by Jade Alters
What we can’t see is his shimmering blue form phase through the wall behind us. Hoster’s Astral body glides to the heavy door, on the outside. After confirming that the coast is clear, he manifests his spectral fist for a hard knock. He rattles the door six times before one of the frantically glancing workers hurries over to open it. He leans out to search both ends of the red hallway before giving up. He pulls the door back shut and returns to his station.
“Who was it?” one of the other workers asks.
“No one,” says the door-man.
“No one? The door just knocked itself?” the first worker challenges. While they squabble, the door creaks back open a crack. He holds the lock pin back with his Astral form. It’s just wide enough for us to pass through, one at a time.
“Holy hell man, you didn’t even pull the door shut!” the cajoling worker yells as Darius, last in line, puts his chest into the opening. Then I remember.
“Hoster!” I tell Darius, “Get his body!”
“Ah, jeez,” Darius hisses. He shoots back inside the waste nexus as the frustrated worker stomps over. Darius hurls Hoster through the opening and slides through himself. The worker slams the door on his foot. “Fuck!” Darius screams without restraint. The rest of us freeze. We’re an inch away from the confused worker who pulls back the door to see what it was caught on. Right, I remind myself, they can’t hear us.
“Stuck on something…I don’t see what though,” the worker grumbles. He slams the door again, which is now unobstructed by an invisible Vampire foot. That is cradled in the hands of Darius while he curses and nurses his wounds against the wall. The door clicks shut without a problem.
“Alright…” Hoster murmurs himself back to life in his physical body. “Let’s find Helena.”
“Let me find the dislocated bones in my feet first, you fucking noodle,” Darius barks. He fiddles with his foot for a moment before deciding, “Alright…it’s the whole thing. That’s actually better.” He snaps his foot sideways a little and lets it down gingerly on the floor. After a few test-steps, he sighs and grabs Rock’s shoulder. “Next time…you grab the overcooked pasta.” For the first time, Rock smiles at him. At Fey Deller’s instruction, we tap a node on the side of our organic filters to pop them free of our faces and pocket them for later.
She leads us down a long, twisting corridor of red. The walls are maroon, laced with a repeating golden diamond pattern. The soft carpet is a vivid crimson. The bright cones of light from the lamps overhead make it feel like the whole place is bleeding. It takes so long to reach the next room, I can hardly believe we’re inside all those rocks we just walked over. I can’t even hear the pounding of the waves. Rather, with how quiet our footsteps are on the carpet, the silence has a haunting sound all its own. The effect doubles when we cross our first door. With what’s happening on the other side, there should be something. A scream. A whimper. That it’s so incredibly silent just feels wrong. None of us cringes harder than Darius.
Through the viewing window in the heavy iron door is a man in a reclined restraint-chair. His mouth is fixed open with clamps. A worker in a long, stained apron works on his teeth, specifically the pronounced fangs that identify him as a Vampire. The worker leans in with a pair of calipers and a scalpel. Through the soundproof door, we hear nothing as the worker wittles around the root of the man’s fang. It plunks in a bowl, spurting liquid rubies on the rolling table next to him.
“Let’s get Helena…and get the fuck out,” Darius mutters. We shoot down the long hall, which I realize now is round. It leads us around the perimeter of the underground Facility.
Along the way, we pass one soundproof lab after another, always on the right. Always on the outer fringe of the Facility. I catch glimpses of things we never imagined. Things I can never forget. In one room, a Demon’s cracked skin is peeled back and pinned to expose the orange lava-like tissue beneath. In another, a worker prods instruments into a bowl of blood dripping from the IV line of a restrained girl hardly older than me. Find Helena, I keep reminding myself, find Helena. It’s all that keeps me either from shitting myself or banging on every door we pass.
Then comes the first door on the left. I hardly have time to glance through the window before the door swings open. I leap back to avoid being struck. The worker that shoots out has two wild eyes and a head of frayed hair.
“Security breach? Who the hell would sneak in here… Who even knows where we are?” the woman mumbles to herself as the iron door swings wide behind her. I share a glare of fright with Hoster, Rock and Darius. They know. Fey Deller, however, has her eyes fixed on something entirely different.
“Inside, now! While we can!” she chirps. Despite the ambient horror amongst us, we file inside the heavy door just before it seals back shut. Had I an adequate chance to gauge the situation inside, I might never have gone in.
We five stand alone on a massive catwalk that circles a huge cave in the rock. Unlike others, not much has been done to this chamber to disguise the fact that we’re inside a gigantic coastal boulder field, besides the occasional iron support post. The cavern below is peppered with a moving sea of bodies. Workers rush to and fro from consoles on one end of the room to rocky archways on the other. I never thought I’d see even one. This chamber is filled with them. Runic Gates.
Each Gate is made up of a narrow arc carved in the walls of the cavern. These archways are both etched with ancient spells and laced with coils of precious metals for conductivity. The click of a few buttons on the workers’ control panels shoots a concentrated current of both magic and electricity through them. The result, which I can’t believe I’m witnessing, opens a window to another Realm. Each Gate blinks on for maybe two seconds, just long enough for a worker to glimpse what world waits through their assigned archway. None of them seem to satisfy. Each one is closed down after those few, fleeting seconds.
All of these things frighten me, but none of them is the reason I might not have come in. That reason stands down in the middle of the fluid worker crowd. An island of unmoving bodies. VampKing Lucidous, Fey Rorelia, Horace and Deliah. The Kyrie.
“Don’t get too close yet,” I tell the group “Those two might sense my trick if we do.”
“Who are they?” asks Hoster. Rock holds his tongue, having been well-acquainted with them in the past.
“My parents,” I tell him. Then I turn to Fey Deller. “Why would Helena be in here?”
“The Kyrie has been trying to find the Realms of Power here for years. They calibrate the Runic Gates with magic, electricity and biological material,” she explains. “They’ll use Helena as a battery long before they risk losing her in an experiment.” Sure enough, a tall, tan figure in a long, dark coat pulls Helena from the shadows of the cave.
“Helena,” I murmur.
“And that’s Dorian,” Darius tells me. His finger points over the rail to Helena’s escort. Dark hair sweeps back behind his ears to show two flashing hazel eyes. Whatever they’ve done to Helena, it’s exhausted her. Dorian holds her up with an arm under hers. There’s something almost gentle about it, but I’m not about to award brownie points to any of the miscreants that have my friend.
“Explain to me how this works,” Dorian’s voice rumbles like a tremor even deeper in the earth.
“We attune the Runic Gate with magic from one receptacle, electricity from ano-”
“Not the Gates. I understand that,” Dorian cuts Deliah off, “Explain to me how using this girl’s magic is going to produce different results than your first five-thousand failed attempts.”
“There’s never been a Witch like her,” VampKing Lucidous tells him. “From what we could tell in the initial screening, she can cast spells of two natures at once by harnessing the two natures within her. Most Witches and Warlocks are limited in terms of spells by the nature of their bodies. But Helena somehow has access to both the masculine nature she was born with and the feminine nature she chose.”
“The amount of magical energy t
his generates is…unprecedented,” Horace adds. Dorian’s eyes fall heavy onto him.
“Alright…have you made any progress on my daughter?” he asks. Horace clears his throat and looks just slightly to the left of Dorian’s eyes. A rare tick, but one I wouldn’t miss even from far away. He’s about to lie.
“It’s been challenging to assess leads, lately. Our Academy connections have been…strained,” Horace tells him.
“Taking the girl was over the line. Emery’s against us, now.” Lucidous amends Horace’s bent-truth.
“A ridiculous assumption!” Deliah declares. “She was operating with the traitor - there may be some contingency we’re unaware of - she could still be playing double-agent! We won’t know for sure until we procure her.”
“Enough,” Dorian rumbles. I gasp as, for the first time in my life, I watch my parents concede to the order of another. Dorian proceeds through the rest of the Kyrie to a set of grated steel steps. He takes Helena up in both arms as easily as if she were a child. He climbs the first stair with a resounding clang. At the top of the stairs waits a seat that resembles an egg without a front. It’s full of wires and sensors. “We hardly have time to squabble. We have a security breach and the possible means to find our Realms at once. Now is the time to act.”
Dorian climbs the stairs to the egg. He turns Helena around to lay her gently in the seat inside. My fists turn white around the railing of the catwalks above. I want to jump. I want to snap Helena out of the Facility, if such a trick would even work here. But then we’d be trapped. More than anything, I want to scream for Dorian to stop. He sticks padded sensors to Helena’s forehead, collar and wrists.
“What’s the call, Em?” Hoster asks.
“If we catch them off-guard, we can buy her a little time,” Rock interjects.
“We’d never get out. Neither would Helena,” Darius counters.
“I…” before I can come to a decision, let alone spit one out, the whole cavern shudders. Our catwalk rocks with the tremor. Dust cascades down from the rocky ceiling. The Kyrie look up, Dorian included. He does, however, think to lower the iron shield of the egg’s front over her. Now I can hardly peer at her through the thick glass of its viewing window. Then another quake rocks the chamber. This time, I feel where the shockwave emanates from. The door behind us.
The five of us split down the middle just in time. The door flings right off its hinges. A plume of flame rolls in and disperses into the air. The stench of flame still cooks my nose hairs when four figures rush through the smog. I take in a breath of it when I gasp. We’re not the breach.
Sorceress Lily puffs the smog away with a gust of wind. It descends on the Kyrie, slicing at their skin with invisible blades of air. Horace snaps a shield around them to stop it. Dragonlord Thise leaps from the catwalk, wings flapping wide. She circles the cavern, torching the perimeter of the cavern with flame from her throat. Magister Reynold deploys an illusory shield around Chief Botan as he charges out on the powerful all-fours of a tiger. He leaps from the railing to snarl at the Kyrie, who draw in close together. Not even Lily and Reynold notices the five of us on the catwalk, a foot away from them on either side.
“I won’t cite everything you’re being charged with here!” Lily’s voice booms through the caverns. “Just get Helena out of that damned machine!” The Kyrie is silent, grimly so.
“Let’s go,” I whisper to our invisible party.
“Wha- now?” Darius whines. “There’s about to be an all-out race war down there!”
“Which is precisely why my parents won’t notice us,” I counter. “We have to get Helena out now. Whatever happens with this battle, we’re getting out. All six of us. Understand?” the last question is posed to everyone. One by one, Hoster, Rock, Fey Deller and even Darius gulps, then nods. “Go,” I issue and take the lead down the stairs. We fly down them as fast as we can, while Dragonlord Thise circles overhead. We trot past the massive, planted paws of Chief Botan before Dorian pipes up from the top of the stairs opposite us. The ones that lead to Helena.
“How appropriate! The Council kicks down the door talking about charges! Without the slightest idea of what we’re doing,” he huffs, almost a laugh. His first step down the stairs tenses up every member of the Council.
“We’ve known what you’re doing since you tried to abduct Cecelia Ford!” Dragonlord Thise bellows down, eyes on Horace and Deliah. “This time, we’re not waiting for a bunch of students to deal with your treachery before we do.” I lead our little line just past Lucidous and my parents, through the cloud of frozen, trembling workers. Deliah’s eye deviates towards us in the corner of her skull.
“Come to do it yourself, at last, Thise? If only you’d paid me the courtesy years ago,” Dorian snarls. His fists tighten up at his sides. Jet black scales slice through his skin. Just when I think the battle will start with them, Deliah turns fully toward me. She throws her hands up to shatter my trick.
“Nice try, Reyno- Emery?” Deliah coughs when the illusory shards fall away. That’s right, Deliah, me, I think. Your daughter. And not just me either, she sees as the trick falls away from all of us.
“Emery?” Magister Reynold marvels.
“Rock?” Chief Botan snarls with his tiger-mouth, when his son appears beside me. All of these, along with Hoster and Fey Deller, materialize on the lower floor of the cavern instantly. I turn back to face Sorceress Lily on the catwalk.
“Hold them off!” I scream. “We’ll get Helena!” I turn to signal Fey Deller and the boys, then fling a portal-trick straight at Deliah. A purer chaos has never been born so instantly. Lucidous zips away from Botan’s pounce. Dorian takes flight as a sleek, black-scaled serpent to crash into Thise. Lily shoots out a lightning strike to separate Horace from Deliah. Reynold vanishes under the guise of his own trick. Fey Deller and the others sprint straight for the stairs to Helena. The war between the Council and the Kyrie starts right here, in this underground cavern.
Deliah freezes my portal in the air with a last-minute flick of her hand. I scrounge together what little light there is in the room to conjure a glassy lance inside it. It thrusts from my portal to the air an inch to the right of Deliah’s darting cheek. She almost didn’t move. She almost didn’t believe I would do it. With a two-handed thrust, she shatters the lance and portal. Illusory shards lash across my skin just before Magister Reynold’s glassy whip lashes around her ankle. He tears her from her feet and I tear for the stairs to Helena. I make it about two steps before something catches my ankle. I look down to find a bloody mass of thorned vines from Fey Rorelia’s arm. I’m so pumped full of adrenaline that I don’t feel a thing.
I tug and struggle against her pull until the vines turn brown and brittle. Fey Deller stands in opposition of her Council representative, killing her vines with her focused will. I tear my leg free just in time for an arm to grasp mine. Darius lets me go after a furious blur of motion, at the foot of the steel stairs to Helena. Rock guards the other side of the stairs as a stag, launching workers with donkey-kicks to the chest before they can summon their own powers. Hoster waits at the top, both hands on the iron egg containing Helena.
“Can you project through that thing? Break the locks?” I shout up to him.
“It’s spelled! No Astrals allowed!” Hoster shouts back. I turn to the horse bucking Witches, Magicians and other Shifters in lab coats across the floor.
“Rock! Get up there and see if you can rip the door off that thing!” I shout to him. Without a word, the horse leaps, implodes in a mass of legs, then bursts out in a new, winged form. Rock’s hawk body flutters up beside Hoster, only to form into a massive simian frame. His gorilla feet dent the grating when he lands. He scoots Hoster to the side to grip both sides of Helena’s prison with his giant fingers.
“Darius,” I call, while a circle of workers congregate around us, “do us both a favor and power up.”
“Finally!” Darius chimes. He zips off in a blur. I barely catch glimpses of him between lashin
g out glassy whips and portals. Every time I do, his lips shine more brightly like rubies. He leaves a trail of collapsed workers and blood in his wake.
I spread my arms wide just in time to unfold an illusory wall against the flood of fire from a small battalion of Witches. The flame rolls up into the air instead. My wall cracks under their persistent heat, until Fey Deller pierces four of them through the leg with the thrust of a tree-branch pike grown from her arm. Each of them collapses. Darius finishes the rest with a lightning-fast sprint and the superhuman dig of his nails. The backs of their necks tear open to empty a red shower on the steel ground.
I hear a crack behind us as Dorian and Thise’s colliding flame blankets the ceiling with dense, black smoke. I glance over my shoulder to find Rock’s gigantic forearms peeling back a corner of the iron door. All Hoster needs is a few inches. His head thunks against the wall as his spirit leaps from his body. I’m forced to face forward again when I feel my illusory wall fold in on itself. It’s the elaborate transformation that alerts me to just who’s casting the trick. If it was anyone else, they would just have shattered it. But not Deliah. She wants to punish me. She folds my wall into a tiny, condensed spike of glassy magic with delicate maneuvers of her hands. She draws it back in the air, for the fatal thrust. The unfamiliar glaze over her eyes stuns me. She isn’t just upset. She’s sad. Devastated, even.
“I’ve never been more disappointed in my life,” Deliah mutters. She launches the spike straight for my guts. It sticks straight through Darius instead when he zips in front of me. He barks out a glop of blood on the right side of Deliah’s face.
“Neither have I,” I tell her. The grip of my hands in the air slides the spike from Darius and sends it sailing for her. But I share none of her flair for dramatics. Mine goes for her ever-composed face. It shows a sickening hint of true fear, right up until the moment the spike strikes. It hits Horace’s illusory shield an inch before her nose. It freezes in the air, neither trick quite powerful enough to dispel the other. I rush to Darius’ side to hold him up. “Are you alright?”
