Night Rises: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 2)

by Leslie Claire Walker

  He kept my form, so the magic he’d attacked the Watchers with still held, and for all intents and purposes, the Watchers viewed him as if he were me. They’d laid eyes on me as well now. They mumbled their confusion, trying to work out which was the real Night. Which Night contained the Angel of Death, and which was the imposter.

  I couldn’t see Addie. I couldn’t make out Shadow either, but I knew they were out here somewhere. If I tied up my magic on the remaining Watchers, I left myself open to his attack. And it was coming, as sure as the pellets of ice that fell from the sky gave way to big, wet, fat snowflakes. As sure as the houses all around remained dark and quiet. As sure as the sound of a far away train’s horn penetrated the shields with a haunting moan.

  I trained my magic on the Watcher who stood behind Miguel’s fallen form. They were close to the house. A threat to those inside. I couldn’t see them clearly against the backdrop of the house, but a silhouette would do just fine.

  I dropped them where they stood into a vision of the train whose horn had sounded, onto the tracks beneath the train’s wheels and weight.

  Sunday took one as well, and then a second. That left only Shadow, wherever he—

  I didn’t have to wonder any longer. I saw him clearly, with his supernova halo, step from the front door of the house. He’d brought no one with him, and no one followed.

  Blood stained his white-blond hair, and his pupil-less cobalt eyes glowed with barely suppressed rage.

  Either he’d killed everyone in the house, or something terrible had happened, something he hadn’t expected.

  Sunday dropped her knife and drew her gun and fired.

  My own fear rose up like a wild animal.

  Chapter 8

  SHADOW LAUGHED. The sound reminded me of the kind of darkness that swallows everything it touches, muffles every noise, and pierces the heart like a thousand obsidian knives only to soak up the blood as if it had never flowed—as if there had never been life or love at all.

  The bullet Sunday fired exploded before it reached him, a ball of fire that vanished in an instant, raining ash onto the snow below.

  Shadow stepped over the prone bodies of the Watcher I’d just dropped and Miguel, whose chameleon impersonation of me still held. He paid no mind to the Watchers Sunday had dropped as they writhed on the ground or lay still in shock, without their sight.

  He searched the yard with his cold cobalt eyes, his gaze flowing over the rose bushes and the walk and the fat snowflakes that settled on the grass. No other magical attacks on the way. No one out here but the three of us.

  When he looked at me again, I could see that he knew Miguel was the imposter, and that I was the real deal.

  “How?” I asked.

  “I read it in your blood,” he said.

  That made no sense. I wasn’t bleeding. He had no physical contact with my blood. The things he was talking about being able to read were DNA-deep—or deeper. “You can just look at me and see that?”

  “It’s part of the fabric of your being,” he said. “Those things are mine to see.”

  Addie had said the Watchers had the power to tear apart a person’s being—or presumably, to knit them back together. Shadow was talking about Watcher magic, and as the oldest Watcher, his power in that area would not have been dulled or divided by space or time.

  “A chameleon can copy many things,” he said, “but the power in your blood is not one of them. I don’t need to read your mind in order to know your thoughts,” he said. “That’s your department. But you should work on your poker face. You’re an amateur, Night. Dream should’ve chosen better than you.”

  The other advantage I thought we had—the idea that the Watchers had never seen a mark like the one Miguel and I bore, that they’d never heard of Dream, that the power of an archangel in my blood might enable me to fight Shadow and win—went up in smoke.

  I had nothing now except my wits. That wouldn’t be enough against someone like Shadow.

  I managed to keep that off my face, because damned if I’d let him know the despair that touched my heart. If I was going down—if I had to die—I’d make him work for it.

  “Nice job, by the way,” he said. “I didn’t think you had it in you anymore, taking out my Watchers as if they were targets of the Order. I thought you’d gone soft.”

  “They knew what they were getting into, coming here with you,” I said.

  “They were ready to give their lives for the cause.”

  And they would, because I had no intention of releasing them.

  Sunday sidled up to me. I didn’t like what that might mean. It was better to give Shadow two targets than one, unless she meant to step in front of whatever he threw at me. I didn’t want that.

  She set her hands on her hips. “And what’s that?”

  “What it’s always about,” he said.

  She tossed her head. “Well, it ain’t money.”

  Shadow strolled across the lawn toward us. “So it’s got to be power.”

  If Shadow managed to free the Angel of Death—however he did it—he’d be in over his head. “The Angel won’t submit to you. If you think you’ll be able to make him do what you want, you’re delusional.”

  He shook his head. “The Angel of Death isn’t my end, Night. He’s my means. All I need is for him to walk free, to do what he plans to do anyway.”

  “What’s that get you?” I asked.

  “The keys to Heaven.” He took another step closer. “That’s what it’s always been about. Too bad Addie won’t be going home with us when the time comes.”

  “Where is the old lady?” Sunday asked.

  “Inside,” Shadow said. “Dying.”

  I felt no surprise. Panic, yes. I had complicated feelings about Addie, but Jess—Jess loved her aunt. And I loved Jess.

  Sunday lunged for Shadow. I grabbed hold of her wrist hard enough to leave bruises. Hard enough to wake her up to the idea that attacking Shadow would be the last mistake she ever made.

  “You want to go inside, Sunday?” Shadow asked. “I’ll give you leave to go, but you might not like what you find.”

  She spoke through clenched teeth. “I’m not leaving Night.”

  “Even if the people in the house need you?” he asked. “Even if someone precious will expire without your attention?”

  That was an obvious trap. Well-baited. So very hard to resist.

  Sunday yanked her wrist from my grasp. “He could be talking about Faith, Night.”

  Yes, he could. “I don’t want you to go, Sunday, but if it’s Faith?”

  She turned to meet my gaze, fear for me and the others etched around her eyes.

  I leaned into her. She leaned back.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Go.”

  She moved toward the house, walking past Shadow without another word or a glance. I watched her go, the crunch of her steps supernaturally loud in the hush all around us. Once she made the walk and turned toward the door, I refocused my attention on Shadow.

  Now that I had no guard to give him trouble, he moved closer, drawing nearer until he stood inches away. “A Watcher might be not be able to rip apart the fabric of your being without harming the Angel,” he said, “but then I’m no ordinary Watcher.”

  “You’re the oldest,” I said. “You’re special. Whatever that means.”

  He reached out to touch my cheek. At my answering glare, he stayed his hand.

  “There are those of us who’ve been around since the beginning,” he said. “Elders. The Angel is one. I am another. We’re reclusive, mostly. We keep our secrets to ourselves, waiting for the signal that it’s time to rise again, time to walk again, time to make the world ours again. Once there were many of us; now there are few. But there are still enough of us to take the throne of creation.”

  “The throne of creation? Is that some sort of euphemism for God?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s a higher power than God.”

  Well, shit.


  “I’m sorry to have to do this,” he said. “Truly, I am. I’m loath to destroy someone my sister Dream has made her own, even if they’re not worthy of that honor.”

  Shadow reached into me with his Watcher’s power, brushing off my attempts to stop him, overriding my magic as if it were nothing at all. He took hold of my power with his mind and turned it over, examining its facets and ultimately discarding it in a cobwebbed corner as if it were something he’d dragged inside on the bottom of his shoe. It was worthless to him. Harmless.

  He moved to touch me again. He had ahold of me—my mind, my magic. I couldn’t stop him. His fingertips caressed my skin—then passing through it, reaching through flesh and bone into my blood.

  I understood the title he bore suddenly, like finding revelation in a lightning flash. He only appeared to be solid, made from human parts. He only appeared to have weight and mass, to be one being, whole and contained within a sheath of skin that marked his edges.

  In reality, he was a collective of shapes and darkness, as if all of the shadows cast by the sun and the depths of the human heart had taken refuge together. Burned together. Suffered together. Plotted together, sharing knowledge and manipulating each other and those around the collective toward a single, solitary end.

  The shadows within him fluttered like crow’s wings made of blackened steel and talons honed to the sharpness of a god’s blade. Everywhere they brushed against a part of me, they cut and sliced and ripped and rent. They tore me apart as a predator tears prey. They tore me apart as if I were slag. Worthless. Harmless. Nothing.

  I had no sight, no hearing—no sense at all except dissolution. My edges were gone before I had a chance to miss them, my bones broken and crushed, my magic squandered all except for the darkened door of my mind behind which I’d locked the Angel of Death. The Angel’s cage.

  The cage held.

  Shadow turned all of his might against it. All of his fierce hope and pent-up rage. He began to chip at the lock, each blow glancing off the fortified magic that refused to yield, but leaving its mark, too. Chinks in the armor.

  Inside the cage’s confines, the Angel did not seem glad of it.

  He didn’t want Shadow to free him. He didn’t want out at all. He bent his will toward keeping the cage secure, holding the magic intact, saving himself from the oldest Watcher.

  Saving himself.

  The power I’d used to hold the door closed had disintegrated along with the rest of my magic. The angel’s blood in my beating heart might be worth something, but was it worth enough to keep the lock on the door?

  The only thing holding the door closed was the Angel of Death himself.

  As my mind began to disintegrate around the cage, I could see only fleeting images. The faces of people I loved. The people I’d tried to become human for. The people I didn’t want to leave.

  The kids.

  Sunday.

  Red.

  Faith.

  When I could no longer see the images, only feeling remained. My heart, like the cage, endured. It still beat—if not in my physical body, then on some other plane. That shouldn’t be possible.

  Heart.

  Beat.

  Blood.

  Angel blood.

  The blood of a high angel ran in my veins. I didn’t know which, and I didn’t care. They would know me for their own if they saw me, Miguel had said. They would know.

  Would they hear?

  With all the strength left in my beating heart, I sent out a call. For a single, endless moment, it seemed as if someone had answered.

  The blackened steel feathers and talons went suddenly still. The snowflakes hovered in midair, turning like tiny, crystalline wheels. The stillness and the space between them seemed to go on forever, as if the whole world had drawn a deep breath and held it.

  My heart began to slow, the space between the beats stretching out to minutes, to days, toward forever.

  But then the snow began to fall once more. Shadow hacked at the cage. I would die, every piece of me shattered and scattered to the winds as if I had never been. Shadow would break the cage. It was only a matter of time. He would get to the Angel.

  Whatever he intended for the throne of creation, whatever the fuck that was, the Angel of Death meant one thing: the end of the world. Of all the worlds.

  Shadow bent the lock. Any second now, it would break.

  Inside, the Angel roared.

  A single, solitary hope formed in the moment before what remained of me imploded. A single, traitorous thought.

  What if I turned the power of my blood toward a new purpose? What if I stopped trying to contain the Angel of Death? What if I helped him instead?

  I had no idea how to do that. I saw two possibilities, and two possibilities only if I made that choice:

  Die without knowing what would happen. Whether Shadow would succeed, and what that would mean. He didn’t mean well for anyone but himself. The world might burn. If it did, he wouldn’t care.

  Live, knowing that if I empowered the Angel, I might lose the ability to contain him. I might become his servant. The events he set in motion would lead the world to burn. I might have a hand in that. I might have no choice.

  I was a chosen one of an Elder named Dream. I had a part to play in what was coming—but not if I was dead and gone.

  The Angel of Death was my enemy—and my responsibility. I didn’t know what I could do, if I could do anything at all. But I couldn’t do it if I was dead and gone.

  The people I loved would be in danger, and I couldn’t protect them if I was dead and gone.

  I had no time to decide. There was only now, or never. If I had a chance, I had to take it. I did the only thing I knew how to do, the only thing I could do. I barely knew how to do it. I had so little experience, and so much fear.

  I opened my heart. I offered the Angel the power in my blood.

  That offer of power did what Shadow hadn’t been able to. It cracked open the lock on the cage.

  The Angel absorbed the power in my blood. It entered him as a thousand rays of light, the fire of the sun meeting the darkness and decay. The heat and flame scorched him wherever they touched. He howled in pain, but still, he drew in the power.

  The pain became agony, doubling and trebling like the pressure wave before an avalanche until it crossed a threshold of no return, until the force of it became too much to bear. The door of the cage burst open.

  The Angel exploded into a thousand shards of fire.

  Each shard sliced through Shadow’s razor feathers and talons, the fire in them incinerating every shadow, illuminating every nook and small space in which Shadow tried to hide, leaving him no way to stay, and nowhere to go.

  Shadow disintegrated, all that remained of him so much smoke that faded into the snow-drenched night.

  The explosion of fire began to turn back in on itself—pulling in all the pieces that belonged, and nothing that didn’t. The parts of me that Shadow had broken. The bits that had flown away on the wind. The flesh and blood and bone, come back together in the shape of a woman—my shape.

  The Angel began to knit them back together again.

  That remaking, that reweaving, was a Watcher’s magic. The Angel was no Watcher, but he had the kind of power Shadow had—the power of an Elder being—and the remnants of the archangel magic that I’d given him.

  When he was finished, when I had eyes to open and see with and skin to sense the ice in the air and the feel of the wind, when I could smell the snow again and taste the night on the back of my tongue, I found myself whole and hale, on all fours in the grass, lungs heaving for breath.

  I willed my fingers to move, my hands to claw back toward my body. I willed the big muscles in my legs and core to draw me up to standing. My knees threatened to give way for a second, but decided to hold.

  The Angel came to rest within me, just inside the edges of my skin. Any second, I expected him to take control. To take me over.

  He did not.

>   I didn’t know what that meant, only that I’d deal with it later. I had to get into the house now. For Faith and for Red. For Addie, who might be dying.

  Someone was. I could taste it in the air. I could feel it, as if I were standing on the edge of a cliff at great height, balance tipping, helpless to stop the fall.

  I ran, tripping over my own feet, then nearly tripping over the bodies of the Watchers Sunday and I had downed. I leapt over Miguel as his lashes began to flutter—as he started to come to. I bounded up the steps and burst through the door into chaos.

  Sunday paced the strip of living room near the door. Her face was a mask of pain and rage and worry. Her palms were burned black. She’d tried to get past a shield and failed. She took one look at me and her eyes went wide.

  I didn’t want to know why. I didn’t have time.

  The shield that had flummoxed Sunday bore no sign of Ben’s gray magic. This one had been woven of golden threads, and it undulated as if it were a living thing. A sparking, electric living thing. I couldn’t see through it. I couldn’t see anyone else except the person who’d made the shield and stood at its center.

  Faith.

  Her pupils bloomed with gold. No brown remained.

  She’d glued her gaze to Sunday, as if Sunday were a stranger, a dangerous interloper. Faith glanced at me as I entered. She didn’t seem to recognize me either.

  I bit back the scream that wanted to roar from my throat. I kept my words even, and without any edge of magic. I didn’t know the Awakened. I didn’t know whether it had taken over utterly, or how much of Faith might still be in there.

  “Let me in,” I said. My voice sounded like mine, but not only mine. The Angel of Death’s words twined with mine, adding power, adding demand, threatening force if necessary.

  It was enough to shake Faith—or to shake the Awakened.

  The golden shield faltered long enough for me to push through it, heedless of the threads that seared my skin and scorched my hair. Sunday had my back. We barreled into a circle of grief.

  Ben knelt on a patch of blood-soaked carpet, cradling Addie’s head against his thighs. Corey and Red had pulled every towel from the kitchen and bath to soak up the blood that seeped from the wound over Addie’s heart. They applied pressure, while Jess used what magic, skill, and training she had to knit her aunt back together.