by Lan Chan
When I tried to look down into the void, all I could see was a bottomless pit that had no end. It had no anything. It was just...empty.
“Where am I?”
When he spoke, I wished I’d never asked the question. “You are where you should have always been,” the thing that was no longer Kai said. His voice was like the sound of a million souls begging for release. The sound of torturous rage and unending grief. His voice belonged to that thing that kept encouraging me to use my blood alchemy.
A sob escaped me. He reached out a hand as though to slide it along my cheek. I flinched. His beautiful face lit up into a smile that made me want to scream. He was at once Kai and not Kai at the same time. The wrongness of it caused me to draw in on myself. My teeth gritted hard, and my toes curled, not wanting him to touch me.
A smile sliced across his mouth. The air around us shimmered and the voice disappeared. Instead, we stood on a bridge overlooking a foaming white-and-cobalt-blue waterfall. The water rushed into the lake below that fed into a network of rivers. They forked away from the lake and wound around the landscape, disappearing behind the towers of the golden castle structures. Seraphina.
As I watched, great opalescent bodies broke through the water. The rainbow whales swam in small pods, shooting glistening spray from their blowholes. The unparalleled beauty of it stole my words until something flickered in the air in my line of sight.
Kai turned his back on me. His wings shot out and lifted him in the air. All around us, foggy outlines shimmered. Bit by bit they solidified into the towering, grotesque shapes of the malachim. There were hundreds of them floating in the air, half solid, half transparent. For a moment I wondered why they didn’t move forward. And then the white glow of thousands of Angelical wards snapped into being. They lit up every inch of the perimeter, the paranoia of the Nephilim coming into play. Given the current situation, they had every right to be paranoid.
The malachim in front of me parted for Kai. He glided through the air, his essence cloaked in sickly darkness. Where was his angelfire? He raised a hand haloed in sludgy darkness, and I finally understood. Wherever he was, Kai was no longer in control of his body. Whatever now lived inside him shot a beam of black fire at the wards. For a second, darkness met the light and engulfed it.
The wards shattered. As soon as they did, Nephilim guards teleported in, their golden armour blinding in the sun. Below them, portals opened up and spat out para-humans and mages. The Fae came shortly after.
The malachim rose up to meet them. Kai drew back as though keeping himself out of the limelight. I watched with my heart shredding bit by bit as the malachim cleaved their way through the ranks of the elite guard. My head swam as my eyes tried to find a safe spot to land so that I wouldn’t be assaulted with carnage.
Kai moved up beside me. “You did this,” he said. “You can stop it.”
“No.” I wasn’t even sure at this point what I was refusing. And then I saw her. Astrid. She was a speck of silvery light in the near distance. She took down one malachim after another with an insidious rage. For a moment, I thought Astrid had spotted Kai and was cutting a path to him. But the look of sheer astonishment on her face when she finally noticed him was heartbreaking. It was made a thousand times worse as it morphed into joy and then leeched away when it dawned on her that something was very wrong with him.
The momentary lapse in judgement gave the thing that was Kai an advantage. He teleported behind her. Before I could even gasp, he reached out with hands adorned in black talons and snapped her wings. The crunch of bone and cartilage was blocked out only by Astrid’s scream. Pain made her forget to teleport. Confusion stayed her blade when she would have struck out at him. Grabbing onto a fistful of her hair, Kai jerked her head back and pressed his mouth to her ear. His words, when he spoke, were for me.
“Because of you,” he said, “he’ll watch as he kills everyone he cherishes.”
When Kai raised a taloned finger to Astrid’s throat, I threw out my arms. I had every intention of using the alchemy to hurt him. The dusky pink of my magic wrapped itself around the creature Kai had become. It clashed with his intent, and I felt a stabbing pain in my head as his will beat down on my mine. Blood spat from my mouth as I heard somebody screaming my name. Inside me, the mating link roared. As alchemy bled from my fingers to curl around Kai, so too did a tendril of pure golden light.
Kai gasped. A flicker of green snapped behind the dark orbs. He released Astrid and she fell. I wasn’t sure if somebody caught her, because pain burst in my shoulder and I was ripped into consciousness.
Cassie shook me harshly. “Sophie!” she yelled. Behind her, Charles was a bleary-eyed ball of fur. His hair was a long mane over shoulders roiling with shifting muscles.
I coughed blood, and it splattered onto Cassie’s sheet-white face. She didn’t take any notice. “Sophie?”
Realising that she needed me to speak, I forced my mouth open. “I’m okay.” It was barely more than a croak.
“No, you’re not! You’re bleeding.”
The evidence was soaked into Max’s T-shirt and my blanket. “Help me up.” She grabbed my hand and pretty much lifted me until I was standing. Charles moved out of the way, his lips still peeled back into a silent growl. Fumbling around in my ingredients chest, I plucked out the remaining vials of health elixir and drank them both in a big gulp.
My head cleared in an instant. With it came the cold fear. It occurred to me that there were voices coming from the living room. “What’s going on?”
They were silent as they followed me down the staircase. Luther sat on the couch pointed towards the mirror. His eyes were still glassy, but I didn’t think it was from the sleep potion I’d doused him with. The image in the mirror was of a grim-faced Patricia.
“...extreme caution. The best course of action is to run when engaged.”
“Astrid?” I asked. Their heads turned to me, mouths open.
“How did you know?” Luther asked. “It only just happened.”
Not wanting to frighten them, I said, “She’s the only one I know in Seraphina.”
They were too shocked to think things through properly. “She’s in critical condition. They’re not sure how she managed to escape, but her wings are broken.”
“Turn it off,” Charles grated after we’d watched the same report four times in a row. Cassie sat on the couch, her hands clenching and releasing as she tried to take calming breaths.
“They won’t let us into Seraphina to see her,” she said. “No one but Nephilim and guards in and out now.”
Charles stood. For a second, I thought he was going to run out the door, when he turned and punched the wall. I winced as it shattered beneath his fist. When his cheeks became bathed in burnt orange as his eyes glowed, I knew we were looking at a meltdown. “It’s not like we can do anything even if we’re there!” he shouted at nobody in particular.
“Stop it,” I said. “Maybe we can’t help her right now, but we can help each other by not losing our minds. You want to do something? Let’s go to school.”
“What good is that?” he snapped.
Luther got up from the couch. “Sophie’s right. I know you can feel it in the air same as I can. Everyone is scared. If you roll around acting all pissed off because you’re scared, the submissives are going to freak out.”
“Who says I’m scared?” Charles said, coming up dangerously close to Luther.
Luther ignored the challenge. “Are you going to sit here all day roaring about how you can’t do anything, or are you going to go out there and remember what you’re supposed to be protecting?”
It was amazing what a good night’s sleep could do for a person. It was those calm words delivered in Luther’s practical way that made me realise what had been so wrong with the Reserve since the moment I’d stepped foot back here. Their fear and helplessness had made them forget who they were.
So, like usual, we got ready to go to the Academy. I wasn’t surprised when Noa
h turned up as we were walking to the portal.
“What’s happening up there?” I asked, nodding towards the conference rooms of the pack circle.
Not really expecting an answer, I was surprised when he said, “They’re divided. Half of them are chomping at the bit to go after the Hell dimension. The other half want to cut us off from the supernatural community so we can look after our own.”
A typical alpha response to an impossible situation. “And where do you land?”
“My job is to guard you while you’re at the Academy.”
I didn’t know what to make of it. It was no surprise that less than half the students turned up to Potions. All of the Nephilim were gone. I was also sans one of my friends. That too was understandable. Professor Suleiman was undeterred by the absenteeism. He just wheeled the trolley of blood into the room like nothing cataclysmic had happened overnight. “I trust you understand why we need to go on despite any challenges we might face.”
Today, I breathed through my nose even though the echo of the blood extraction was no longer a constant drumming. Just being in the room with it made my skin crawl. I took a seat in the corner, as far away from everybody else as I could.
Charming lit a steady fire under the cauldron, and I set to work. Without friends, Noah had space to sit behind the desk while I set to work. He didn’t move a muscle, like he thought if he knocked something over it would affect the potion.
When I dropped the nephilite crystal into the cauldron, he frowned. “What was that?”
“A stabilising crystal.”
He leaned over and looked into the bottom of the cauldron. “Is that meant to be there?”
“If you know that, why are you asking me questions?”
He rubbed at the back of his neck.
“We both know you’re well versed in potions,” I said, in no mood to entertain his subterfuge today.
“I had to be.” He gripped the edge of the bench. Charming flinched as the table cracked, and the fire died out for a second.
“Please don’t break things. I need Charming to be calm. This isn’t a potion that can be poorly made.”
“What is it?” Grooved lines appeared around his mouth. I might have ignored it if I didn’t see the sheen of sweat that suddenly clung to his brow. If I didn’t know better, I would think that he was afraid. But that was exactly it. As well-adjusted as he had become, there were some things that even he was unable to completely forget.
“It’s a health elixir,” I explained. “I started working on the potion last year as a school project. It does wonders for a supernatural’s healing ability.”
“Why do that? You’re not supernatural.”
I contemplated lying but didn’t see the point in it. “It was for Max. I started it after he hurt himself in the Unity games.”
He eyed me as though trying to see beyond my words. Beyond my body even. Right into my soul. “Why the crystal?”
“Kai gave it to me for my birthday. It helps to stabilise a potion so that it doesn’t explode.”
“And the rosemary?”
He pointed at where I had placed a sprig of rosemary I’d picked from the bush near the portal field. “It reminds me of my friend.”
He had no more questions, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to answer, as my throat clogged. Thinking of Kai brought back last night’s dream in a fresh wave of hysteria. Before we left the house, I had already decided I would tell Max when I got the chance. Until then, I just had to keep myself busy. Focusing on the potion became my salvation. There was nothing besides me and the precise ingredients that would make up the potion. I cleaned, sliced, and pummelled ingredients in a slow grind and dropped them into the potion using a silver spoon, and in some cases, enchanted tweezers.
Noah didn’t say a word as I worked until I glanced up at him. “I’m going to use blood now.” As expected, he tensed. “It’ll be my own blood.”
“Why?”
“Why the blood or why my own blood?”
“Both.”
“There is great power in blood. I need it to bind the spell together. I’m using my blood because the alchemy is strongest when it’s my own.”
Without giving him time to consider, I nicked my finger and pressed the pad together to extract the drops. The potion didn’t look like anything to write home about at the moment. There were peaches and strawberries floating in it, as well as the scent of honey and the eye-opening acidity of the winterflower. Slivers of rainbow whale ambergris floated in the foaming bubbles.
Once I’d used some knit-bone balm to hold my cut in place, I closed my eyes and drew on the storm of alchemy inside me. My turbulent emotions made the pool erratic. It was crashing against invisible rocks, unsure where the evil was that it needed to attack. Taking a couple of calming breaths, I drew the magic outwards and saw the world light up in pink behind my closed lids. The Ley sight was a glistening shimmer of rose tones as I funnelled my magic into the cauldron and forced the essence of the ingredients to warp.
A dull ache began to throb behind my left eye. Truth be told, I shouldn’t have been performing this magic wholesale like this. I’d made the last batch bit by bit over weeks. The last time I’d performed magic this time-restricted, it had been because Lex needed me. Afterwards, I’d had to take a potion myself to keep me from falling over. None of that mattered anymore as I funnelled the alchemy into the cauldron and made it change the properties of some of the ingredients inside. Bit by bit, the dull, translucent liquid began to glow like amber.
I heard Noah hiss. My hands shook. The pain in my head gained traction, spreading to the right side and down my neck.
My stomach lurched. “Sophie...”
Gritting harder to the alchemy, I forced the rest of it into the cauldron. Something clattered to the ground behind me, but I wouldn’t allow myself to lose concentration. Stabbing pain now sliced into my gut. I took one last shuddering breath and pushed. The alchemy stuttered.
My eyes opened just in time to see the floor coming up to meet me.
“Sophie!” I heard Professor Suleiman shout.
The world righted itself as Noah scooped me up and sat me down on the chair. He pressed his palm to my forehead, his touch uncomfortably warm but not unpleasant. Professor Suleiman’s lined face appeared in front of me.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
I nodded, even though Noah’s arm was the only thing keeping me from face planting. “I think I overdid it a little.” He glanced at the full cauldron of shimmering elixir and frowned.
“I think you’d better just sit for the rest of the class.”
“Why did you push so hard?” Noah asked when we were alone again. He eased away as soon as I could sit up on my own.
“It wasn’t so bad.”
“You almost passed out.”
“I’ll be fine.”
His expression was grim. “That’s not what I asked.”
When the bell rang for the end of class, it was obvious I would be useless for Arcane Magic. It was just as well, because Agatha went into a rant about how everything that had happened the night before could have been avoided if we had taken the precautions she had suggested.
Sure, those precautions involved ritual sacrifice, but so what?
She was even less impressed when I turned up to our private tutorial still lightheaded. My pool of alchemy was bone dry. “Get out of my sight,” she said, dismissing me with such disgust that I felt a shiver run down my spine.
Buoyed by her annoyance, I was bouncing on the balls of my feet until Noah took a turn towards the Reserve instead of the infirmary.
“You’re going the wrong way,” I informed him.
He grabbed my arm when I veered off. “You’re dead on your feet. You can barely walk straight. You’ve run into two people already. There’s no way you’re working in the infirmary.”
Uncorking one of the vials of elixir that I’d been making him carry around, I swallowed it down. The fog cleared from my head
immediately. The potion kick-started my system, and the first trickle of alchemic magic began to flow again.
His voice was rough with disbelief. “What the heck was that?”
“I’m fine. I’m going to work now.”
He shut up when we arrived to the groans of broken bodies. I could drain myself every day for a month and there wouldn’t be enough elixir to help all of them. As a result, I had to become ruthless. The para-human who was bleeding out too quickly to clot won over the Fae whose wing was half hanging off. The dwarf whose arm was almost completely severed at the elbow joint pounded down the elixir while the bull shifter with the fractured ribs looked on without relief.
In the heat of their distress, not one of them questioned what I was giving them or that it was even me who gave it to them. Not after that first para-human groaned with relief as the wound at his throat healed enough that it could be cleaned.
As evening closed in on us, I found myself in the small bathroom next to Doctor Thorne’s office. I was splashing water on my face, when I looked into the mirror. All of a sudden, black eyes that should have been green stared back at me. The groan of pained soldiers filtered through to me from just outside the door. It all became a little too much.
I let out a single sob before Noah knocked on the door. “You okay in there?”
Cupping water in my palms, I splashed my face again. “I’m fine,” I said when I opened the door. He grabbed the back of my shirt before I could start walking.
“It’s time to go home.”
“But–”
The look in his eye said that I could either walk out of the infirmary on my own two feet or I could be carried. Huffing, I packed my things and let him lead us out. To my surprise, there were still people milling about on the Academy grounds. I saw Kieran and a few of his friends huddled by the Grove. Through the dense brush, I watched Peter tending to the Arcana trees, as Isla and some of the students who used to be in Herbology sat around weeding.
