate at him inside.

  Haatim couldn’t bear the thought of losing her yet again. He hadn’t even come to terms with the idea of her death when she got lost in the mountains, or when he’d found her nearly dead in Cambodia, and this seemed so much worse. She had gotten backed into a corner with no options, and all because of the decisions and actions people made when she was only a child.

  “Where do you think she went?” he asked, after a few more minutes.

  “I was going to ask you that,” Frieda said.

  “Me?”

  “You can do incredible things, Haatim. I think you can find either the demon or Abigail if you try.”

  He opened his mouth to say that he didn’t know how, but then realized it as a lie. He knew how to reach out and search for demons, just never so far away.