bedeviled & beyond 01 - bedeviled & beguiled (29 page)

Her resistance softened a bit as I caught her by surprise and I gained some ground. Inch by inch the life-eating force moved toward Rayanne and I could taste her fear on the back of my tongue. I wondered if she could taste mine.

Somewhere in the back of my consciousness I became aware of the splintered sound of voices, like static in my head. The static began to grow in intensity, distracting me, and Rayanne gained an edge in our magic confrontation. The lightning bolt surged backward with a roar, stopping just inches from my nose. I had to force my mind closed to the voices that fought to be heard. Sensing Dialle in the broken noise, along with someone else who felt familiar, I shoved them away. I couldn’t expend the energy to explore that avenue right at the moment.

I had to concentrate. Hard.

I managed to push the fiery wall of power back toward Rayanne a few precious inches, but unfortunately, my energies were running low. The power, all too new to me, seemed to have a limit and I wasn’t experienced enough at dealing with it to work through it. Despite my renewed efforts to hold her off, Rayanne and her evil energy started to close in on me.

Inch by inch the magic-charged electricity moved in my direction, until it burned at the edge of my power, eating it away bit by bit. My power bubble wavered, weakening, and I knew I was seconds away from losing the magical tug of war and eating a death sandwich, heavy on the ionic mayo. Every cell in my body ached with the effort I was expelling to hold her off. And, to make it worse, I could feel her gaining strength as I weakened. It was if she was feeding her power from me, sucking me dry.

That thought brought my eyes open and I realized with a start that that was exactly what she was doing. As I sent my power out, she was slowly draining it from me and throwing it back. I realized I would need to block her somehow and then use every resource I could find to finish her off.

Pulling together every ounce of will power I had, I stopped pushing at the lightning bolt that danced and hissed between us, burning a track in the floor and ceiling of that revolting room. I left the protective bubble in place to hold it off and threw my power in another direction. Beneath me, the souls of thousands of Nerul’s enemies lay trapped in the physical remains of their bodies, which consisted now only of a gathering of hair fibers, the rest of their physical forms having long since been sent to a cold, unhappy grave. I realized that if they were enemies of Nerul then they were friends of mine. What was left of those unfortunate souls waved and throbbed beneath my feet in helpless agitation because that was what Nerul had planned for them when he’d trapped their souls in that helpless state. But if I could I was going to release their souls and allow them to help me defeat the evil Rayanne.

I dropped my hands to my sides and redirected the power into the floor. I sent my senses into the horror beneath my feet and concentrated on melding them with the trapped souls there. Almost immediately a wall of angry, frustrated voices slammed into me, the voices of thousands of lost souls clamored and begged me for release. At first, terrified by the intensity of the onslaught, I fought against the angry voices and tried to push them down, but I suddenly realized that, rather than trying to force them into a manageable box, I would have more success using that rage. So that’s what I did. I opened myself up to the fury of those released souls and allowed them to flow through me into the room. In turn, they fed upon my power, taking it with them as they surged free and amplifying it as they merged into one, incredibly powerful and pissed off force. The result was catastrophic.

Almost immediately the floor beneath me started to rumble. The rock beneath the carpet shifted violently, nearly throwing me to the ground. I fought to regain my balance just as, above my head, the horrifying representation of Hades shattered and spat billions of shards of glass toward the ground. The glass stabbed tiny slivers into my flesh and pinged away, piling up around my feet. I didn’t feel a thing. Standing apart from the physical world around me, I was numb from channeling the earth-rending force beneath my feet.

Rayanne’s shadow form wavered and looked, for a moment as if it would fade as the room imploded around us. But I reached out with the enhanced power I shared with thousands of angry souls and grabbed her before she could disappear.

Her shadow mouth opened in a silent scream, which from behind me on the floor, was echoed by her physical form. Fueled by the anger in the released souls, I tore through Rayanne’s shadow form with razor-like tentacles of power and ripped her apart. Her chest caved inward and then exploded into the room, casting a green haze like smoke into the roiling air around me.

Almost simultaneously I felt her body rise up off the floor behind me and I turned, carrying my rage-fueled power rush with me and smashing it into her before she had time to move a finger to stop me.

Her face creased in an ugly scowl. She flew away from me and hit the stone wall with a sickening crunch. Slowly she pushed herself to her feet and stood, leaning against the wall, which was coming apart behind her in a spider web pattern that was quickly widening into cracks and spewing stone-dust into the room in choking waves.

I stood several feet away from her. My legs spread in a bracing stance and my face impassive. I was aware that my skin had started to glow with the combined power of a thousand angry souls. The rough material of the robe whipped around my legs, caught in a frenzied wind that raged around and through that cavern room, pulling my power with it and causing devastation everywhere it touched. My long, auburn hair whipped away from me, blown back by the sucking wind. As I stared at evil Barbie, I slowly raised my arms to the sky, feeling the power pulse between my uplifted hands.

Seeing her death in my face, Rayanne cringed back. She threw a hand in front of her face as if to block my attack. At that point, even if I’d wanted to I was incapable of stopping the power. I was a renegade laser train speeding down a mountainside with no brakes.

Three inhuman steps brought me face to face with her. She dropped her covering hand and flew at my throat, her long, gleaming white teeth bared to rip out my throat. She hit me hard enough to knock me on my ass, but I stood against it. The sound of ripping flesh told me she’d found her mark. Hot, wet blood ran down my throat, soaking warmly into the neck of the rough, brown robe. I felt no pain or fear as she tore into my throat with her knife-like teeth.

I was a mindless machine, with no thought for anything but killing the evil Rayanne. I reached up and pulled her from my throat, holding her off the floor before my face with a strength I’d never had before. Her lips and chin were shiny and wet with my blood, but already I could feel the hole she’d chewed in my throat closing and I knew that somehow I would heal myself. I smiled at her and finally saw the fear spark in her black eyes. That fear told me I had won. She was mine.

“Get thee to Hades fool, for God hath tired of you!” My voice boomed through the room, rising to vibrate against the quickly disintegrating rock walls. It rose above even the thunderous cacophony that the disintegration of millions of years of geological architecture wrought in the underground cavern. It was an inhuman voice, filled with the power of a thousand, long-tortured souls and the combined hatred that had too long lived within them.

I threw the full force of my power into her, flinging her like a rag doll thirty feet away to crash against the far wall. Then something twisted in my heart and, before I even realized I’d had the thought, I’d sent hundreds of knife-like shards of glass from the shattered mural flying toward her. She had almost regained her feet when they slammed into her. The magic driven sheet of shattered glass pummeled her, ripping her flesh away from her bones and driving what was left of her back into the wall. The shards of glass hit with such force that, despite their fragility, they were driven cleanly into the rock at her back, pinning her mangled body to the wall.

I stood there for a moment that was collapsed in time, my heart pounding terrifyingly in my chest and my breath coming out in gulping gasps. My body started to tremble uncontrollably as, from somewhere amid the jumbled mess that was my thoughts, I extracted the notion that I’d taken a turn toward my monster side which I would never be able to retrace. This thought caused me to fall to my knees in sudden, bone melting weariness. The subterranean room continued to rumble and collapse around me. As my head drooped onto my chest I realized that I would soon be buried alive in debris. In that moment, it was hard to make myself care.

Like a bolt of lightning through my benumbed brain, Emo’s face flashed across my mental screens, drawing me out of myself with a jolt. Adrenaline surged through my veins again. My gaze flew to him. With horror I realized that the wall he’d been hanging from was crumbling away and he’d been thrown to the floor, quickly being covered by flying stone, dust and glass. I jumped to my feet and rushed toward him.

Scooping him up with my newfound strength, I fairly flew from that room, praying that I’d be able to find my way out of the horrid cavern.

As I reached the passageway that led toward the ceremony cave, I realized the implosion I’d started in Nerul’s office hadn’t stopped there. Chaos reigned in that subterranean hell as rock walls and ceilings crackled and thundered and fell about the inhabitants in varying sizes of chunks.

Emo and I were quickly caught up in a slowly moving retreat and I soon began to fear that we’d be crushed and trampled by the onrush. Hooded figures swarmed around us, flinging each other down and charging toward what I assumed was an exit out of the court. I followed as best I could, praying I’d make it out in time to save Emo.

After a few moments of the crushing retreat, we emerged into sunlight and I suddenly found myself with room to move again. I carried Emo into the dense underbrush near the face of the cave and laid him on the ground. He groaned as I laid him down and all of the breath left me when I saw how pale he was. His usual ruddy red skin tones had been replaced by a kind of pinkish gray color. I could tell by his shallow and infrequent breathing that he was a hair away from eternal life. Panic welled in my chest.

“Hang in there, partner. I haven’t given you permission to leave yet. You’re still on the clock here. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”

Although I knew I was avoiding the inevitable, I pulled several small slivers of glass from his chest, arms and legs before turning to the knife in his cheek. Remembering the gargoyle claw, I panicked. I would have to call the power to heal him or he would die. I also knew that what I had just done in that cave had scared the soul out of me. I was deathly afraid that I’d gone beyond the point of return and my soul was lost to me. My devil had taken over in that horrible room and I was terrified to unleash it again. But I knew I had to. I had no choice.

Before I could chicken out, I laid one hand on the hilt of the knife and wrapped the other one around the blade, resting it palm down on Emo’s flesh. Closing my eyes I reached tentative mental fingers toward the core of my power and reluctantly drew it forward.

The energy slid smoothly from its hiding place, easily flooding my hands. I poured it into the knife buried deep inside my friend and concentrated on pulling it free and closing the wound behind it. The knife vibrated under my fingers and then slid smoothly and wetly out. I allowed it to drop to the ground beside Emo’s head and smoothed my hand over the wound. Under the influence of my power, the blood began reversing its flow, moving away from the wound, back into Emo’s body. I felt the edges of the wound knitting together from the inside and I drove the power until it had completely closed the wound under my hands. Then I moved my hands to his chest and repeated the process there.

Once his body was whole again, I touched his forehead and shuddered at what I sensed there. I gently nudged my magic into Emo’s mind, encouraging his brain to heal and pull him back to life, because I perceived a weakness there that scared me more than the knife had. It was a giving up. A letting go of life. He was reaching for death.

After a moment I realized I’d done all I could do. I gently withdrew the power and sat back. My cheeks were wet. It was the first moment I realized I was crying. As it had in that horror chamber inside the cave, my heart was pelting the inside of my chest in a panicked state. I was going to lose my best friend and there was nothing I could do about it.

He lay there barely breathing, although his color had returned. He looked lifeless and way too still. I wanted to grab him and shake him into consciousness but I was afraid to move him. Feeling helpless is not one of my better things.

I stood and started to pace. I suddenly realized that it had grown quiet in the cave. Dark worlders no longer spewed from its face and the ground beneath my feet no longer rumbled and shook. Other than a thick dust that hung in the air just inside the opening, the cataclysmic event might not have ever happened.

Suddenly I remembered Nille and Dialle and Nerul and I wondered what had happened to them. I thought of the static I’d pushed away as I’d fought to drive off Rayanne and felt a new level of panic rising in me. Dialle had been calling to me. Looking back, I was sure of it. And Nille. I’d pushed them away in there and I didn’t know what had become of them. I suddenly knew what I had to do. I’d done all I could for Emo. I had to go back into that cave.

With a final glance at my friend, I said a quick prayer, briefly wondering if my prayers would even be heard anymore after what I’d done to Rayanne, and forced myself to turn my back on my dying friend. I moved toward that cave with a feeling of such dread I wondered at my ability to keep my feet moving forward. I knew suddenly, with perfect clarity, that I was about to face my greatest foe. And that one of us would need to die.

I had a cold knot in my gut that told me I was afraid it was gonna be me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A Battle Due

Into that cave our lady did go, to face the evil core,