"I think your rocket stick is toast," I told her. "Plan B isn't going to work." One rocket stick wouldn't hold two people very well.
"I don't suppose you want to talk about this?" I shouted at our pursuers, but the wind snatched my words and tore them apart. I motioned my head down. "We gotta do this the hard way. Plan C."
She raised a dark eyebrow. "Isn't this already the hard way?"
"Harder way," I clarified. "I'm glad we practiced with these squirrel suits."
"Oh god." Elyssa glanced down. "I just figured out Plan C."
I flashed a grin. "Hey, me too." With that, I tucked my arms to my sides and closed my legs. Without the wings to catch the air, I dropped like a lump of frozen turds from an airplane. My stomach hugged my spleen and held on for dear life.
Blazing wings folded tight, the Darklings dove after us, firing blindly and missing. Elyssa and I streaked down the side of a tower that twisted in a corkscrew spiral.
"Get ready," I said. "Three, two, one, go!" I spread my arms and legs and arched my back. The wind slammed into the wings, steering me inches from the shimmering surface of the building. Elyssa and I leaned hard right and whipped around the corkscrew, dodged left and threaded the narrow slit in the center of a heart-shaped building. Another hard dive and we twisted back and forth through a maze of high-rises.
For a moment, I thought we'd lost our pursuers.
Four shadows on the deserted pedestriums below gave us only an instant's warning that we'd been outsmarted. Rather than attempt to follow us between the buildings, the attackers maintained altitude and watched us from above. I craned my neck and saw them swooping in for the kill. A bolt of Murk exploded against the building ahead and to my left. Shards of crystal exploded in a deadly cloud.
Elyssa cried out and swooped right. Another blast of Murk blocked me from following. At the last instant, I dodged left to avoid receiving a face full of glass. I crashed through a window and got it anyway. My ribs bounced off a wall, the wind exploded from my lungs, and I rolled across the floor of an empty apartment before skidding to a stop.
Gasping for air, I looked up in time to see a Darkling aiming his glowing fists of death at me. I reflexively threw up my left hand to channel a shield, except—oops!—I didn't have any aether to power it. Thankfully, my enhanced Daemos reflexes weren't affected by the lack of magic. I blurred left. A spear of Murk crashed into the wall like a sledgehammer, punching a hole clear into the next room.
Instead of fleeing like anyone with a lick of common sense, I dashed forward and punched the attacking asshat right in the stomach. With an explosive grunt, he doubled over and flew backward out of the window. My hopes of him falling to his doom were thwarted when one of his companions caught him and carried him to safety.
I ducked back inside as Murk hammered the area where my head had been. This time I used common sense and ran through the hole in the wall and into a huge, empty room overlooking a park. I spotted a levitator alcove in the left corner that housed what passed for an elevator in Seraphina. I drew up short when I realized there was no glow of light emanating from the shaft. I peered over the lip and was greeted by a dark hole promising a quick trip to oblivion.
Unless there were stairs hidden somewhere, I didn't know how I was supposed to get to ground level. The window to my right exploded and a Darkling barreled into me. His momentum carried us crashing through the glass and outside into empty air.
"This wasn't what I had in mind!" I shouted as we plummeted earthward.
He tried to let me go forty stories above the ground. What he hadn't counted on was my demon strength and desperation. He spread his wings but they weren't enough to hold us aloft. We lost altitude, cruising high over the small park and crashing through a window across the street. He caught a wing on the window frame while I tumbled across the room.
Like many buildings I'd visited in my previous trip to Tarissa, it lacked permanent furniture since magical gems on the wall allowed occupants to furnish the room on a whim. Without aether to power the buildings, the rooms were empty unless someone left the furniture in place from the night before.
I wished for a sturdy chair to break over the head of my assailant, or even a couch to duck behind as he tried to pound my head to hamburger meat with shards of energy. Instead, I was forced to juke back and forth across the room, slowly closing the distance.
I tried to reason with him in Cyrinthian, but it had been a while since I'd spoken the language aside from the crash course I'd taken from none other than Cephus himself the last time I'd been here. "Cephus is destroying this city!" I shouted.
My attacker didn't acknowledge what I'd said—in fact he seemed to be emotionally numb to everything, though it could have just been the creepy mask he wore. I ducked beneath another attack, came up from below, and delivered a crushing uppercut. My fist launched him off the ground so hard he hit the ceiling ten feet overhead and thudded back to the floor.
"Sweet dreams, flyboy." I knelt and inspected his uniform.
The symbol on the chest looked familiar. I flashed back to the day I'd gone to the Ministry of Research to save Nightliss. The guards all wore the same symbol—a white line spiraling into black—the Void. "There is no god," one of them had said. "Only life and the Void."
I knew a bit more about the Void than they did, namely that it had a denizen of its own, a creature called the Beast. Though I'd never seen the creature, I'd heard it growl after accidentally opening a portal into that dark realm. That had been more than enough incentive not to investigate further.
"If there's no promise of afterlife, only oblivion, why would anyone be so eager to die?" I wondered aloud.
Now was not the time for introspection, so I tugged the mask off the soldier to reveal a shaved head with a freshly puckered scar across the temple. That wasn't what nearly made me lose my breakfast. One of the seraph's eyes was gone, replaced by a white gem.
Seraphim come in two flavors—Brightling and Darkling—each with an affinity for opposing primal forces. Brightlings utilize Brilliance, the force of destruction, while their Darkling kin who they treated like second-class citizens, channel Murk, the magic of creation. In my experience, Darklings were usually the good guys. After all, my best friend, Nightliss, had helped me fight her evil twin sister, Daelissa, and her Brightling forces.
Not in the case of Cephus.
During the Second Seraphim War, I'd come to Tarissa seeking the help of the Darkling forces against Daelissa's army. My first day here, I'd met Cephus, one of the three members of the Trivectus, the governing body of Pjurna. At first, he seemed the most reasonable of the bunch, but that was before he tricked me into helping him murder Ministers Uoriss and Thala, thus propelling him to power.
He hadn't stopped there, kidnapping Nightliss and experimenting on her all while I was blithely unaware. When I'd rescued her, she'd been so beaten and bruised—a pang of regret tore at my insides.
Rest in peace, Nightliss.
On our way out of the Ministry of Research, I'd seen things that would make even the most hardened veteran's skin crawl. Seraphim in cages, bodies mutilated from horrible experiments, some of them turned into creatures that no longer resembled anything humanoid. If this mutilated soldier was any indication, it seemed Cephus had found a use for his cruel research.
The seraph's one good eye blinked open. The gem in the other socket glowed and a thin beam of Brilliance stabbed out. I didn't move quite fast enough. Pain seared into my right cheek. Shouting in pain, I rolled off the seraph and wrapped my arm around his neck from behind like a wrestler, squeezing his throat between my forearm and bicep.
He flailed, scratching my face, his legs thrashing. I pulled back my head to avoid his hands until he went limp from lack of oxygen. My fingers found a slow, steady pulse on his throat. I wasn't ready to kill him just yet, especially if he was a brainwashed victim.
The next thing I did was undo the leather straps holding the aether pack to the seraph's back. Two crystalline prongs pressed against the bare skin of his back through a slit in the uniform. The pack felt insubstantial when hefted in one hand. I opened the leather wrapping and nearly dropped it like I'd just peeled open a spider egg when I saw what was inside—a small glowing crystoid. Upon further inspection, I realized its surface was smooth instead of spiky, its insides sparking with electric aether.
"That explains things," I muttered. Even when it wasn't being fed by the aether beam from home base, it seemed to hold plenty of juice. I touched the crystal prongs and felt a rush of power in my blood. Cephus had been a busy bee. Not only had he found a way to destroy magic in Eden, but he'd come up with these aether crystals to power his own troops.
He'd severely underestimated our ability to fight off the crystoid menace despite an army of robots and armed airships thrown against us. Nightliss's burned, bleeding body flashed before my eyes and the hatred of a thousand suns burned in my chest. The day I laid hands on Cephus, he'd get a free Bible lesson because I planned to go Old Testament on his rotten ass.
I wiped my eyes and raced for a window facing north. I saw no sign of the other Darklings and, even worse, no sign of Elyssa. We hadn't even reached the target, and already this mission had gone to hell.
Chapter 2
Finding Elyssa was my first priority.
Knowing that I'd abandoned the mission to focus on her safety would probably piss off my girlfriend to no end. She'd kicked my butt plenty of times and I was more than willing to accept another whooping if it meant she was safe and sound.
I knelt next to the unconscious seraph and frisked him to make sure he didn't have anything else of value. He didn't even have a bladed weapon on his person, which meant Cephus was more interested in manufacturing glass cannon soldiers with tons of firepower but little experience or chance of survival.
What he'd accomplished was as impressive as it was repugnant. No matter how powerful, Seraphim couldn't naturally fly. If I really concentrated, I could manifest angel wings, but all I could do was glide. The last time I'd tried to flap my wings and fly, I'd nearly killed myself.
Thankfully, I didn't have to rely on wings to get out of this building. I reached over my shoulder and slid a shiny chrome rocket stick from the sheath on my back. It was a little dented from fighting, but a flick of the switch confirmed it still worked.
I preferred boomsticks—high-powered flying broomsticks—to the gadgets from Science Academy, but heading into an aether dead zone required desperate measures. Unlike broomsticks, rocket sticks had fins on the tail for steering and a rear exhaust port for flames. This model wasn't as fast or powerful as my boomstick, but it would do the trick.
Pressing the neckline of my Nightingale armor retracted it down to my waist so I could strap the aether pack on my back. The second the crystal prongs touched my skin, I felt the beckon of raw aether. I tugged up on the waistline and the armor grew back into a skintight layer of protection, spreading beneath the crystal prongs and breaking contact with my back.
"You've got to be kidding me," I groaned. I'd hoped the armor would grow over the aether pack. Instead, it was doing what it had been charmed to do, sliding across the skin no matter what clothes or gear the user was wearing. Even though I had a short sword at my hip, using it to cut through Nightingale armor would be like cutting through a titanium-plated tank with a can opener.
That left me with one option.
I flew the rocket stick out of the broken window, the aether pack snug against my back. I was also as bare-chested as a male model in a shopping mall. Though I felt naked without the armor and my nipples went hard as diamonds from the cold air, I now had access to magic.
"Or I could slice someone real good with my nipples," I muttered.
Gaining altitude, I rose above the tallest buildings and looked around. A fresh rush of power indicated the aether beam from Cephus's fortress had found me and even now recharged the power pack. Since I couldn't possibly be mistaken for one of his unfortunate minions, it seemed likely the aether beams homed in on the aether packs and not the users.
My heart dropped at the sight of a black-clad figure on the streets below. I dove straight down, pulling up at the last instant when I realized the body belonged to one of the Darkling soldiers. It was a breadcrumb that might lead me to Elyssa.
The hairs on my neck rose and I had the distinct impression someone was watching me. Though the streets were completely empty of people, there were plenty of buildings to hide in. Unlike Eden, there were no planes, trains, or automobiles in Seraphina. The cities relied on skyways and cloudlets for transportation. Without magic, none of those had power, and as I'd discovered in the last building, not even the levitators worked. That meant if someone was watching me, they were probably doing it from ground level.
I rotated the hovering rocket stick in a circle, but saw no one. Since my eyes hadn't found anything, I used another of my super senses and focused on ambient noises. The faint but unmistakable explosions from channeled energy echoed in the distance. I swept the rocket stick west and zipped forward.
A moment later I stopped to silence the rush of wind in my ears. The cry of battle sounded closer now. The echoes through the canyons of empty streets made it difficult to pinpoint the source, but it seemed to emanate from the north. I twisted the throttle to full and zipped down the road. Movement caught my eye. I pulled hard right and veered down a wide avenue flanked by crystalline towers.
Elyssa and another figure fought two soldiers on the ground. Divots in the street and surrounding buildings bore evidence of the firepower the Darklings had employed, but Elyssa was no easy target. Before I reached the fight, it was over and the attackers lay unmoving on the street.
I hopped off the rocket too quickly, stumbling forward and wind-milling my arms to stay upright. "Elyssa!"