by Lan Chan
I lifted my finger and waited for the lick of pain. The nymphs had always tried to make my life difficult. I expected her to cut a gaping wound in my hand. Instead, she pierced my skin as though using the dagger as a needle. It was only deep enough to draw a small drop of blood. She nicked her own hand and pressed it to mine.
I knelt down in the grass and used the small amount of blood to draw a circle. Then I placed my palm over it and scrubbed the circle away. With each brush of my palm I felt the blood barrier disintegrating.
The loud pop in my ear when it finally eroded was followed by the roaring of what sounded like an ocean. I braced my arms over my head as the pressure between my eyes built to an almost unbearable level. I was dragged into the Ley dimension.
The blue was absolute. There was no more distinction between me and anything around me. I felt a sob snag in my throat.
A tingle of magic rolled over my skin. I couldn’t see the spark of Professor Mortimer’s light in the Ley dimension. All I saw was blue. I was starting to hate that colour. An unfamiliar lick of magic stroked over me. I imagined that was Professor Flint’s magic.
I forced myself back to reality. Jacqueline was leaning over me.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I rubbed at my eyes. The morning sunshine was suddenly too bright. “I guess so.”
She glanced around the Grove. “I suppose we should have done something about this after you felt the need to create the blood barrier in the first place.”
“That might have been helpful.”
Jacqueline sighed. The Nightblood headmaster had moved off to speak to the two professors. Not that either of them was in any state to make conversation at the moment. “Once the games are over, we can go back to normal,” she said.
I bit my lip.
“What are we doing to prepare for the growing forces of the Hell dimension?” I blurted. It was unfair of me to lay this at her feet. But in the absence of anyone on the Council, I had to direct it at somebody.
“All of the factions have been gearing up for war since that day you claimed to have seen Lucifer in the Fae forest,” Jacqueline surprised me by saying. “There have been reports of areas where there is an unusual amount of demonic energy without the usual blowout of violence. Almost like the demons are gathering themselves into a force and not giving into their baser instincts to kill.” She raked her fingers through her hair. “Thankfully, we still have some time before that might happen.”
She tipped my chin up. “About last night –”
“I don’t even want to go there,” I said. “I know I shouldn’t have lost my temper but there is only so much I can take.”
“I wasn’t going to punish you, Lex.”
“Damn straight. They were lucky I only went for the statue.”
She let out a small laugh. “Yes, they are very lucky.” She brushed her hand over the grass. “Declan and Sam have asked to attend the Unity Games.”
I balked. “That’s just what I need. More people to come and see me fail.”
“Based on what we saw last night, I think they’re hoping to see a human victory.”
“Well, they should probably come to one of my training sessions to divest themselves of that notion. I suppose there’s no way the Nephilim Council are going to pick me now.”
Jacqueline shrugged. “You wouldn’t want them to.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve seen what goes on in Pantheon. Imagine that on a grander scale. The way they let their students run rampant is completely against the edict the seraphim have given us.”
“And yet none of the seraphim have seen fit to step in.” I knew how she would respond.
“Free will,” we both said at the same time. I made a face.
“Alright,” Professor Mortimer said. He and Professor Flint came back from the site of the barrier. “That should keep the structure intact for the remainder of the semester.” He mopped at his brow. Professor Flint was also looking decidedly green.
“Are you gentlemen feeling alright?” Headmaster Stan asked.
“Just a little drained,” Professor Flint said. “The barrier was stronger than either of us imagined. What have these nymphs been doing?”
The nymphs were fortuitously absent at the moment. I left shortly after to meet the rest of my friends for breakfast. Astrid was regaling last night’s events with a big grin. “I’ll remember the moment Douglas Laurent’s head popped off for the rest of my life,” she said.
“Way to be morbid,” Diana told her.
Astrid shrugged. “His death was a tragedy. But that thing last night was an atrocity.”
Speaking of atrocities, Andrei sat alone at a table close to us. Every now and again his head lifted to peer at Astrid.
She chose to ignore him. I did not. “Excuse me.”
I stood up and slid my tray out. I let it drop loudly on the table opposite Andrei. He didn’t startle. Darn.
“Aren’t you concerned that Captain Nephilim is going to have a problem with you speaking to me?” he asked.
“I’d say that’s more of a problem for you than it is for me.”
His smile was way creepy. The hollows in his cheeks and the bruised patches under his eyes kind of scrunched. He appeared very much like a sack of skin held up by a skeleton.
“So,” I said. “Why the sudden urge to occupy this space?”
“Why not?”
I picked up my fork. “Do you think stalking Astrid is the way to get her attention?”
I caught a glimpse of something behind his eyes. They were unfocused but there was still life in them. Unlike some of the eyes of the demons I’d come across in my time.
“You are a very unpleasant little girl,” he said.
I grinned. “And yet I’m sitting over there with Astrid and you’re not. Guess that makes you worse than unpleasant.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
I agreed with him. That was why I decided to take the time out during my free period to figure it out. Over the past year, as I tried to find out more about Lucifer, I realised that Sophie’s Book of Beasts was super sanitised.
The one in the Bloodline library was also censored. Sadly, it was the best version that I had. My only other alternative would be to sneak back into Nightblood.
Colour me surprised when I went to the information desk and Jem informed me there was no need to be all cloak and dagger about it. “The Popescu massacre is well documented.” He scratched a long claw over the bald skin on his head. “You’ll find it in the condemned supernaturals section.”
I sat there all afternoon reading about Andrei’s family. He had two little brothers. Their cherubic faces smiled at me on one page. On the next their gruesome decapitated heads peered out at me. Everything Sasha had told me was in here. The thing that confused me was that nobody could really say why they had given into the bloodlust. The investigation hadn’t been very thorough. I began to understand Andrei’s bitterness. Vampires and bloodlust were a done deal. He obviously refused to believe it.
I realised then why Andrei hated Kai so much. When Kai’s family died, the supernatural community rallied around him. When Andrei’s family died, they were condemned. It wasn’t rational, but I understood. That was the part that scared me the most. Somehow, I had started to feel sympathy for a psychopath. What did that make me?
33
I fell asleep that night with thoughts of headless babies running through my brain. My eyes peeled open to a landscape of pristine blue.
Just to be sure, I slipped in and out of the dimension. Yep. There were no two bones about it. I was magically blind. Stifling the sob that tried to escape, I swung my legs over the side of the bed. My limbs were ice cold. It took a few seconds of rapid flexing for my hands to loosen enough so I could take off my pyjamas. My heart was racing. Taking a few deep breaths, I made myself stuff the panic into a box and lock it away. The boxes were stacking up. Sooner or later they’d topple. Fatigue rolled ov
er me. I pushed back against it. Giving up was not an option. There had to be something I could do. The Ley dimension was too big a deal to just give up on.
The crescent moon hung low outside the window. I slipped silently into my sweats. Taking care not to disturb the wards and circles protecting the room, I stole out into the night.
The first thing to hit me as my feet touched down on the ornamental lawn was a tingle of magic. It fluttered all the way up my spine. I twisted back around and inspected the front face of the Academy. The breath caught in my throat.
All along the brickwork, magic symbols glowed. There was no one denomination. Celtic runes, Talmudic passages, Taoist symbols, and on and on until my vision was swimming in front of me. Everywhere my gaze settled there was another passage of words to astonish. They covered every inch, towering up into the strata above. What the ever-loving hell was this?
Theoretically, I knew the entire school was protected by powerful wards and runes. When my magical sight had still been working, I saw them as two concentric circles that vibrated in tandem. They both protected and contained. A nothing-in, nothing-out mentality. This was on another level.
I hadn’t known I was biting my lip until my teeth broke skin. The lick of blood had me suddenly apprehensive. I never had cause to come into contact with the wards until now. It was even odder that they were visible without the Ley sight.
Without knowing why, I picked up speed. Professor Mortimer lived in a cottage on the outskirts of the official Academy grounds. When I first started, I assumed he just lived in his office because I’d found him asleep at his desk one time too many. The cottage was a step down if you asked me. It was a nondescript single-story building nestled in a small clearing that was surrounded by ash and rowan trees.
There was a light on inside. The way it flickered told me it was candlelight. Something brushed up against the side of my leg. I yelped and jumped a couple of steps. When I glanced down, a pair of hazel night-glow eyes winked at me. The grimalkin made a spitting sound. It was Bebe’s way of laughing. Professor Mortimer had named him Beelzebub but that was too much of a mouthful. Many lifetimes ago, Bebe had been a tomcat. Then he’d made the mistake of ingesting the spirit of some unknown low-level spirit. His whiskers were drawn over a maw that was limp with age. Unlike other cats, his claws weren’t retractable. They didn’t file down with use either. When startled, I’d seen his fur shift into parched skin. The exact opposite of a shifter transformation.
Professor Mortimer had found him skulking in the dungeons of a Siberian castle. He’d had him ever since. Bebe didn’t deign to be kept. His cauliflower ears and patched fur denoted wildness.
“What are you up to?” I asked him. I swear he shrugged his shoulders. Who’s crazier, the person talking to a grim or the grim who pretends to respond?
When I tried to step past him, Bebe bared his teeth. It was a gruesome retraction of lips that had suddenly lost its fur. It never occurred to me that a cat could have a bitch-face. Thinking he was just being pissy because of the late hour, I ploughed forward. Bebe’s back arched. All of his hair disappeared. A thin rib cage attached to a bony spine made its appearance.
“Very scary,” I told him. No matter how I tried to get past, he kept blocking me. “For goodness sake! This isn’t funny.”
The pale green night-glow blink of his eyes said this wasn’t a game. I was just too thick-headed to understand what was happening until the reinforced door of the cottage exploded from its hinges. Bebe and I both hit the ground. He was on his feet within seconds.
Halfway across the clearing, Bebe turned back and hissed at me. I got where he was going with this, but I couldn’t get my feet to move. I drew a circle around us both, but Bebe wasn’t content to stay put. The circle wouldn’t contain him. It wasn’t meant to. But once he was outside it, he was on his own. The grim screeched at me one last time before he disappeared. He’d tried to help, it was my own fault if I was too stupid to understand. That was a fair assessment.
My attention became locked on the figure lurking in the professor’s doorway. The candlelight didn’t extend far enough to beat back the gloom. It cast long shadows over the humanoid form. The thing stumbled around, fighting with itself.
“Professor?” I called. Real stealthy.
A tearing sound had my head tipping up. Something thumped against the wall. I stayed rooted to the spot. My teeth ground together. The figure stumbled out.
My heart leaped into my throat. “Professor?” The thing wore Professor Mortimer’s clothes. They were stretched to ripping point across a back that undulated like there was a snake slithering beneath his cardigan. Muscles bulged and boiled. I would have thought it was a shifter transformation except for the gargled screams he was attempting to contain.
The professor clutched at his head. He lifted it to worship the moon. With that movement, I saw the glowing red that had invaded his eyes. I watched, dumbfounded, as the skin on his face stretched thin. He took gasping breaths.
Purple magic blazed along his palms. It shone bright as a light in the gloom for a second before sputtering out into a fizzled black. His left hand curled into a fist. He pressed it to his mouth for a second before smashing it repeatedly into his chest. I took a step back as he dropped to his knees. Scrambling on all fours, the professor came closer to me. But he wasn’t trying to get to me. He was stumbling around in a circle. He repeated the ritual of setting his hands alight with magic, only for it to be dulled a second later.
When he could keep the magic contained for a while, he reached out as though attempting to draw something in the grass. He choked out a word. It was bitten back by snapping teeth.
I tried to cover my own scream. This couldn’t be happening. Professor Mortimer was one of the strongest mages in the world. The First Order had tried to recruit him more than once. If he had wanted it, the Council seat would have been his. Instead, he’d decided that his calling would be to teach the next generation.
On his knees now, he reached out a hand in my direction. I took an involuntary step forward before logic kicked in. The professor’s hands flew to his throat. His voice was a gurgling rasp. “Aless...run!”
He collapsed to the ground.
I heard a roar like the sound of a compressed storm. The first spark of light appeared in the dim just behind where the professor lay convulsing. No! This couldn’t be happening on Academy grounds.
I bolted to him. Touching a possessed body was all kinds of stupid. Instinct was fuelling me right now. When a portal was about to open, my first instinct was to get the hell away from it. As soon as my hand touched down on the professor’s arm, he latched on to me. Something writhed along his forehead. Two points on either side of his skull protruded out like horns under the skin. His eyes were coated in a film of yellow.
I slammed my hand against his forehead and tried to remember the words of light. When I spoke them, a spark of what felt like cool electricity spiralled through me. They speared the creature that had a hold of the professor. This kind of thing had never worked for me before. The creature cackled from Professor Mortimer’s throat. Well, would you look at that, it didn’t work for me now.
I thought about knocking him unconscious, but that would do nothing besides give the demon free rein. If the professor couldn’t fight, he would lose himself. Purple flared against my hands. His grip loosened. For a second, I thought about unleashing another Angelical word. It was borne of desperation. I would likely end up killing the professor if I tried.
Cursing at the lack of options, I settled for dragging his body across the lawn away from the portal. It was a quarter of the way to becoming a fully fledged hell-mouth. I stumbled with his dead weight. I wasn’t exactly Hercules. The elbow patch on his left arm tore where I was using it for grip. I shoved it into the pocket of my jacket.
With a heave, I pushed him against the side of the cottage. His arm swung as though he was going to slug me. It stopped mid-air. He released his fist, the human inside still struggli
ng to contain the violence. If I left him here, who knew what might happen to him. I drew a containment circle around him.
When the circle was complete, it shone in a deep blue-green. Where the circle touched the grass, it began to grow tall. Seeds sprouted into weeds that formed a dense clump of plants. If a demon came this way, hopefully all it saw was an overgrown patch of earth that hadn’t been mown in some time.
Then I did what he told me to do: I ran.
Beating a path to the closest guard tower, I pushed the door aside. The tower was empty but that didn’t matter. On an ivory pedestal in the centre of the room sat an everlasting flame in a golden cauldron. Every tower had one. I passed my hand over it. When the flame licked my palm, the heat of it drew my hedge magic.
“Alessia Hastings,” a disembodied voice identified.
“Raise the alarm,” I screamed at the flame. “The Academy is under attack!”
Immediately a clarion call roared out into the silent night. It wailed like a banshee, making my molars ache. Within seconds, Marshall and Curtis appeared.
“Alessia?” Marshall asked.
“Professor Mortimer!” I pointed to the professor’s cottage
In the blink of an eye, they were both gone. I gave myself a minute to catch my breath before I sprinted back to the dorms. Overhead, streaks of multi-coloured lights flew by in the direction of Professor Mortimer’s cottage. I frowned. Not enough streaks of light. Not even close to the amount of guards we had at Bloodline, let alone the ones from the other Academies.
At the beginning of each term, the Academy went through disaster drills with us. It was one thing to be put through the paces without the threat of danger looming over you. It was another to know that at any second a demon could come barrelling at you. I knew what I was supposed to do. I just couldn’t comprehend it. My movements were sluggish.
