Balance (The Divine, Book One) (42 page)

I
already knew what kind of plans the archfiend had for Rebecca, and I could
imagine what he would want with his longtime nemesis. Why he wanted Obi, I
didn’t know, but just the thought of what the demon was going to do to them was
the worst torture imaginable. 

“
I’m
so sorry this happened
,” I said. “
I’m so sorry. Reyzl has me. I’m going
to die.
”

“
No
,”
she replied, her voice commanding. “
You cannot. Not yet.
”

The
angel held his blade back, preparing the blow that would remove my head. “You
were lucky the Outcast saved you the first time,” he said. “You won’t be so
lucky again.”

“
There’s
nothing I can do
,” I shouted back to Josette, even my mental voice panicked
at my imminent decapitation.

Then
it hit me. In my current state I couldn’t focus enough to pull my Source to me,
so instead I pushed myself to my Source, feeling the shift from one realm to
another. The world faded into a translucent mess. My current location on Earth
had no counterpart in this dimension. Instead there was only pure white, the
absence of everything, like the wall at the end of the beach. I could see the
fuzzy transparency of the mortal world frozen in time, moments away from the
end of everything.

“Landon.”

I
turned, and she was there, in all of her heavenly glory. Not the fallen
Josette, but the angel Josette, in lustrous white robes, her ivory wings
stretched out wide from her back.

“Josette.
I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said. It was all too much. She floated
over to me and put her arms around me, holding me as I cried. “I’ve failed,” I
told her. “You, Rebecca, Obi, the sanctuaries and the balance. I can’t stay
here forever, and when I go back, I’m going to die. It
will
all be over, and it’s all my fault.”

She
stroked my hair, and kissed my forehead. “It isn’t over,” she said. “You will
not die. It is not my Lord’s will.”

I
looked up at her, my vision blurry with my tears. “There’s nothing I can do.”

She
used her finger to wipe the droplets away from my eyes. “There is something you
can do,” she insisted. “Summon the Beast.”

The
Beast? She must mean Ulnyx. With a thought, he was there. He laughed when he
saw that I was crying, my state of hopelessness leaving me too weak to control
him.

“I
knew you would blow it,” he said. “When you die, my soul will be free to find
another host. I doubt your sidekick will be able to resist me.”

His
words snapped me out of it. I reached out with my power and constricted it
around his neck, lifting him off the ground and choking him. “Your soul will
never be free,” I shouted, my anger flaring.

“A
demon can absorb the power of another demon,” Josette said. “You trapped his
soul when he tried to take your body. You can take his power for your own.”

Ulnyx’s
expression turned fearful.

“How?”
I asked.

“Kill
him,” she replied.

So I
did. I wrapped him in my power, twisting and crushing and pressing in on him,
watching as his body was compressed into nothing more than dust. He had no
chance to speak, no chance to beg. My power was unequaled here, and he didn’t
stand a chance. I could feel his soul floating unhindered by his shell, but
unable to escape. I pushed it toward me on a gust of air, a small black cloud
of energy. I brought it to my face and took a deep breath, taking it in for the
second time.

Memories
flashed before me, years and years of memories. Ulnyx was born a werewolf,
killed his parents, and slaughtered his brother, the leader of his pack. His
thirst for blood and destruction was insatiable, his need to destroy unending.
His power was the power of pure evil, and I brought it into me, absorbed it
into my soul and took it as my own. It wasn’t a painless process, the inherited
memories vile and disgusting, threatening to drive me mad. I released a
guttural growl, an angry howl. I could feel myself changing, losing control. I
looked at Josette.

“Why?”
I asked her, feeling betrayed.

“There
is no other way,” she said. She continued to float before me on her angel
wings, her beautiful, calm, loving existence the only thing keeping the demon’s
evil from overwhelming me. “I will protect you fellow. I will save you, so that
you can save your world. I believe it is His will.”

She
reached out and took my hand, which I now saw was the clawed hand of the Great
Were. I could feel the pressure building in my soul, could feel the darkness
creeping in on me. I was only part demon. I was never meant to do what I had
just done. I couldn’t survive it and keep my sanity.

She
took the hand and put it to her face, kissing the grotesque, demonic palm.
“Godspeed, Landon Hamilton,” she said. She took my evil claws and raked them
down her face, cutting deep into her flesh. The black lines of the demon poison
blossomed across her skin.

“No,”
I cried, the passion of my emotion holding the darkness back for the moment at
least.

“I
love you brother,” she said. “Look after my daughter.”

She
opened her mouth, and a burst of light shot out of it, catching me off-guard
and splashing against my face. It blinded me with its brightness, and pressed
hard against me like water from a fire hose. I couldn’t. No, shouldn’t turn my
head. I opened myself up to it, opened my mouth wide and accepted the flood.
Again, I was overcome with memories and images, Josette’s childhood, her mother
and father, her brother, the pain of her violation, her death, her hundreds of
years as an angel walking among the mortal, her unrequited service to God.

Then,
the unexpected: her brother an archfiend, her capture, her torture, her
pregnancy, and her daughter. Sarah.

I
fell to the ground, my mind a battleground between good and evil, Ulnyx and
Josette. I could feel them both vying for control of my soul, their memories
conflicting and washing through me: death, destruction, love, charity, anger,
selflessness
, Heaven, Hell. Somewhere in the mix I rediscovered
myself, regained my own identity, and stepped between them.

“Enough,”
I cried to nobody, looking up and seeing I was alone in Purgatory, in my
Source. I could feel them in my soul, could hear their voices, see their
memories, pull the smaller flow of their power and mix it with my own. The
balance. Josette had sacrificed herself so that I could absorb the demon and
not go mad. She had saved my life to stop Reyzl and protect her daughter. Sarah
had thought her mother was dead. Now she was. She had done it for me.

I
pulled at the new sources of power, letting the feeling of it flow through me.
I looked over at my still form, held by one of the fallen angels, about to be
beheaded by the other. Josette had been training for hundreds of years. She
knew how to escape from that hold. Now I did too.

The
sword was already whistling through the air when I retook my body. Faster than
I could ever have moved before, I snapped my head back to where I knew the
angel’s to be, feeling the crunch as the force shattered his face and loosened
his grip. In the same motion I dropped to a knee and threw my upper half
forward, lifting my captor up and over, into the path of the blade. He cried
out in pain as it dug into his back. His grip destroyed, I sent him into the
air to slam hard into his counterpart.

Neither
angel stayed down long, rolling to their feet once their kinetic momentum had
been broken. The one who had been holding me looked like he had already healed
from the sword strike, and he pulled his own sword with a grin.

“Thanks
for the blood,” he said, flexing his back. “Delicious, and nutritious.”

My
blood. Whatever Reyzl had done, it had made them not only impervious to damage
from blessed weapons, but had increased their healing rate beyond my own. I
dropped into a defensive crouch, waiting for the attack that I knew would come.

They
struck together, their swords thin white lines of steel arcing toward me. I
ducked and dodged, twisted and danced around the blades, somehow matching the
impossible speed of their motion as I circled around the room. I could see that
they were pushing me, herding me towards the wall. I couldn’t play defense
forever.

I
reached in and found the Great Were’s power. I felt the strength surge through
my limbs, felt myself growing and changing. My hands stretched out into
gigantic claws, my clothes tearing as my mass increased. The angels’ swords
whistled towards me.

I
caught the first with a massive paw, the edge of the blade sinking into my
flesh but nowhere near deeply enough to harm me. I closed my grip around it and
held it, then sidestepped the other attack and lashed out with my other claw.
It caught the angel in the face, the razor sharp fingers ripping and tearing,
removing most of the head in one swipe.

No
sooner had I brought my hand back when I could see the intense wound beginning
to heal, the face rebuilding, the mouth opening to laugh. I wrenched the sword
from the other angel’s hand, flipped it in the air to take the hilt, caught it
with a smaller human hand, and delivered the killing blow, removing the
mutilated head before it could regenerate.

“No,”
the other angel cried, seeing his partner’s headless corpse topple to the
ground. I let the transformation reverse completely, shrinking back to my human
form, reknitting my tattered clothes together, remaking myself as whole. Armed,
I turned to face him.

“My
condolences,” I cursed, darting forward, slamming him in the face with the hilt
to knock him back, then whipping the blade around and through his neck.

I
didn’t wait for him to fall, instead spinning around, looking for Reyzl. I
found him near the Rift, speaking under his breath and scraping out another
circle. He hadn’t noticed what had been going on behind him and probably
believed I was already dead. This would be easier than I thought.

My
plan was to dash in and remove the archfiend’s head before he had any idea I
was still alive. It might have worked too, if he hadn’t finished the circle at
the same time I started towards him. The runes burst into flame and the first
of Reyzl’s army stepped through. A humanoid female with scaled red skin and
bright yellow eyes. It saw me as soon as it entered, letting out a cry of alarm
and shoving Reyzl away from my attack.

The archfiend
rolled to the side, somehow keeping his hold on the Chalice, and rose to his
feet as I decapitated the demon with the cursed sword. If he was surprised to
see me alive, he hid it well.

“You
continue to impress me with your persistence diuscrucis,” he said with a smile.
“However, I’m afraid you’re in the way.”

A
second demon stepped through the Rift, then a third, a fourth. They hissed when
they saw me, springing forward to attack. Reyzl bent over and placed the
Chalice on the ground, then began to unbutton his suit jacket.

I did
the one thing that made sense. I couldn’t fight Reyzl and an army of demons on
my own, so I ran. Not to get away, but to get help. Rebecca. I raced down the
corridor, the demons chasing behind, still streaming in through the Hell Rift.
I heard growling as hounds joined the devils.

She
was standing next to the ladder, pulling against the handcuffs that bound her,
the demon Yuli perched above. He was cackling at her futile attempts to escape,
hopping back and forth on the rung. They both turned to look at me as I rushed
in, Yuli freezing in fear, Rebecca baring her fangs in a half-snarl,
half-smile.

“Hey,”
I said to her, cracking the sword down on the chain of the cuffs. Freed, she
grabbed the sword from my hand.

“Hi
handsome,” she said, her eyes fading to black. “Nice eyes.” She leapt forward
and tore into the devils behind me.

Nice
eyes? I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I didn’t have time to think about it. I
heard flapping wings, and saw Yuli flying away up the shaft. He wasn’t worth
chasing. I started to turn back towards the fray when I saw Obi. He was lying
on the ground behind the ladder, his eyes closed, a huge bloodstain on his
stomach. He was still alive, but he was out of the fight.

My
anger flared and I hurried to catch up with Rebecca. I used Ulnyx’s strength to
throw around the devils like rag dolls, leaving them broken for her to dispose
of. I had already lost Josette, and I didn’t know how long Obi would last
without help. It was time to end this.

Reyzl
was waiting for us when we reached the main room. He had removed all of his
clothes except his underwear, having placed them in a neat pile next to the
Chalice. His body was taut with lean muscle and covered in dark scars that
formed more of the demonic runes. They burned on his skin, the flames bathing
him in a red glow. His hands had morphed into talons, the ends dripping demon
fire.

“I’ve
grown weary of you, Landon,” he said. I felt his power all around me, pressing
on me in an effort to freeze me as he had done before. I pulled on my own flow
and pushed myself free, feeling his efforts dissipate from the force of my
will. He observed his failure without emotion, and then launched himself at me.