by Lan Chan
The last glyph was erased. An ominous crack reverberated through the school. It rolled like a wave of magic over the earth and snapped back to the being that had made it. The professor shuddered. A pleasured smile danced on his blackened lips. He erected a new barrier. This one blocked out everything outside of the junior school. Overhead, twin blazes of green and silver skidded towards us. They came to an abrupt halt and sparked like they were trying to meet the barrier head-on.
I felt everything through a sluggish haze. Inside me, the blue light in the Ley dimension pulsed again. It flared for a second and drew the professor’s attention. My palm tingled. Morning Star’s hilt was solid comfort as it appeared in my hands.
“Lex,” Sophie said. The professor took another step towards us. A shower of green sparks danced in the sky. The huge demon let out a soul-shuddering roar as the last of its legs were cut out from underneath it. The thing hung suspended for a second before it jerked and went crashing to the ground. It left the horizon mercifully free. Without that huge head blocking out the sky, I picked up the dim glow of fire in the distance.
I reached inside and scooped up every speck of magic I could find, drawing it into a circle around the school once more. Sophie added her magic on top of mine. The Fae in the room chanted, their power imbuing the circle with runes of their own.
A cackling laugh broke out of the professor’s throat. It sounded nothing like him. He raised his hand and tested the circle. Sophie and I both gasped at the scorch of demonic magic. I punched the wall and held my ground. The professor planted his feet.
The undead that had made it out of their graves without being cut down began to swarm the circle. They scraped at the sides making me want to scratch at my own skin. Their nails were sharp, but they weren’t even close to being as powerful as the professor. Sophie shuddered. She rolled her shoulders as though trying to throw off something unpleasant.
I gripped Morning Star’s hilt and took a step towards the door. Diana grabbed my shoulder. “Are you insane?” she yelled.
All I could see in my periphery was Bran’s colourless body. His expression was blank. His once-warm brown eyes saw nothing. I could feel my cheek twitching. “Yes,” I told Diana. “Now let me go so I can run my demon blade through that asshole’s neck.”
She shook me. I swayed with each thrust. “No way you’re going out there!”
I tried to push her off. “What’s the alternative?” I snapped. “Sit here and wait for him to break through the circle?” The scraping of it was already driving me insane. I wanted to peel off my own skin where the undead were slashing against it.
Irritation shot through me. I gathered up a blast of magic and threw out circles that spun and seared the undead into smaller pieces. My blue light flared in the Ley dimension. It gained ground and ate at the darker magic that was trying to invade. Like the rolling tide that was the undead, my hedge and bone magic obliterated everything it touched. There was a moment of blessed silence. No more gnashing of teeth and keening from throats that had long ago lost their ability to produce speech.
It didn’t last.
The ground broke once more. Undead popped up like weeds. Somebody spat out a string of curses. The sky above us boomed as Kai and Astrid hammered at the forcefield the professor had erected. It was a waiting game now. Which of the circles would break first? I had a feeling I knew.
“He needs to be exorcised,” one of the Fae said.
“He’s a bit past that, don’t you think?” Sasha bit out. His eyes had gone red. When he spoke, the tip of his fangs snagged at his bottom lip.
“What do you suggest then?” the Fae snapped back.
We all went quiet. I could hear a low rumble above the sounds of the fight outside. In the back room, Charles was finding it difficult to maintain his composure.
“We could break out and take him down,” one of the wolf shifters said.
“Hanging to die young, are you?” Roland asked.
“Better than cowering in here!” The wolf’s eyes had turned into shards of yellow diamonds.
“Shut up!” Diana roared. She turned to Sophie who was the best out of all of us at this sort of spellcasting. “Do you think there’s any chance it might work?”
Sophie bit the inside of her cheek. I reached out and held her hand, pulling her away from the window. “He’s so strong,” she said finally. She brushed the moisture from her cheek. “I don’t know if we have enough power –”
“Bullshit!” Kieran said. He pointed at me. “We’ve got Lucifer’s scion in here. If that’s not power, I don’t know what is!”
“You don’t want me anywhere near a word of light,” I said.
“Screw words of light! Just obliterate these bastards already.”
I gaped. He was asking me to speak Angelical. “What if I hurt other people?”
“We’re going to end up dead anyway if we don’t do something,” a kobold boy said. I could only tell he was male by the tunic he wore around his hips. What caught me was that there was no condemnation in his voice. He turned his head to the side. “Aren’t you sick of prostrating yourself in front of these pricks on the Council?”
Behind his back, the door to the dorms had opened. All along the cracks, dozens of eyes peered out at me. The walls vibrated again. Sophie and I both winced as Professor Mortimer took a dent out of our magic. I laced my arm around her when she almost toppled. If we were going to do this, we had to do it now while we were still strong enough to enchant. She gripped my hand tight.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
“I need chalk, salt, parchment, ink...” Sophie rattled off ingredients. Cassie and Luther raced off to find them. Sophie’s attention returned to the scene outside. She blew out a shaky breath. “I’m not exactly sure how we’re going to get an item of significance from the subject,” she said.
“Finally, some luck!” I said. I pulled out the patch of Professor Mortimer’s jacket.
“Where did you get that?”
I shook my head at her at the same time a boom shattered the atmosphere. Everyone raced to the window again to watch as the highest spire of Pantheon’s tower crumbled. Demons crawled up its face. One of the bigger ones must have run right into the foundations. It turned to dust and sent up a cloud of debris. The roofs of the other academies looked like they had come over with a case of the demon boils. Demons had monopolised the space. Where were their students hiding?
Cassie and Luther raced back into the room with ingredients hugged to their bodies. Clearly they had ransacked bedrooms. The salt came in a little satchel with initials embroidered on it. Whoever G.H. was, they might end up saving our asses.
Everything was dumped in a heap. While they were gone, the boys had cleared an open space of furniture. Now Sophie and I scrambled to set up a circle. She tossed the chalk stubs at me. Out of habit, I picked up the finger-length blue piece and began to draw. I hadn’t even connected the lines of the inner circle when something invisible slammed into me. I rocked sideways. My hand came down and smudged the chalk.
“Lex?” Sophie asked.
“It’s fine,” I gritted out. “He’s just trying to break down the circle.”
I let her think that was all that was happening. While they had been distracted, I’d subsumed her magic and that of the Fae into my own. It meant that every time Professor Mortimer struck, I bore the brunt of it. If he was just trying to tear down the circles, that wouldn’t have been a problem. But as I drew, my vision had started to slip in and out of the Ley dimension. The darkness was back with a vengeance. On the one hand, I was glad that I could see something besides blue. On the other hand, I kinda wasn’t that keen to die.
A single drop of blood spilled from my nose. I slapped my hand over it before anyone could see. Swiping my nose with my sleeve, I sucked in a breath and finished off the circle.
Now we were faced with the problem of getting Professor Mortimer inside the circle. The answer of course was bait.
“No way!”
Diana said.
“We don’t have any other choice!” I said. She snagged my arm as I stepped into the circle.
“That’s nuts! You saw what he did to Bran. The second he sees you, he’s going to kill you!”
“I’ll shield myself. I have a better chance at surviving something he throws at us than anyone else.”
There was a second of silence. They were all physically stronger, but my magic could withstand more than a physical blow.
“I’ll stay in the circle and you shield me,” Trey said.
“We don’t have time for this!” My point was punctured by a series of explosions. I was thrown aside by another assault from the undead. I didn’t even want to think about what could be happening to the guards outside.
Without giving them time to argue, I retracted the circle outside the school and drew a smaller one around the common room. The other students scrambled to remain within the circle’s protection. It was a gamble. I was betting on my friends’ survival instincts overriding their need to protect me.
It was a stupid assumption. I’d forgotten how we’d first met. Not one of them had run at the sight of the manticore. They refused to run now.
Trey and Sasha leaped in front of me as Professor Mortimer snatched the front doors with his mind and tore them open. He sent them flying across the lawn. They decapitated six undead before skidding to stop.
My heart jackhammered in my chest. The professor sauntered through the door. He tapped the severed head of an undead at his feet and lobbed it into the building. It rolled along the floor emitting a foul stink that stripped the lining from my nostrils. Like flies following the stench of rotten meat, the undead clambered into the Academy. Only one or two guards trailed behind them.
Roland and Diana met the undead head-on. Roland cleaved at the neck of an undead. Diana ducked beneath the vicious swing of another and buried her axe in its spine. She levered the axe away using the base of her boot and pirouetted to slice another undead directly in the face.
Sophie backed up against the far wall, her eyes fixed on the circle. A swirl of pink magic bloomed in her hands. She thrust once and the magic jumped from her fingers to hold a pair of undead in place. She was attempting to take over their minds. Seeing that there were two sitting ducks, Roland and Diana each took one out with gleeful screams of rage.
Still the undead continued to advance.
Trey growled low in his throat. He was caught in between his human and shifter halves. Still humanoid but hairy all over. His muscles flexed to reveal a broad, striped back.
Everything in this world was about context. When he was himself, the professor was everyone’s favourite great uncle. The mysterious relative who showed up with his bag of tricks and made you believe anything was possible. The man who strode through the foyer towards us was a harbinger of death. Magic crackled around him in a vile storm. It swept everything in its wake and destroyed it. The doorway crumbled around the professor where his magic touched it. The demon had struck supernatural gold. How it had managed to override the professor’s mind was beyond me.
“Get out of the way!” I screamed at the boys. Sasha stepped back. His torso pivoted. I read his intention to knock me out of the way. Charles was right. Without any kind of buffer, they were literally demon fodder.
I threw circles around them at the same time the demon that had a hold of Professor Mortimer’s mind lashed out with a whip of magic. Our minds collided. I screamed as the acidic bite of its thoughts crunched down on me. I sank low to the floor, my head spinning. A high-pitched squeal just outside the door had my throat locking. Half a dozen demons lumbered into the room. Trey clashed with a monstrosity with two heads but no eyes. It kept balance with a corded tail littered with metallic spines.
Sasha grabbed me just before a cambion demon took a swipe at me. He jumped wide to avoid the blow. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Professor Mortimer raise his hand. His magic materialised into a whip. Without thinking, I phased, taking Sasha with me. We crashed to the floor. I dropped Morning Star. The magic lashed at us. I hissed as a phantom heat sliced through me, but Sasha gasped as though he’d taken a full hit.
We rolled as we fell. I ended up at the bottom. His hands came down on either side of my head. Glowing-red eyes met mine. I heard the sound of blistering flesh. The scent of charred skin wafted through me. A long shadow fell over us. Professor Mortimer raised his hand once more. Sasha’s arms locked around me.
No!
The world flickered. Lucifer should never have trusted me with Angelical. Then again, that slippery bastard probably did it on purpose. I’d seen him do it in my nightmares so many times that the words formed on my tongue well before the thought even settled. My heartbeat slowed as my body turned into a wisp. Sasha buckled when I rolled straight out of his hold. His head snapped around, searching for me.
But I was already on my feet. I saw everything through a slow-motion filter. Three wendingos slid their way into the room. My consciousness settled over everything and nothing at the same time. I registered Roland throwing himself in front of his sister to take the blow of a demon right to the chest.
I looked on as Trey grabbed hold of one of the demons that was about to descend on Sophie. He buried his claws into its neck, sliced out and ripped its throat to shreds. Ironically, when I turned back to the professor, his left foot was inside the circle. A few more steps and we’d be able to try an exorcism. Too bad we were otherwise occupied.
The professor demon glanced down at the circle and grinned. It was the kind of smile you never forgot. His foot traced over the smallest circle, the one I had imbued with as much of my hedge magic as possible. The slide of his shoes smudged the chalk. Without Sophie to speak the enchantment, it was nothing but a desperate attempt at art.
The professor’s head turned up. He locked his focus on me. Those palms lifted to the sky once more. Pressure built behind my eyes. I felt the tentative touch of something in the outer rim of my consciousness, but it shrank back too quickly for me to hold on to.
The professor’s mouth opened. “Mistress!” The sound of his voice was like acid sliding over my eardrums. It was a sound that was never meant to be heard by human ears. This was a demon that shouldn’t have ever been made. Around me, my friends screamed. The high-pitched wails of the little voices inside the common room sank into my soul.
I snapped. Throwing caution out the wind, I blasted the professor with as much of my magic as I could. “Possideo!” Possess.
My voice came out cold. Laced with all the rage and anguish that swirled inside me. Everything inside the room stood stock still. Wave after wave of blue cascaded through the Academy. It surged against the barrier the professor demon had created and smashed right through it, bleeding out into the other academies. The magic rolled. It latched on to every demon and undead mind it came into contact with. I gathered them up like ants swarming a nest. Starlight pricked at every cell in my body. I felt weightless.
The professor demon made a choking sound. He clutched at his throat as my magic took hold of him. As soon as our minds touched, the world flipped. My vision became a blaze of vivid, cornflower blue. On instinct, I dived into the Ley dimension, thinking it might offer me some relief. And in that moment, I finally understood. I saw myself as the demons all saw me. An enormous beacon of demonic power amidst a midnight velvet sky. There was nothing wrong with my Ley sight. It was just that the brightness of my power was blocking out every other light in the sky. The way electricity had dampened the stars. Every time I used my powers, I was broadcasting to the demons that I was there, that my power was strong, and that they could harness it to trespass into this dimension. I was the reason there were portals opening up all over the Academies. My blood, Lucifer’s blood, had made it possible for them to come here. Like it or not, I had fulfilled a prophecy. I had led the armies of Hell to earth.
36
As my magic swept through the academies, the demons stopped their endless deluge of violence. They craned
their senses to find me, drawn to my power as a substitute for their true master. And they would keep coming until there was nothing else left alive in this dimension. The portal had to be closed.
Unfortunately, I was on the wrong side of it. That could be corrected easily enough. My magic wrapped around the demon in Professor Mortimer’s mind and yanked. It came away like a bandage. Sasha caught the professor as he deflated. But I was already running. Morning Star whipped into my grip. I had always been slower than the supernaturals before, but shock gave me a few seconds’ head start. And then I was surrounded by so many demons and demonic essences that there was no way they could get to me.
I sprinted as fast as my body could take me across the great lawn that intersected the Academies. Green and silver streaks shot towards me in the sky. They attempted to dive but there were winged demons flying in formation around me.
“Blue!” Kai screamed.
I blocked it out. Biting my tongue, I used the distraction to push more of my magic farther out. The portal rose up into the sky in front of me. Professor Flint still floated in the air. I drew a circle around him and wrenched the demon spirit from inside him. It was crude but I didn’t have time for delicacy. I couldn’t be sure where he dropped, but that was a secondary consideration. The horde was hundreds deep at this point. I was the Pied Piper leading my demon rats back to the depths of Hell where they had come from.
Closing in on the portal, I felt the reason why it wouldn’t close despite the dozen mages who were chanting in the protective circles around it. On the other side, dark mages had propped the portal open using necromantic magic. The undead used their bodies to hold the portal gaping wide while demons shot through it. If I destroyed it from this side, I would leave these demons to ransack the Academies. There was only one choice. The only problem was, there was no way to get back.
The wave of demons stampeded over Nightblood Academy. Some of the flying demons collided with its stone walls rather than bother to change course. They were like battering rams, oblivious to their own injuries, desperate to keep up with me. A scream burrowed its way into my consciousness. It was a grating voice that had my hackles rising. I turned a corner. Chanelle scrambled on her butt on the ground against the advance of an incubus. Her wings were soot-stained, the white feathers at the tips broken and hanging limp.
