by Ella Summers
“You are very strange,” Grace told them with wide eyes.
She didn’t mean it as an insult. She was simply perplexed by the beings before her, by notions she found as strange as their magic. And she’d expressed that with a childlike innocence that I hadn’t expected from her.
Crystal laughed. “Yes, I can see how you’d think so. We must seem very strange to three demon girls who have grown up believing in their own divinity and in their right to be worshipped.”
Crystal didn’t seem offended. She must have realized Grace wasn’t being critical; she was just perplexed.
“We can show you another way,” Silver offered. “Peace and harmony are possible. We too are of light and dark magic, but we have learned to coexist without conflict—by giving up vanity and the thirst for power. Demons and gods can learn to get along too.”
“Why would we ever want to get along with the gods? Their magic is vile,” Sonja said stiffly. “Why would I give up my divine right to rule just to make friends with them?”
“Why would you do that?” Crystal shook her head sadly. “We once lost people who thought as you did, who allowed their pursuit of power to consume them, and in so doing, they destroyed the Immortals.”
“The Guardians,” Ava guessed.
“Yes,” Crystal confirmed. “Remember the sins of the Guardians. Because of their vanity—because of their thirst for power—the great Immortals are forever gone.”
“But the Guardians’ tragic tale didn’t end there,” Silver said. “Because they didn’t stop with the Immortals. The Guardians’ bitterness lived on. Not even that terrible act of revenge could put out the flame of their anger. Even now, they are searching for a way to destroy the gods and demons, you favored children of the Immortals. Children who were given much better magic—or so the Guardians believe.”
Grace looked at Ava. “The Guardians are coming for us.”
“Their magic might just be the most powerful of all, a magic to end all magic.” Ava’s voice shook. “They have the power to render magic useless—whether spell, potion, or artifact.”
Sonja’s laughter sliced through their distress. “Oh, please,” she said, derisive. “I know a ghost story when I hear one. They are trying to scare you. And like naive little girls, you’ve let them.” Sonja pointed her flaming sword at Crystal and Silver. “But I will not let them do the same to me. I will take their power, and with it, I will defeat the Guardians.”
“Oh, dear,” Crystal said sadly. She waved her hand, and the flames went out on Sonja’s sword.
“Violence isn’t welcome here.” Silver clapped her hands once, and Sonja vanished.
“What have you done with our sister?” Ava demanded.
“I sent her back home,” replied Silver.
“She was acting very rude.” Crystal shook her head in quiet disapproval. “Galactic domination is simply not welcome here.”
“Was she right?” Grace asked them. “Are the Guardians just a ghost story you told to scare us? Or are they truly coming for us?”
“The Guardians’ hearts are full of envy, hatred, and vengeance,” Silver said. “They might not act today or even this century, but eventually they will strike out against the demons and the gods.”
“Can’t you help us stop them?” Grace asked.
Crystal blinked. “Why?”
“Because the Guardians have your kind of magic. Passive magic. They are the responsibility of the spirits and eidolons. Your responsibility,” Grace told them.
“We don’t operate under the same magical hierarchy as you do,” Silver said.
“And we don’t take sides,” Crystal added.
“But you have to,” Grace told them. “You just have to.”
Ava set her hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Forget it, Grace. They’re pacifists.”
But Grace wasn’t giving up so easily. “Can you at least tell us where to find the Guardians?” she asked the two passive magic deities.
“Why? So you can launch a preemptive strike?” Silver replied. “No, we can’t tell you how to find them. That would be interfering. In fact, we’ve told you too much already.”
“We should warn them about the savior,” Crystal said to her.
“No.” Silver’s voice was sharp.
“Who is this savior?” Ava asked sweetly.
Crystal smiled. “She is the one who will—”
“Enough,” Silver cut her off.
Crystal shook her head. “Sorry. I don’t know what got into me. The words just flowed off my tongue.”
“She got into you.” Silver’s eyes locked on to Ava. “Siren magic.”
Crystal rose from her seat. “We don’t take kindly to being manipulated, little demons.”
She clapped her hands. The cabin, the spirit, and the eidolon blurred out like paint dissolving into water. Then Grace and Ava were back home, inside their castle.
Ava looked at Grace. “To me, their non-interference line just sounds like an excuse to hide away and take no responsibility for anything.”
“Yeah,” Grace agreed. “But the threat of the Guardians is no line.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s true. I could feel it,” Ava said. “Well, if they won’t help us, we must come up with a plan to defeat the Guardians ourselves.”
“All right, but just the two of us, Ava. We can’t involve Sonja. Too often, she only does what’s best for her and for her alone.”
I saw a conference table. On one side of the table sat Faris and Zarion. I sat on the other side, right beside Grace. I knew it was Grace, not Ava, but I couldn’t say how I knew. Grace appeared to be fully-grown now, so this memory must have occurred many years after the last one.
Zarion folded his hands together on the table, his many garish rings clinking together. “Ava, I do hope you’re not just wasting our time.”
Ava. So I must have been inside Ava’s body this time.
I wonder if the body you’re in is determined by the person who most drove the memory, who had the most influence on the situation, Nero commented.
That made sense.
“Not at all, Zarion,” Ava replied to the god. “But perhaps we should take a short recess from these negotiations, just to give your mind a chance to catch up with everything we’ve discussed.”
Fury flashed in Zarion’s eyes. He rose quickly from his chair, but Faris caught his arm.
“Sit down,” Faris said coldly. His gaze shifted to the demon sisters. “We shall take a one-hour recess.”
“Agreed.” Grace looked at Zarion. “And when we return, we expect more civilized conversation.”
Ava and Grace rose fluidly from their seats and exited the room. They said nothing until they’d reached what looked like a very opulent hotel suite. A gentle sea shone bright and blue beyond the numerous windows, each one framed by a set of red velvet curtains. The walls were gold and the floors marble. The ceiling was painted with cloudy blue skies and lots of angels.
Now alone, Ava turned to Grace. “He has a thing for you.”
“Zarion?” Grace’s face crinkled up in disgust. “He’s so…godly.” She said the word like it was the worst thing imaginable.
“Not Zarion. Faris,” Ava told her. “Didn’t you see the way he was looking at you? He’s enticed by you. It must have something to do with your magic. I’m clearly the pretty one.”
Grace snorted. “You think we can use this to our advantage.”
“I do.”
“How?” Grace asked her.
“That spirit and that eidolon warned us about the Guardians’ plans. Centuries later, the Guardians have finally made their first move. Nearly as soon as our war with the gods reached Earth, they arrived there too. We hadn’t seen or heard from the Guardians in ages, and then they were suddenly there. They made themselves a hiding place on Earth, out of our reach in their so-called Sanctuary.”
“The Sanctuary is slightly offset from our realm,” Grace said. “It occupies the same space as the plains of mons
ters.”
Ava frowned. “What I want to know is how the plains of monsters came to be.”
“They were born from the clash of our dark magic with the gods’ light magic,” Grace said.
“Grace, demons and gods have fought many times on many worlds, and this has never happened before. Only on Earth have we lost control over our beasts. Only on Earth has the magic gone so wild that these so-called plains of monsters formed.”
“There’s something special about Earth,” Grace suggested. “It’s a place of change. Of opportunity. All kinds of magic are all mixed up there. The Immortals did something to the place.”
“But what?”
“I started researching that after the plains of monsters formed on Earth,” Grace said. “I found some tales in our older books. These tales describe the world where the Immortals conducted their first experiments on magic, on splitting magic into separate types in order to understand how the different parts work. I believe this world was Earth. Do you know what this means, Ava? It means Earth is far more precious than we’d thought. It’s one of a kind, a place where magic—and the people who wield it—can be anything. A place where any magic or combination of magic can exist. Magic can be chaos and order, light and dark, active and passive. All depending on how it’s shaped.”
“You’re right, Grace. This conference is an opportunity. Being here is an opportunity. An opportunity to destroy the Guardians. And the gods too.”
“The council sent us here to negotiate with the gods,” Grace reminded her sister. “They’re concerned about what happened on Earth. They fear other worlds could suffer the same fate—and broken worlds don’t make for very nice places to rule.”
“But you just said this can’t happen to any other world. Because the Earth is special,” Ava pointed out.
“I didn’t actually say this couldn’t happen to any other world. I just explained why I believe it happened on Earth. I doubt plains of monsters will spontaneously pop up on other worlds. But I can’t prove it yet. And that doesn’t negate the council’s wishes for us to negotiate with the gods.”
“Multitasking, my dear sister,” Ava said with a sly smile. “We can do both. Besides, both we and the gods know exactly how these negotiations will end. They’ll end the same way they have every other time we’ve tried to negotiate with the gods. No agreement will be reached, and we’ll just continue fighting.”
“That does seem likely,” Grace agreed.
“But just because the demons and gods as a whole can’t come to an agreement,” Ava said. “That doesn’t mean a demon and a god can’t come to a private agreement. That’s where Faris comes in.”
“Faris won’t betray the other gods for us,” Grace told her.
“No, he won’t. Faris will always act in a way that furthers his own interests. Actually, that’s what I’m counting on for my plan to work.”
“And what exactly is your plan?” Grace asked.
“For you to create a weapon powerful enough to defeat the Guardians and turn the tide of this immortal war. And Faris is going to help you do it.”
“Because he has a thing for me,” Grace said drily.
“No, because he’s a power-hungry lunatic who won’t be able to resist the ultimate weapon. The fact that he finds you enticing can only serve to advance our plan.”
“Our plan? This sounds an awful lot like it’s your plan, sister.”
“Remember all those years ago when we pledged to find a way to destroy the Guardians?” Ava reminded her. “That was our plan. And now we finally have a way to do it.”
“So what makes this weapon so powerful? And why do we need Faris’s help?”
“The weapon will be powerful because it will use the full spectrum of magic,” Ava said. “And we need Faris for his light magic. You see, Grace, you and Faris are going to have a child. That child will have all the powers of the demons and the gods. The ultimate weapon.”
Grace folded her arms across her chest. “Even if Faris agrees to work with me, he will try to take this child—this weapon—for himself.”
Ava winked at her. “Well, then it’s a good thing we’re smarter than Faris is.”
Ava’s plan was good, but she didn’t take it far enough. Grace had had a few hundred years to think it over and had improved upon her sister’s plan. Because this wasn’t just about the child of a demon and a god. It was about the child of that child. Grace would make a child with the power of gods and demons, but she wouldn’t stop there. If she played her cards right, that child’s child could have all the powers of the Immortals. And that child would truly be the ultimate weapon.
So Grace and Ava, in their move to fight the Guardians, came up with the same plan as the Guardians, I commented to Nero.
The Guardians wanted us to come together because of a Prophecy, he replied.
A Prophecy with several different outcomes.
Exactly, Leda. The Guardians acted to bring us together because they’d heard that you would be something special—and that our child would be just the weapon they needed.
“I’m offering you a chance to finally play the smart game,” Grace told Faris when she visited him on one of his worlds.
“Go on.” Faris looked annoyed, but also intrigued.
“You’ve been concentrating entirely on collecting the individual members of your Orchestra,” she said. “But if you want to win this game, you need to get one powerful conductor. One powerful weapon. Someone with all the magic of the gods and the demons.”
“The Immortals are long gone,” replied Faris. “There is no such person anymore.”
“No, there isn’t,” she agreed. “Which is why we can’t find this conductor. We have to make it.”
That got his attention.
“How?” he asked her.
Grace put her hands on her hips. “You’re pretty dense, aren’t you? If you want to make someone with the powers of a god and a demon, you need to make someone with the powers of a god and a demon.”
Faris blinked. “You wish to have sex with me.”
“No, I don’t. Not really. But, unfortunately for both of us, that’s how babies are made, Faris.”
Grace didn’t tell Faris that she had other plans for this child, that she planned for the child to grow up to bear another child, an Immortal child with the power to defeat the Guardians.
And Grace already had her future daughter’s mate picked out. She would pair the child that she and Faris created with the angel Nero Windstriker, the offspring of two angels with Immortal blood. That combination should do the trick. Light and dark, passive and active, order and chaos—all bound together by love.
That meant her child and Nero Windstriker would need to fall in love, but that was manageable. And Grace needed the Immortal child to be made on Earth, the world of infinite potential. That was the perfect formula, the perfect recipe for the ultimate weapon.
“My Queen, do you require anything else?” Colonel Soulslayer asked.
Sonja looked up from the Legion soldier chained to her table. The man was so close to death’s door that there wasn’t much point in continuing. She needed a fresh subject.
“Take this one away and kill him,” Sonja told the dark angel. “Then bring me something else, someone with a little less light magic. The Venom killed this one too fast.”
Colonel Soulslayer bowed. “It will be done.” He lifted the soldier from the table, balanced him over his shoulder, then left the room.
Sonja took the time to jot down a few notes. She’d been at these experiments for centuries, but she didn’t feel any closer to creating a subject with the right magic to destroy the Guardians. She must have been missing something, some vital piece of the equation.
Ava knew the odds were stacked against them when it came to Grace and Faris conceiving the child who would be their weapon, but she also knew of one deity who had cheated those odds. He was a god named Regin, and he’d managed to cheat the odds not once or twice or even three times. He�
��d cheated those odds ten times, and he had ten children because of it.
Regin was the brother of Faris and Zarion, but that hadn’t saved him when the gods decided he was dabbling in magic too odious to be tolerated. They’d exiled him and his ten offspring to eleven distant, desolate moons, cut off from one another and from the rest of civilization.
Ava decided to pay the disgraced god a visit. The place was completely off the grid. No magic mirrors could bring her there. So she had to use a djinn to teleport her.
Regin lived in a broken-down old wooden house that looked like it had been built by a blind man. None of the walls were straight, and there were cracks between the wooden planks wide enough for Ava to stick her hand through.
The house was situated on a cliff above the ocean, but the water was very cold and very salty. Ava could taste it on her tongue. As far as she could see, the land in every direction was rocky and barren. There weren’t any plants or animals anywhere.
“Wait here,” Ava told the djinn who had brought her to this forsaken place.
Then she opened the door and walked inside the house. Regin sat on a misshapen chair by the fireplace. Deities were ageless, but you never would have known it from the god’s appearance. His wrinkled face was framed by a long, white beard that would have touched the floor if not for all the knots in it. The hair on his head was just as long, white, and knotted. He wore a tattered, blood-stained robe and no shoes at all.
“Regin,” Ava said, standing in the doorway.
The god squinted at her, blinded by the light she’d let in. He must have not left the house in a very long time.
“Shut the door!”
His voice was scratchy. Ava wondered how long it had been since he’d used it.
She shut the door. She glided over to the defeated god hunched over the tiny fire. “You are the god called Regin.”
“And you’re a dirty demon.”
“Be careful who you call ‘dirty’,” she replied in a biting tone. “I have questions for you. If you answer them, I’ll give you something.”
He blinked, trying to get a better look at her. “You’re Ava, the Demon of Hell’s Army.”
