by Becca Blake
As Orion and Jacob kept the three remaining cultists busy, Maki tackled me and slashed with an unrelenting flurry of attacks. I lifted my blade to protect myself, and his talons clanged as they connected with the steel.
I rolled away from him and jumped to my feet. Flames shot up the length of my sword. When Maki lunged for me again, I was ready for him.
He parried my blows with the diamond skin of his forearms. While we fought, the ritual sacrifice continued. With each pulse of energy, Maki’s weakened skin repaired itself.
But each time I struck him, the flames surrounding my blade surged, and Maki’s skin weakened more. Tiny fissures formed along the diamond texture, and his eyes grew wild as his shimmering skin cracked.
Realizing that his strategy was no longer working, he stepped away from me.
As soon as he showed weakness, I surged. Strength that I didn’t normally possess accompanied my final strike, which sent Maki stumbling into the altar.
I couldn’t allow him the time he needed to recover, so I pinned him down with my forearm and pressed the tip of my sword against his neck. It broke through his rough skin, and blood pooled at the base of his throat.
“End the ritual. Now.” My voice was low and threatening, something completely foreign to me.
His eyes filled with an intense fear, something I would have never imagined making another person feel, and I knew I’d won.
Damn me, but it felt good to hold that power over him.
Maki snapped his fingers again, and the gem dropped to the floor. It rolled out of the moonlight’s reach, and the bonfire faded as quickly as it had been summoned.
Panicked screams tore through the sanctuary as the remaining victims fell out of their trance and bolted for the exit.
Maki trembled as his body shrunk to its original state. “You don’t know what you’ve done. This was the only chance we had to defeat the demon lords.”
“You couldn’t even defeat me in battle. What in the infernal hells makes you think you’d be strong enough to take on an entity that calls itself a demon lord?” I eased up the pressure on my sword at his neck. “You’re pathetic.”
I tensed at the unexpected warmth of a gentle hand resting on my shoulder. I spun around, preparing to launch another attack, but stopped at the sight of Orion standing behind me. Taking a deep breath, I allowed his presence to calm me, allowed him to pull me back from the depths of dark magic.
The flames on my blade receded, but I kept it at Maki’s throat. I still needed my answers.
“What did you mean about my mom?”
“Just keep digging deeper into the Arbiters.” Maki coughed as he clutched his bleeding chest with his hand. Now that he had returned to his human form, his injuries seemed much more severe than they had looked just moments before. “You won’t have to look hard to find your answer. Be careful, though. They’ll kill you the first chance they get if you don’t fall in line. Just like they did with your parents.”
Orion pushed past me and wrapped his hands around Maki’s throat. “The Council had nothing to do with their deaths. Carolyn was killed by one of Zoaznar’s guys while she was on a solo mission. And Owen… that was your doing.”
“Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night, Orion,” Maki rasped as he looked up at him.
“Your death will help me sleep at night.”
“Orion, wait!” I grabbed his arms. “I have more questions. You can’t kill him yet.”
“He won’t kill me. Not today, anyway.”
An explosion pulsed outward and threw us both back.
When we stood back up, Jay Maki was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
The stifling hotel room Orion brought us back to was too small, too quiet, and too full of unspoken resentment between the three of us. I flopped down on the firm mattress and snatched the TV remote from the nightstand, hoping that falling asleep to some stupid cartoons would help keep my mind off of everything that had happened.
As I flipped through the channels, I found that watching TV was a poor distraction. The events at the church had already made national news, and nearly every channel was covering their take on what happened in Omaha. I gave up on my search for mind-numbing cartoons and settled on one of the news programs.
“Plain and simple, this was a terrorist attack,” the news anchor said.
Across the table from him, a psychologist voiced her disagreement. She referenced her recent book on the psychology of cults—non-magical ones, of course—and pointed out that this wouldn’t be the first instance of a cult leader convincing his followers to commit mass suicide.
I ignored their uninformed commentary as I watched the video of the aftermath. Images of the church flashed across the screen as cell phone footage played on a loop. None of the survivors were able to explain how they’d gotten there or what had happened that evening, so the media pundits assumed that they’d been drugged for compliance. A few of those who seemed to have broken memories of the evening spoke to reporters about a green fire and a demon who wanted to kill them.
“Just ignore it,” Orion said as he collapsed on the small couch in the corner of the room. “The public will invent plenty of theories to explain away what happened tonight. They’ll move on to something else soon enough.”
The anchor assured viewers that the survivors’ accounts were nothing more than drug-induced hallucinations, and that the police hadn’t yet found any evidence to confirm anything other than a fire.
Still, the survivors who had memories of the night knew what they saw. When victims of demonic or magical attacks made it out alive, most were too afraid to discuss their experiences openly on national television like this. They knew no one would take their claims seriously.
There would always be conspiracy theorists who believed the survivors and decried the government for ignoring demonic threats, but even when they stumbled on the truth they weren’t exactly considered credible.
“Turn that crap off.” Jacob rolled over and covered his head with a pillow.
If I had more energy, I might have argued with him, just for the sake of it. But I didn’t want to hear any more of this, either, so I turned the TV off and tossed the remote aside. I was so tired, in a way that went beyond needing sleep. The exhaustion seeped into every part of my being, but I knew sleep would elude me if I tried. There were too many thoughts running through my head. Too many fears for the future and concerns about the past.
For all of my reckless decisions over the last twenty-four hours, I was left with far too many questions that seemed to have no answers.
None anyone would give me, anyway.
I closed my hand around the cloth holding the emerald, just to make sure it was still in my bag. I had to find a way to destroy the gem, and until I did, I couldn’t leave it unattended. The Council—and Orion, apparently—couldn’t be trusted with it.
I looked at him as he lay back on the couch with his arm over his eyes, and wondered if I would ever see him the same way again. Even if he had just been following orders from the Council, he was willing to stand aside and allow innocents to burn. How could I ever forget that? Or forgive it?
I still wanted to believe he was the good man I thought I knew, but I wasn’t sure that was possible anymore.
“You still haven’t given me that explanation you promised,” I said.
With a heavy sigh, Orion sat up and rubbed his forehead. “I was hoping this could wait until tomorrow.”
“It can’t.” No matter how tired I was, there was no way I was getting any sleep.
“Can you fill me in on the details later?” Jacob groaned, his voice muffled by the pillow. “My head is killing me. I can’t even see straight.”
My first thought was to be furious with him—how could he not care about everything we’d seen? But with all that had happened, I’d forgotten
that he was supposed to be at home recovering from a possible concussion this whole time. It had been a rough day, and he’d gotten knocked around a lot. It was no wonder he just wanted to get some rest.
Orion gestured to the door, and I followed him out to the parking lot. The night had gotten chilly, so I pulled my leather jacket tight across my chest as I followed him to his truck. He opened the tailgate for us to sit on, then grabbed two beers from the cooler he kept up front.
“There’s a lot you need to understand before we go back to Haygrove.” He passed me a bottle.
Part of me didn’t even want to listen to whatever he had to say. No explanation would make up for what he’d been planning to let Maki do back at the church. But he was family. No matter how angry I was, I had to at least hear him out.
I took the drink and lifted myself onto the tailgate next to him. “I’m not going back to Haygrove.”
“You know what will happen to you if you run away,” he said.
“I do.” The Council would label me an Oathbreaker, and I’d spend the rest of my life on the run. They would hunt me until I was dead.
“Well, I don’t want to see that happen to you.”
“They didn’t kill Maki,” I pointed out.
“That’s only because they thought they could use him. I wouldn’t count on them doing the same for you.”
“How am I supposed to stay an Arbiter after what I saw?” I asked. “Even if I wanted to go back, Jacob saw me use dark magic tonight. If I go back with you and he tells someone, they’ll kill me anyway.”
At that, he was silent. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
“It doesn’t matter how much good we do or how many demons we hunt down,” I said. “If the Council really is serving these powerful demons and killing people for them, then I don’t want any part of it.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“So you keep saying.”
“Everything we do is for—”
“Don’t you dare say the greater good.”
“We’re talking about preserving human civilization here, Ry. That means making tough choices.”
“So, why the secrecy?” I asked. “If this is so important, why doesn’t everyone know?”
“Not everyone would approve,” Orion said, nodding pointedly at me. “This compromise is hard for people to accept, but it’s the cost we have to pay to keep humanity safe.”
“I don’t see how anyone could accept working for these… demon lords.”
He took a long drink. “What all have you learned about the demon lords?”
“Not a lot. I didn’t even know they existed until today.”
“Guess I’ll start at the beginning, then. When early magic users first dabbled in alchemy and dark magic, they opened a portal to the infernal plane. The demon lords came through and brought their armies with them. The people who fought in that war were the first Arbiters.”
“They lost?” I asked.
Orion nodded. “They didn’t stand a chance. The demon lords were too powerful, so, the first Arbiters threw themselves at their feet and begged for mercy. They offered to bring them souls in exchange for ending their assault on humanity. The demon lords accepted that offer and made a deal.”
“But if there was some huge demonic war, how is it a secret now?” I asked. “I mean, why doesn’t anyone know that history? There has to be some record of all this somewhere.”
“There was,” he said. “Aside from some records the early Arbiters kept, the Library of Alexandria held all of our knowledge about the old world. After it burned down, the stories turned into legends that were eventually forgotten, and the Arbiters helped keep it that way.”
“Why?”
Orion shrugged. “I guess they didn’t want anyone to get any ideas about trying to fight a losing battle.”
“So, what, we’re just supposed to work for demons forever?”
“It’s better than the alternative. They’re powerful enough that they could destroy everything.”
“We haven’t tried to fight back for thousands of years. How can you possibly know we would lose?” I asked. “The world is different now.”
“Is it worth the risk?” He set his empty bottle aside. “I get that you want to save everyone, but we can’t.”
We learned at the academy to prioritize stopping the threat over saving a life, if we were put in a position where we had to choose. A demon might kill dozens more people if we let it get away, and if we did, those losses were on our hands. Back then, that idea always made sense to me.
That was before I went out in the field and saw for myself the human cost of letting someone die on my watch.
Now, we were talking about generations of letting people die, on a scale impossible to imagine, throughout human history. How could anyone make that choice?
“Even an asshole like Maki recognized how wrong this is,” I said.
“Maki doesn’t care about what’s right or wrong. That was just a power grab for him.”
“He said he left because he learned the truth about the Council.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” Orion said, his voice unusually quiet. “He was a decent man once. But he just disappeared without a word shortly after Carolyn died. He may have had good intentions when he left, but he’s not that person anymore. The Jay Maki I knew is gone.”
I picked at the label on my bottle. “It sounds like you were close.”
“When Jay left, it crushed me. And Owen had just lost Carolyn. I don’t think we would have made it through those losses without each other.”
“You loved my dad,” I said as the realization dawned on me. “Really loved him.”
“I did.”
“Did he…” I started, though I wasn’t sure how to finish the question.
“Love me back?” Orion offered a pained smile. “He did.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“We thought you might be angry with us, or think we were betraying your mother’s memory. We wanted to tell you, but we hadn’t worked up the courage yet.” He considered that for a while before adding, “well, that’s not entirely true. Owen was ready to tell you forever ago. I was the one who was scared.”
Staring out at the dark, empty parking lot, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t figured it out sooner. It was a puzzle piece I didn’t realize I’d been missing.
I had known—or at least, I had assumed—that my father had never been with another woman after my mom died. He never seemed to have the time. But even though Orion had all but moved in with us, it had never crossed my mind that another man might be in the picture.
“I wish I had known before he died. I would’ve been happy for both of you.” After setting down my bottle, I moved over to sit next to him. As I leaned against his chest, he wrapped his arm around me. For all his flaws, for all of the secrets he’d kept from me about our work, he was the only family I had left.
“I lost Owen. I can’t lose you, too,” he said. “When we get back to Haygrove—”
I pulled away from him. “I meant what I said. I’m not going back to Haygrove.”
“Ry—”
“No.” I slid off the truck, and my boots thudded hard against the pavement. “What the Arbiters are doing is wrong. If you want to help me, then come with me. We can stop the demon lords.”
“Riley…” Orion buried his head in his hands. “You haven’t seen what they’re capable of doing.”
“I think I might,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I saw Raxael earlier tonight—before the ritual.”
It was just a guess. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
“If you did, you’re lucky to be alive. What makes you think it was him?”
“Jacob and I found that cultist girl, Alexis. After she t
old us about the ritual, a powerful demon showed up. He killed her before we even got a look at him. And when I tried to shoot, he disappeared. I’ve never heard of a demon able to do that before.”
“There’s only one who can,” Orion said. “Raxael can shift through planes instantaneously and go wherever he wants without taking the time to summon a portal. He can be everywhere at once—here one second, China the next. Fighting him would be impossible.”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and leaned against the side of the truck. That sort of ability would be a challenge, but it couldn’t be unstoppable. There had to be a way.
“If he knew what Maki was trying to do, he would have shown up, right?” I asked.
Orion nodded. “I’d assume so.”
“What will he do when he finds out?”
“Well, he won’t be happy. He’ll want to hunt down Maki, but he’ll go to the Council for answers first. They’ll probably blame me, since I was in charge of the assignment.”
“So, we need to make sure you’re not in Haygrove when he gets there.”
“No. I have to go back.”
“Why? They’re just going to throw you under the bus.”
“This is my life,” he said, frowning. “I can’t just walk away from it.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I said. “You said you couldn’t lose me? Well, I can’t lose you, either.”
Orion rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know.”
I climbed back up on the truck and sat in front of him, taking his hand in mine. “I’m going to find a way for us to stop these demon lords, but I can’t do it alone. I need your help.”
He sighed and looked up at the dark sky. “If you’re serious about this, we’ll still have to go back. At least for a few days.”
“Why?”
“There’s only one place we can go to look for answers about the demon lords, and that’s the vault in Haygrove’s library. We need to find out if he has any weakness. If we try to fight him blind, he’ll tear us to shreds before we even catch a glimpse of him. But if we can figure out a plan, we might have a chance.”
