by John Corwin
"Better stop with the fried foods," I said, trying to think of some way to delay this banishment. If we could only stop it for a day, it might give Elyssa time to realize something was wrong and find us.
Daelissa backed away a few paces. "I will enjoy this."
I had a distinct feeling I would not. "Can't we talk about it?" I tried to smile. "Daelissa, I know we haven't always gotten along, but deep down inside, I think you're probably a really cool person."
Her upper lip curled into a sneer. "Shut your mouth, pathetic worm."
"What the hell did I ever do to you?"
She bared her teeth. "You were born."
At that point, I decided there was no appealing to Daelissa's humanity—Seraphinity—or whatever it was called. I turned to David and whispered, "What are they planning to do?"
He shrugged. "Sounds like enslavement in an alternate realm if I had to guess."
The Exorcists in the circle began to chant, softly at first, voices rising into a sonorous song. Any other time I might have thought it sounded beautiful. Right then, it was just creepy. Spiders seemed to crawl up my spine as the magic inside the circle brushed against my skin. I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to channel the aether, but felt it slide through my grasp like oily water. Their ritual was somehow preventing me from casting spells.
Damn it, do something!
Manifesting into demon form would accomplish nothing. David walked to the edge of the ring. He pressed a hand against the air, and muttered something under his breath. A glow spread from his hand, highlighting the curving outline of the invisible barrier. The ground trembled.
Daelissa levitated into the air behind the Exorcists. She smiled and waggled a finger. "Even you cannot escape this, betrayer."
David's voice rose to a shout. The ground buckled. Stone cracked beneath my feet, and a fissure raced toward the silver circle. It hit the ring and stopped. The volume of his voice grew louder until it rose above the chanting Exorcists. I heard the groan of metal. Felt the air grow hot against my skin. Saw the floor cracking and crumbling beneath our feet.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Montjoy slash his hand as he shouted a word. The air within the gray arch cracked like glass stressed to the breaking point. A spider web of fissures laced the air. With a roar, the fabric of reality shattered. A gale of wind tore at me and dragged me toward a ragged hole within the arch. Beyond it laid a gray void. I suddenly knew without question where they intended to banish us.
The Gloom.
I cried out as the wind dragged me toward certain doom. Unleashing the demon within, I grew long black claws and stabbed them into the stone floor. They screeched across the hard surface as I vainly sought purchase. Muscles snaked around my arms. A tail ruined the seat of my jeans, jabbing a hole through them as it sprouted like a prehensile weed. David's legs flew out beneath him, and his body sailed toward the portal. I wrapped my tail around David's arm before he flew past. The extra weight dragged us toward the hole. Sparks flew from my claws as they raked the floor.
I looked back. "Don't give up!" I shouted above the roaring wind.
My father gave me a calm, almost accepting look and shook his head.
I felt my shoulder muscles bunch and strain as I tried to stab one of my clawed hands into the stone. Rock chips sprayed as I jabbed them over and over against the unyielding surface. My claws couldn't take the pounding and snapped. Red-hot pain lanced up my fingers. My other hand lost its grip, and the wind seized us, hurling us into the jagged gray maw.
The last thing I saw before the gray swallowed the portal was the smile on Daelissa's face. I slammed into something hard, and everything went black.
Chapter 6
I sit on a bench in a park on a lovely spring day. Children nearby laugh and play. Dogs bark and chase Frisbees. A young girl licks ice cream as her smiling parents walk close behind, hand-in-hand. Something seems to move in my grasp. I look down and see a book with a pale leather binding. A title in gold letters, THE FINAL CHOICE, is the only thing on the cover. I open the book. Inside, it says, "Dedicated to Justin Slade." Unable to resist, I turn the page only to see a blank white space.
The earth trembles. The laughter of the children turns to cries of fear. I look up and see brilliant balls of white light streaking across the sky like stars falling to earth. In the distance, the city skyline crumbles to ash. People scream and run in all directions. One of the balls of light lands, leaving a blackened crater. Giant white wings unfurl and I look into the face of—of myself. Brightling Justin stretches out his hand. All the people nearby turn to face him, fingers reaching as if to touch his while milky white light drains from their bodies. Their bodies writhe with dark veins.
I try to scream, but cannot open my mouth. As if of their own accord, my fingers turn the page. Again, there are no words, only a dim ultraviolet glow.
I hear laughter and look up. The park scene has reset. Everyone frolics as if the entire world hadn't just been destroyed. I hear the sound of waves breaking and look for the source. There are no oceans near Atlanta. A great black tidal wave rises on the horizon, stretching from side to side as far as I can see. It swallows the city within second. The ground rumbles. Trees, houses, and bodies litter the wave like flotsam. Flying before the water on wings of dark light, I see Darkling Justin. As before, I can't scream or run, only watch as the dark wave washes over the park. When it is gone, all that remains is an empty world and a dark sky. As if watching a time-lapse video, I see vegetation growing, and animals emerging. The world seems to be starting over anew.
With a trembling hand, I turn the page and find gray.
The people walk with stiff gaits from one point to another. They are like machines, driven to their tasks. There is no laughter, no joy, only endless repetition. Nothing changes on the outside, but I smell the stagnation, the rot. I see an unmoving statue of myself standing in the center of the park. When I look at it too long, the eyes blink. The happy family from earlier passes me. They are no longer smiling, but straight-faced and serious. They stop before my bench and turn to face me. Half of their faces are nothing but skulls covered in rotting flesh.
"This is perfection," they say in unison. "Perfection, perfection, perfection—"
I jerked awake with a loud scream. David lay face down next to me. He groaned and pushed himself into a sitting position. Gray fog hung heavy as pea soup around us. Whether it was real fog or something else entirely, I couldn't tell. The ground felt stony beneath me. The air was neither humid nor dry, hot nor cold, just a Goldilocks medium.
What kind of crazy dream was that? It had seemed so real. And yet, something like a sense of purpose filled me despite the ache in my head. I'm supposed to be here. Then again, I might have just hit my head really hard. I looked frantically around me. "Daelissa is going after Mom and Ivy. We've got to get out of here."
"This certainly puts a pinch in things," David said, standing and brushing off his jeans.
I pushed myself up and faced him. "Amazing assessment. Did you hear what I said about Mom and Ivy? Do you even care?"
He folded his arms. "Of course I care, but panicking won't solve anything."
I wanted to grab him by the front of the shirt and shake him, but he was right. Escape from the Gloom was our priority, and I had absolutely no clue how to do that. As deep breaths calmed me somewhat, a stinging pain in my fingertips drew my attention. Blood caked my fingers where my demon claws had torn off. It looked like I'd ripped open a pregnant yak with my bare hands. I winced, and realized with a shock I was back in human form already. I usually had to beat back my demon side until it retreated inside its kennel. The raw, jagged remains of my fingernails stung. I sucked on my index finger to soothe it.
"My hand isn't healing," I said.
"I noticed." David knelt and inspected the floor. "I've never actually been in the Gloom. Not much to see."
"There must be a way out," I said, resisting the urge to run aimlessly through the thick haze around us
. "Didn't Daelissa say someone would be here to enslave us? Do you see anyone?"
David held up a hand, and listened. "I don't hear a thing. Before we go running willy-nilly, I suggest we take stock of our surroundings."
Despite the moderate climate, the inability to see further than a few feet in any direction was absolutely suffocating. My feet scuffed against the hard floor. I knelt. The surface looked like stone. In fact, it looked a lot like the floor of the church. "Where did Montjoy get a gray and a sapphire arch?"
"Your guess is as good as mine. I don't remember seeing anything like them."
"Obviously the gray arch goes to the Gloom." I followed David as he moved through the fog. "He tried to exorcise you through the blue one. I assume it goes to the demon realm."
"Fair assumption." He put his hands out, as if feeling his way.
I kept following him through the thick fog. "Do demons need portals to possess people?"
He shook his head. "We have our own ways of crossing the veil between realms."
"Like demon-summoning runes?" My friends and I had been attacked by monstrous demons not so long ago thanks to a group of murderous battle mages called the Black Robe Brotherhood.
"Summoning runes simply bring a demon spirit into a temporary cage of flesh within the mortal realm. An actual demon portal means someone bound by flesh could step into our realm." He pursed his lips. "I'm curious what would happen."
"I'm not," I lied as the image of tossing a cat through the portal flashed through my mind. Stacey would kick my ass.
David knelt and tapped the ground with a knuckle. He looked around and grunted. "The Exorcists must have more than just the one demon portal. I can't imagine they ship all the possessed to Atlanta for purging." He motioned me to follow, and walked until he nearly stumbled over a wooden pew. "We're in the church."
My brow pinched with confusion as I ran my hand along the grained surface. "How is the church in the Gloom?"
"The Gloom is supposedly a shadow realm of the real world, or so I've heard."
"What's the difference between a shadow realm and the other realms?"
He shrugged. "Your mother might know." He shoved at a pew and failed to budge it. "This isn't good."
"What isn't?"
"Move the pew," he said.
I tried and barely managed to scoot the heavy oak bench. "I'm not supernaturally strong."
"Yeah, or the bench got a lot heavier."
Come to think of it, I felt punier than normal, and my hand still wasn't healing. Something was way off about this place. Before I could say anything, David started down the center aisle, feeling his way like a blind man while I followed close behind until we passed beyond the first row. He squatted and traced the ground with his fingers, making a thoughtful noise when they found the silver circle. We continued in a straight line until we reached the center of the circle.
Both arches were there, though they looked different. The demon arch glowed with a sullen red hue while the Gloom arch looked more or less as gray as ever.
I felt a flare of optimism. "Maybe I can use the arch to take us back through." I knelt, searching the floor until I found the silver ring around the Gloom arch.
"Don't you have to sing to it?" David said with an amused grin.
I shrugged. "No idea. I'm going to give this a shot first." Jamming a thumb to the circle, I willed it to close. At first, nothing happened. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the circle, commanding it to close over and over again until finally, I felt it snap shut.
"Doing okay?" David said. "You looked a little constipated for a second."
"I'm fine," I growled. "Let me concentrate." I willed the Gloom arch to open a portal back to the real world. Once again, it felt as if it resisted my will. As before, I kept pushing harder and harder until the center of the portal flickered.
A black barrier greeted us. David grabbed a chip of stone from the floor and tossed it at the darkness. It swallowed the stone without a sound.
"They must have blocked it with a spell," he said.
"Makes sense," I said. "Wouldn't be much of a banishment if the banishees could just hop back through." The foolish hope we might escape quickly died. My chest tightened as I thought of Daelissa hunting down my family.
"You're worrying about Ivy and your mother again," David said.
I felt my eyes flare. "Maybe you should try it sometime. It's called caring."
"Justin, Daelissa is only one Seraphim. Do you really think she'd try to take on your mother and Ivy?" His eyebrows rose in challenge.
"She might lure Ivy to her, brainwash her, and use her against Mom."
He crinkled his forehead. "No wonder you worry so much with an imagination like that."
My knuckles cracked as I fought back the panic and anger. "Just shut up and let me figure this out."
David sighed. "We could try the demon arch."
I looked at it for a long moment before finally deciding it might be worth a try even if the idea of entering the demon world scared the tinkle out of me. I closed the connection with the Gloom arch and worked on sealing the circle around the demon arch. As before, it took me several tries just to close the circle.
"Not working?" David said.
I grimaced. "Just barely. Something about this place makes it really hard to reach my magic." As if to confirm that theory, I spent the next several minutes fruitlessly trying to open the demon arch. Unlike the Gloom arch, I didn't sense any response from this one. I finally gave up. "This one must require an Exorcist singing ritual."
"I'm not much of a singer," David said, "so I can't help you there."
"Yeah, we're basically screwed," I said. I looked around despite my inability to see more than a foot in any direction. "We need to get out of here before Daelissa's people arrive."
"With fog this thick, it's no wonder they aren't here yet." My father blew out a sigh. "There's only one chance of getting out of here I can think of."
"And that would be?"
"The Obsidian Arch in the Grotto." He shrugged. "I don't know the odds of an accidental Gloom rift opening, but unless you have another suggestion, we should head there."
Nothing better sprang to mind. Cinder had once told me under usual circumstances, the odds of an accidental Gloom fracture around an Obsidian Arch were about fifteen percent. Standing here gave us a zero percent chance to escape. The math wasn't too hard to do, and I was willing to try anything to protect Mom and Ivy. Even without considering the odds, something felt right about going there. I couldn't explain the feeling, only that thinking about going to the Grotto gave me a sense of purpose. It was a rather enigmatic feeling. Then again, I was standing right next to an enigma I used to call Dad.
David headed across the room, quickly vanishing from sight.
I shook my head and followed, determined to learn more about him. "I didn't know you could do magic. How did you crack the ground open just before they banished us?"
"I've learned a few things over the years."
I pshawed. "Years? How about centuries? Or better yet, millennia?" Dad looked like a well-preserved man in his early forties. "You once told me you were really only about forty. You lied to me."
He nodded. "Yep. I lied about a lot of things."
What the hell? "You don't even sound ashamed about it."
"Why should I be? I did what I had to do." He reached the large wooden doors to the church and pushed them open to reveal more fog.
"You lied to your own son, you ass." I almost punched him again. Seeing as how the last time I'd done that hadn't achieved the desired effect, I held back. "Why don't you just come out and tell me the truth?"
"I'm an old dude," he said, navigating the stairs in front of the church.
I waited in silence as he bent down and examined the sidewalk, hoping he would elaborate. Impatience overwhelmed me. "Are you going to tell me?"
"I just told you the truth," he said, forehead wrinkling. "Wasn't that what you wanted?"
&nb
sp; "You didn't say how old you are."
"Really, really old."
I grabbed his arm and jerked him to his feet. "Keep it up and I'm going to beat the snot out of you, old man."
"I thought I raised you better."
Heat flared in my face. It took everything I had not to pounce on him and—what? Beat him into a bloody pulp? It wouldn't help a thing. My anger cooled. "You know what? You're not even worth my time." I stalked off in what I hoped was the general direction of the Grotto.
"Why couldn't they wait until night?" someone complained from somewhere in the fog.
I came to a stop and felt David bump into me. Putting a finger to my lips, I listened.
"You think they care if we can see or not?" another man replied to the first. "We're supposed to take them to the fortress."
"A little heads up would've been nice," growled the first man. "The worst part is I won't even get to see the look in their eyes when they realize they don't have their supernatural abilities." He chuckled. "I love that part."
"I think we should have a little fun," his partner said. "Let's kick some demon spawn ass." He spat. "I hate those inhuman things."
The voices were closing in on our position fast. I motioned David back the other way. He nodded and we carefully made our way down the street. I rammed my stomach into a parking meter and grunted.
"You hear that?" one of the men said.
They went silent. I listened hard, but without my supernatural hearing, nothing gave away the men's position. David waved me to follow. We followed the sidewalk, careful to avoid benches and other pitfalls that might trip us up.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are," one of the men called. He sounded farther away, but I couldn't be sure.
"Here, little chicky," his partner said in a mocking tone. "Come out and play, little demon spawn."
The men kept calling after us, but it was apparent they couldn't see through the fog any better than we could.
"Thank god they're idiots," David said as the men's voices faded into the distance.
"What do you think they meant by the fortress?" I asked. "Who the hell puts a fortress in the Gloom?"
