by Lan Chan
I slumped to my knees, completely out of breath. I wanted to just sit here until Max calmed down a little. A second later, the fire went out.
Kai three. Supernaturals zero.
For a second, all was quiet.
And then Kai’s muffled groan filled the night air. I was on my feet and running in a second.
50
I reached him at the same time Chanelle did. Bradley was already there along with the remaining mage. Kai was on his knees inside an arcane circle fluctuating between silver and red. He clutched at his head.
I turned on the mage. “Why is he inside a circle?” My voice could have frozen a lake.
“It wasn’t me,” he said. A stone lodged deep in my throat.
Chanelle bared her teeth at me. She was bleeding from the back of her head. Her silk slip was charred above her thigh.
“Come closer,” I snapped. “Let me finish where Max left off.” I was weaponless and my insides felt hollow, but if she came at me right now, I would tear her head off with my bare hands.
“Kai,” Chanelle said in a quivering voice. She knelt down in front of him. Her hand came up to hover a centimetre from the perimeter of the circle. She was being so careful not to disturb it. I smashed my fist into it. The resultant roar of magic sent an electrical charge through me. I was thrown back three metres. My tailbone hit the ground first. The rest of me flailed. A shot of pain radiated up my spine. Chanelle screamed as the circle discharged and she caught the tail end of it.
My whole body felt too hot. It was like my insides had liquefied. An inward glance told me the seal was holding. It was just my pathetic human body that was hurt. I dragged myself back to the perimeter of the circle.
Kai’s fingers laced through his short hair. He grabbed it as though frustrated. He had bent over. I gaped as he smashed a fist down so hard it cracked the earth. The same frustration ate me up from the inside. Without my magic, I couldn’t break through the circle. I sat there completely useless as Kai thrashed.
Even though I knew I would be shocked for it, I slapped my bloody palm against the circle. “Hey, jackass!” I called out. “Snap out of it.”
To my utter astonishment, the circle didn’t zap me. In fact, my blood tingled for a second before it began to erode the foreign magic.
Kai’s head lifted as though he had heard the sound of my voice.
I gasped. Chanelle whined and took a step back. Somebody grabbed me. I struggled as the mage hooked his arm around my waist and dragged me away.
“Stop it!” he screamed in my ear. “He’s possessed. If you let him out, he’ll kill us all.”
I elbowed him in the face and resumed my position. The horror of it had my ears ringing. Beside me, Chanelle was having a hysterical breakdown. Bradley held her upright as she sobbed.
Kai wouldn’t take his eyes off me. Those eyes that were the most stunning green in the world had turned pitch black. “What the hell kind of sick game are you running?” I screamed into the atmosphere. “Let him go!”
Inside the circle, Kai smirked. Even now he was heart-stopping. That was exactly the thought that filtered through to me from the demon that had taken over his body. When it escaped, it would stop my heart by ripping it out and eating it.
Kai’s face contorted. He shuddered as thought fighting for control. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like. To have a demon possess him was anathema to everything he was. The horror of it had stripped Bradley of his usual meat-headed confidence. All of the colour had drained from his face. His stupid face that just stood there while Kai was slowly losing himself.
“Can’t you do something?” I snarled at the mage. “Exorcise the damn thing!”
He had all the tools with him. They sat in a sad pile inside a crucible next to his feet. A small mirror, a red candle, the salt shaker, a twig of sage, and a knife.
“He’s too powerful,” the mage informed me. “As soon as the circle collapses, he’ll be on us. He’s too fast as it is in his normal form. Possessed, we don’t stand a chance.”
I breathed in a slow, pained breath. “Is it the demon that’s strong?”
He shook his head. “It’s Pendragon. And it’s not likely the demon will let him go. “
I bit my lip. A very bad idea formed in my head. “What if we gave it an incentive?”
“What kind of incentive?”
“Oh, I dunno. Lucifer’s scion maybe?”
The mage frowned for a second like he couldn’t quite understand what I meant. When it dawned on him, his face went slack. “I don’t know about that –”
I was already pressing my bloodied left hand against the circle. Just like Basil said, blood magic still worked despite the seal. That was because blood was an intrinsic part of all living things. I could no more cut it off than I could stop my breath. My blood was full of all kinds of hellish magic. Without the strength of my other magic to boost its signal, it was weak at best. But it was enough.
I felt it chewing through the circle like salt on ice. Kai flipped to his feet, his gaze locked on me. A manicured hand bit into my arm. “You stupid little shit,” Chanelle shrieked in my ear. I punched her in the head.
It only dazed her for a second, but the feeling of my fist connecting would be imprinted in my mind forever. I took a shuddering breath at the same time the circle broke. A blast of demonic magic swept through the lawn. It brought with it the bite of frost and despair. I bit back a sob as Kai launched himself at me.
Rather than evade, I allowed him to grab me around the throat. In the nanosecond before his thumb crushed my windpipe, I swiped my blood across his nose and opened my mind.
The demon inside him gaped.
“Mistress,” Kai said. His voice was an insidious hiss.
Come and get me, I offered the demon.
In the exchange, I heard Kai’s roar. He clawed at me, trying to disrupt the transfer. Jackass, I sent him. I’m Lucifer’s, remember? You’ll never win this one.
He saw right through the bravado and into my soul where I had hidden the vulnerable part of me that was terrified of what was to come.
Blue, I heard him gasp a second before the demon cast him aside.
A black haze fluttered across my vision before pressure like I’d never experienced before shackled me in place. The laughter coming out of my throat was raspy. I scented sulphur in the air. The demon forced the back of my palm across my nose. It came away coated in blood.
Stupid girl, the demon said in my head. In the real world, I fell to my knees. Now you’re mine.
I was stupid. But every once in a while, stupid also got lucky.
The demon chased me through the crevices in my mind, attempting to find the source of the unparalleled power I had dangled in front of its face. The guttural cry it gave when it hit the seal and came up short made my ears pop. I registered the pain, but it was as though I was feeling it through a barrier.
The demon rammed the full force of its consciousness against the seal. I rocked forward. In the physical world, I had fallen on my ass. Now I slipped further, lying on the grass and convulsing. Somebody stuck a hand mirror in front of my face. It didn’t know exactly what the mage was doing but the demon had good instincts.
The demon took a swipe at the mage, but he grabbed my wrist and pressed it against the grass. He had been right. We would never have been able to restrain Kai like this. In contrast, I was as weak as day-old tea.
The laughter that came out this time was my own. Sure, I sounded deranged, but that was understandable given the situation.
Having clawed himself back from the brink of insanity, Kai was on his knees to my left. “Hurry up!” he snarled.
The mage’s hands shook as he fumbled to prepare the spell. For heaven’s sake, I thought, just say the Angelical word. The second I thought of it, the demon inside me vibrated with a sick kind of greed.
I whimpered as it rifled through my memories, plucking out the times I had spoken Angelical without dying. I blacked out for a second as it
tried to penetrate the very core of my thoughts where I kept all my worst secrets.
I spat blood as I tried to resist giving up my soul.
“Screw you,” I cackled.
Kai slammed his fist into the grass. “Do something!” he bellowed.
I wasn’t sure how the mage responded because I was hit with a convulsion like I was being electrocuted. My whole body spasmed. My vision went dark once more. When I came to, Andrei was suddenly there at my feet. He looked horrible. But in the reflection of his normal-coloured eyes, I saw that I wasn’t looking that crash hot either.
The demon didn’t care if I had a second head attached to my shoulders. It had just figured out that although it couldn’t break the seal by sheer force, it had managed to siphon some of the magic that was seeping through the outer edges. My magic was elusive. Since it was low magic, it wasn’t good at obeying the supernatural laws. While most of it was sealed away, the hedge magic was trying to reshape itself so that it could escape through the minute seams that held the seal in place.
The demon wedged a metaphorical foot under the corner of the seal. It felt like someone running a hot blade across my brain. I screamed. It echoed in my mind as well as shattered the night air. The nightmare came for me.
This time, I wasn’t me but a demonic winged creature with a forked tongue and a long tail with a spine at the tip. I wasn’t relegated to the trenches with the other demons but raised up on the dais with Lucifer. How pathetic that in its wildest imagination, the demon wasn’t able to picture itself in charge. It was an eternal servant.
Something cool swept across my brow. I was distantly aware of the low hum of a chant being spoken aloud.
But the demon inside of me was too enamoured with the nightmare. As I writhed under Kai’s crushing hold, the demon speared more and more of itself into crevices of the seal. It was like a thousand needles being forced under my fingernails. I cried out. If Kai and Andrei weren’t holding me down, I would have kicked and scratched at anything to stop the pain.
The sound that came out of my mouth was so coated in despair, I thought Kai was going to spew fire.
A tiny hairline crack appeared at the tip of the seal. My magic bottlenecked to get out. The demon gave a pleasured sigh. A golden-haired figure appeared behind Andrei. The demon’s lips peeled into a cracked smile at Michael’s presence. None of the others reacted as though they saw the seraph. I could no longer distinguish reality from nightmare.
In my thoughts, Michael appeared on the battlefield. Golden light of angelfire so bright it seared my skin ran up his blade. In a corresponding gesture, Morning Star appeared in the demon’s hand.
Smoke curled in the air around me. I became trapped between worlds. In the physical one, I was being restrained and the mage was chanting words of light to try and exorcise the demon. In the nightmare, I was about to challenge Michael to a duel. In both worlds, I felt myself slipping away.
Kai held me by the shoulders. That first time I had been possessed, I had the benefit of my magic to help me resist. This time, I just had myself. It didn’t seem like enough.
A sliver of hedge magic slipped out of the seal. The demon latched on to it. The vile thing bit the edge of it, ingesting it and growing stronger. It laughed with satisfaction. I laughed with it, unable to control my emotions.
All around me, lawn daisies burst into flower. “It’s broken her seal!” Chanelle said. “We’ve got to get rid of her before it possesses her fully.”
“Touch her and it’ll be the last thing you do,” Andrei said. Chanelle couldn’t have been more shocked if he had reached out and slapped her. I wished he would.
The bitter edge of my thoughts turned into a trail. It led the demon straight to the chamber where I hid the worst of myself. All of the negative emotions that made my magic go haywire. It did a little dance of glee. The thing pressed a chilled hand against my innermost thoughts. I reacted to the intrusion by latching onto the mage’s throat when he went to drip candle max onto my forehead.
The demon became wary. My thoughts helped the demon understand what the mage was trying to do. A crushing wave of sheer rage burned behind my retinas. I saw in the demon’s memories that it had been hunted by a being of the same kind as the mage. It had been harvested and stored inside an enclosure that was demeaning for one of its ilk. While the elite guard had constructed the stages of the game, it had laid in wait. The thing had been ecstatic when it was presented with Kai. I overshadowed the Nephilim by a hundred miles.
Never did it think it would cross paths with me. And it would not ever let me go. A tendril of hedge magic escaped the seal.
“Michael!” I pleaded in both worlds. “Stop it, please.”
I tried to latch on to my magic and force it back behind the seal. The demon battered me aside. In the physical world, Kai crushed my wrist, trying to get me to release the mage. His face was turning blue.
“You want air?” the demon cackled through my vocal cords. “I can stop you from needing it.”
Leaves that were scattered over the lawn fluttered against an errant wind that picked up speed in the blink of an eye. The demon sharpened my hedge magic into a pinpoint weapon that had the leaves whipping at such high velocity they turned into paper blades.
“No!” I screamed at the same time the demon unleashed the magic onto the mage. The leaves sliced through the mage’s neck in the blink of an eye. His head dropped onto my chest. His body collapsed beside me.
The demon roared with laughter in my voice. My mirth cut off abruptly as an arrow pierced my shoulder. A second one would have collapsed my face if Andrei hadn’t reared up and punched Chanelle in the head. She scuttled backward.
Free from his hold, I kicked out wildly. Bradley appeared in my vision. “Step back,” Kai said. Bradley kept coming. He was going to kill me and nothing was going to stop him.
The demon had something to say about that. So did Kai. Caught between restraining me and stopping Bradley, Kai had to make a hard choice. As soon as he lifted his hold, the demon had me standing upright.
It laughed once more. “As if I need your protection,” it made me say.
A circle of blue light constructed around me. Kai lunged at the circle but it was too late. I was encased. The demon turned my head to the side. It drew more and more of the hedge magic from the gap in the seal. Having forgotten the battleground nightmare, the demon became obsessed with the havoc it could wreak in the mortal world.
Six figures materialised around me. Angus, a mage of the First Order, a vampire, a shifter, a para-human, and a Nephilim. The elite guard.
The First Order mage raised a hand glowing with yellow fire. “Release her!”
I pressed my tongue out between my teeth and tasted the emotions roiling in the air. Hatred. Fury. Fear. Panic. Astonishment...love. It paused at the last like it wasn’t capable of processing it.
The mage shot a wave of yellow fire at me at the same time the Nephilim guard tried to slice through the circle with his blade. All of them came up short.
The seal groaned against the weight of my magic, trying to break out. If the demon got hold of any more magic, it would become unstoppable. Worse still, the thing that I had been trying to hide away from it was dangerously close to the surface of my thoughts.
I had Lucifer’s blood. My magic could release him. The demon had control of me. I was terrified that it would put two and two together. That in the blink of an eye, it could unleash Lucifer onto the world. I couldn’t let that happen.
While the demon was distracted with the growing leak of magic and the elite guard, I grabbed the arrow from my shoulder and yanked it out. Kai smashed his fist against the circle of magic, realising what I intended to do.
“No!” he screamed.
Andrei was only a second behind. He was too shocked to speak, but he too tried to break down the circle. I smiled at both of them. Then I shoved the arrow as hard as I could into my carotid artery.
You win, Gaia.
The de
mon bellowed its rage. It ripped my hand away, but it was too late. There was blood everywhere. I fell to my knees.
The last thing I heard was Lucifer’s voice directed at the demon. Take her from me and you will regret it for eternity.
The demon fled.
So did my soul.
51
Green light saturated my eyelids. It happened in tandem with the golden glow that repaired the cracks in the seal.
Voices trailed closely behind. “That’s grounds for disqualification,” Bradley snapped.
“Why didn’t you do that when she killed Carlos?” Chanelle said.
Angus’s voice rumbled but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It mingled with the sound of indiscriminate voices in the background. A warm hand caressed my throat. My head was rested on somebody’s lap. The pain from the arrow was gone. I felt the soft tension of a couch beneath my back. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Kai leaning over me. The glow from his magic made my eyes water. The stern expression on his face made my heart stutter.
“She’s awake,” Angus said.
The voices ceased. All of the elite guard were still present. They stood in an equidistant circle around where I lay. Preparation for the off chance that I might wake still possessed. Max sat with his eyes closed in the armchair close to my feet. There were scars and burn marks all over his body. Andrei leaned against the window frame. The pane to his left was held together by the thinnest strip of metal. All of the glass was shattered. His eyes fluttered like he was only just holding on to consciousness.
