by Jenn Stark
She blinked, and I could see the flash of confusion and half recognition across her face. Mary’s mother, so young and yet so old, her eyes rich with a pain that made my heart quail. She reached for Brody’s arm, and I wheeled back, ducking my head and turning. She didn’t recognize me; she couldn’t recognize me. We’d seen each other once, a long time ago. And I’d been only a kid.
Then someone else moved, and I stiffened further, hesitating as a familiar figure approached me with a wide smile.
“Mademoiselle Wilde. It is such a pleasure to see you again.”
I took an instinctive step back. “What are you doing here, Mercault?”
He stopped several feet short of me and executed a short bow. “You increase in value to me with each passing moment. What sort of business partner would I be if I did not help you in your time of need?”
I frowned at him. “Help? Since when do you help for free?”
His eyes danced. “Who says I do not gain? I have redeployed my agents in the city to serve as protectors for the Connected, as I understand we have a bit of a demon problem.” He tilted his head. “I must say, working with you has already proven more invigorating than I would have expected. When this business is complete, we shall have much to discuss.”
“Um, thanks?”
If by not compartmentalizing Blue intended me to be thrown into a morass of confusion, she’d accomplished that. I was relieved beyond measure to see Nikki striding across the room to me, carefully avoiding both Mercault’s thugs and Brody’s parent trap.
“Hey, girl,” she said, taking my arm. “We thought we’d start in the same chapel. Kreios gave me the high sign that there’d be no Council onsite until the kids came through, so it’s just us chickens for this.”
“They decided to back Viktor?”
“Not exactly.” She slanted me a look. “They decided to back you. Apparently, the house is betting on you to bring home the job on your own. They stay out of the process, balance is maintained, and Armaeus gets to see you level up. You pull this off, I think they’ll throw you a friggin’ parade.”
“Yeah, well. Remember what happened last time.” We stepped into the second chapel, and Nikki shut the door behind me. The sudden solace was a mini miracle, all the energy of the main chapel held apart. I blew out a sharp breath, eyeing the gleaming Atlantean weapons piled neatly on the small platform at the front of the room. “Viktor doesn’t know about this place?”
“If he does, tough tits for him,” Nikki said. Her smile was hard. “Mercault showed up tonight like the Easter bunny, with the entire French Foreign Legion behind him. Viktor isn’t getting anywhere close to here, demons or no demons. Though the longer I think about it, I gotta admit…those guys were smokin’ hot, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
I stared at her, a new layer of crazy embroidered onto the insanity quilt I was pulling around myself. “You seriously liked them? Even though they wanted to possess you?”
“Well, not all of them—okay, all of them. Hey,” she said, laying a hand against her chest. “I more than most know what it’s like to be an outsized Dorothy in a world of Oompa Loompas. The fact that I made their cut did not escape me.”
“You made their cut for possession, Nikki. Not for the prom.”
“Till you walk in size-thirteen stilettos, honey, don’t judge.” Nikki’s words were more teasing than chastising, but I remained thrown off my axis yet again. I didn’t know her that well, but she seemed so strong and certain in everything she did. It hadn’t occurred to me that the idea of being chosen—even chosen by a demon who wanted to dominate her, body and soul—would give her a rush. The very idea made my head spin.
I turned toward the front of the room. Once again, the carpeted stairs made the most sense for the attempt, but I had to stuff down a twinge of apprehension as I climbed the short flight. Turning, I sat down on the edge and rested my elbows on my knees. My ink didn’t hurt, and it was only Nikki here, so I pulled up my hoodie sleeve and peeled away the bandage covering my forearm. Nikki was sitting in the front pew, but the room was so small that that meant she was essentially in my lap. With a slight forward lean, she inspected my arm, letting out a low whistle.
“That…somehow looks really deep.” She looked up at me. “And like it hurt. A lot.”
“I noticed it.” I smiled ruefully, looking at my arm. With the initial flare of reaction dying down, I could see the design a little more clearly. Blue had certainly upgraded my Celtic-looking symbol to something that looked, as Nikki had said, etched into my skin. The three-dimensional effect was breathtaking, but it was the clear pathing of the symbol that truly struck me. This artwork had a definite beginning, middle, and end. It was a walkway into and out of a place that seemed beyond this world.
Unaccountably, my heart began beating hard in my chest. She’d done this for me, Blue. There would be a price. There was always a price. But for the moment, I could focus solely on how much potentially easier she’d made this next jump.
I turned to Nikki, who now was spreading out the weapons I’d pulled from Atlantis. “Wow,” I muttered, and she grimaced.
“Yeah, wow. These things keep getting more beautiful every time I look at them.”
She was right. The arrows seemed more refined, the knife more elegant. The calligraphed symbols stood out in high relief on the blades, looking ancient and powerful at once. “You ready?”
“I’ve got the easy part of this assignment, babe. You’re the one who goes deep undercover.” She leaned forward. “But I’m here for you. You say the word, I’ll do it. Whatever you need.”
I gave her a smile that didn’t really hold its shape, and breathed out a long sigh.
“Okay, then,” I said, picking up a knife and extending my hand to grasp another blade. “Let’s get me gone.”
And as Nikki spoke the words, I fell into the deep trance the jump required. In the space of a single breath, I left the tiny, quiet chapel and descended…
Into madness.
Chapter Twenty-five
The cosmos rushed around me in a blinding blur, and I found myself once more in the plane of the Syx, but everything was different now. The oxygen seemed far too thin, for one, the very fabric of the illusion fraying away and making it impossible for me to get my bearings. I was back in the courtyard of the New England-style university, but the sky was a bright red, the grass was yellow, and the brick buildings wavered in the background, unable to hold their shape.
Another critical difference: I carried weapons with me this time—a pack of stars on my back, a large knife in my hand. I ran forward toward the nearest building, and the illusion fractured further, as it had the last time. I was once again in a cold, utilitarian room, but instead of it being lined with gurneys bearing children, there were six full-grown figures who stood bathed in light beams pouring from the ceiling.
I stumbled to a stop and took a moment to simply stare.
They were beautiful.
Tall, straight, and glowing with health, the six children had turned into the kind of people that parents proudly posted on Facebook and photographed for Christmas letters. Just as in their missing persons posters, there was no indication that they’d been stolen from their parents, their friends, their homes, their planet. They were perfect and whole. Their faces untroubled, their smiles easy in their stasis.
“Amazing, aren’t they?”
I whirled, but there was no one there. Still, the voice persisted in my head. I knew that voice. Viktor Dal. I didn’t know how he had found me, but it didn’t really surprise me. Even if he couldn’t come here himself, he had to stay in communication with the demon realm.
“Had you stopped to take more stock of the artistic record of Atlantis, you would have seen this place as well, seen the Syx, immortalized on the painted dome.” The voice pounded through my head, refusing to be ignored. “They are truly remarkable creatures, born of a time when magic bowed to no rules. When all that mattered was creation and growth, learning and be
ing. You saw them, no? The creatures they were before? Surely they remain still in the bowers of Atlantis, waiting for the hand to bring them home.”
I shook my head. Viktor was talking in circles. I hadn’t seen the Syx in Atlantis, I’d seen the Watchers. Angels and demons who’d rushed me like the mad creatures they were, crazed with loneliness and—
I stiffened. Loneliness. The Watchers hadn’t truly recognized me, not in any real sense. They’d raced toward me because they’d been alone. Abandoned for how many centuries, how many thousands of years?
And the Syx. If these were the most powerful of the Watchers, they too had suffered long for their transgressions. Suffered more, some would say, locked in this alternate dimension, waiting an eternity for someone to notice them, someone to remember.
“And for what were they punished?” breathed Viktor, his voice twisting in my heart like a sickness. But I couldn’t deny the power of his words. “For being what they innately were? For being true to their selves? There is always a price to pay for that, isn’t there? You learned that price early. So early. These children would have learned it too, eventually. They would have been considered outsiders. Strangers in their own families. As you were. As you always were. Is this the life you would give to them, the life you were forced to live?”
Viktor’s words riveted me to the spot. In some distant point of my mind, I realized that the veil was tearing here, the pocket of safety unraveling. In another part, I felt more than saw Nikki’s strong presence, and Mercault’s mischievous grin and larcenous eyes. In a farther part, I saw Brody and Dixie, and farther, the shadowy presence of the Council, safe in their immortal ivory towers.
Except not all of them were immortal. Not anymore.
Focus.
I turned back to the six figures held immobilized by the streaming light. Three girls, three boys. Featureless in the way that young people were, their lives waiting to be written on their faces in deep furrows and hard angles. Their eyes were closed, their mouths slightly open, their hands outstretched and down at their sides. They looked like nothing more than yogis in the midst of meditation.
Well, it was time to give them a whole new meaning to transcendence.
“Is it worth that much to you, to see them age and be broken over and over again by life’s disappointments?” Viktor persisted. “To see them bend beneath the weight of expectations the world cannot hope to fulfill? Here they have known happiness, acceptance. Here they are not considered aberrations. They could die without pain, without heartache.”
“Here they are alone.” I said the words, and my heart seemed to grow too large for my chest. “No one should die without knowing those who love them.”
“But no one does, don’t you see? Not anymore. They love what these children were, what they might have become. Not what they are.”
Forcing Viktor’s thoughts away, I moved into the center of the six children. Not children anymore—these were teenagers in body, if not mind. They would learn, though. And they would be loved. Viktor was wrong.
Taking a deep breath, I set down my weapons and reached for the first child’s hand. Mary Degnan. The girl who’d really started it all for me, without knowing it. My hand penetrated the beam of light easily, and I grasped her wrist, feeling the heartbeat thump against my fingers. Pulling her hand free of the beam, I reached for the second child, Sharon Graham. Though they could easily reach each other, their hands fell limply back to their sides when I tried to link their fingers.
Worse, there was now something wrong with the hands that I’d freed. They’d…aged. The veins larger, the skin thinner. I frowned at the beams, wondering what they were made of. If I took the children out of the light, would Viktor’s prediction come true? Was that what he meant by them aging too fast, getting bent and broken by the world they were reentering?
“You’re going to have to make a choice, Sara Wilde. An important choice.”
Viktor again. I tried to ignore him, but his voice sounded all around me like a tolling bell. “If you damage the portal as you leave it, the demons will not…cannot return here. Their prison will be in ruins.”
“Yeah? Why would I want that?”
“Because I am proposing a trade. Permanent protection for the children, if you destroy this plane.”
Another voice cut across my thoughts. “Something’s happening, dollface. You need to hurry.”
I jerked my head up. Nikki’s voice had come through far more clearly than it had the last time I’d made the jump. Another modification of Blue’s? Either way, the concern in her voice was clear. Viktor had been distracting me. He could be on his way to the chapel to stop me, keep me from delivering the children—or worse, his demons could take them as they finally reached earth.
That couldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen.
As if reading my thoughts, Viktor’s voice pounded down again. “The demons must have hosts on earth, you know this. Who better than children groomed to the task?”
“You’re lying,” I snapped. “The djinn don’t want them. They’re not strong enough.”
Racing forward, I pushed through the light beam into Mary’s body, sending her toppling over onto Sharon Graham. I watched with horror as their skin darkened outside of the brilliant light, but I didn’t take the time to dwell on it. I couldn’t. I turned and yanked Jimmy Green and Harrison Banks out of their light, and then I noticed it. Someone was screaming.
Viktor continued as if nothing was happening. “Physically, no. They would not be permanent solutions. But temporary? Of course. Until the jump to some other human—the biggest and strongest of humans—was possible. By then, granted, the children would be…quite broken. But now there is another solution. Another choice. If you would only give it to them.”
The walls of the room were starting to blacken and curl. I pulled Hayley Adams and Corey Kuznof, and they tumbled to the ground, dropping like corpses in a boneyard. This is dignity? This is what I brought for them? The moment the last child was out of the light, the beams winked out and the screaming grew louder. I howled for Nikki, but I couldn’t hear her voice anymore. Couldn’t hear anything.
“Why wouldn’t you choose to save them forever?”
I was a fool to believe Viktor, a fool to believe his lies. But he didn’t give me the chance to deny him. “Destroy this realm as you leave, Sara Wilde. Without the portal, the demons can remain in their own form on the earthly plane. They are not invincible there, anymore, though they do not know that yet. They will merely be strong, new blood to feed the heart of magic. Tools to be shaped as they must be for the good of all.”
“Are you insane?” Everything in me rebelled at the thought of the demons remaining on earth. It was against the Council, it was against reason.
“It’s the only way you’ll know—for sure—that these children will be saved. A pity to bring them all the way back home, only to lose them again. To lose them all. Their minds already so fragile, their bodies so—”
“No!” I dropped protectively over the children as the wind picked up and roared through the room, shattering the walls beyond me and bursting them wide.
“Do it, and I will be in your debt. I acknowledge that freely.”
I pulled the children’s arms and hands together, clutching them close. “I’ll kill you if you hurt them!”
“But you cannot.” Viktor’s words beat at me, inexorably. “Think about it, Sara Wilde. You have the weapons this time. Many weapons. Who gave them to you—more than you could possibly need? Ask yourself who. Then ask yourself why.”
There was no longer any time to argue. Bright white light blasted beyond those walls, infernally hot. Reshouldering my pack and gripping the knife once more, I pressed myself against the children as a wave of heat roared over us. With their bodies so close together, I could wrap my own arms around theirs, like the Ten of Wands with the worker bent over his clutch of staffs.
And still the portal held. A prison that had held creatures from a time before time.
Creatures like the Watchers I had seen on Atlantis. Creatures like the children now huddled beneath me. Who was to say Viktor wouldn’t try this again? Who was to say that the demons wouldn’t attack the Connecteds or bring them back to study, to possess, to grow even stronger while they waited?
And another voice spoke, not Viktor’s, deep in my own mind. Who was to say I shouldn’t do everything I could to protect these children once and for all? To do what I couldn’t all those years ago?
The wind screamed over and around me, and I tucked my head down, glaring back at the room where the children had been imprisoned. It was dwindling now, peeling away. But it wasn’t broken. It was holding. A prison waiting for prisoners from a dozen worlds away.
Not anymore, I thought. Not anymore.
Flipping the knife in my hand, I flung it back toward the illusion.
The portal burst outward like a supernova.
We hurtled through space, completely off course from the force of the explosion, and I whipped my head around. Nothing looked right, nothing looked familiar. There was no Möbius strip to follow along to bring me home.
Yes, I’d destroyed the portal—but I’d destroyed my own path as well! If so, I’d never be able to get the children back. Not alone. Not at all.
As we shot forward with dizzying speed, I tried to drop myself back into the trance—but I couldn’t concentrate. The wind was too strong, my own panic too great. Casting my mind out, I struggled for anything to catch hold of, anything to draw us back across the twisting path, anything—
A woman’s face flashed into my mind, so fiery bright that everything else paled beyond it. Mary’s mother. No, not only Mary’s, but the faces of all those people in the main chapel at Dixie’s, those parents, men and women, young and old, their faces turning toward me as if they’d heard a far-off cry.
