Collision: The Alliance Series Book Three (32 page)

“Magic’s not stable!” I said. “As long as that doorway’s open, this world’s going to be in danger of tipping over the edge. Even with no Balance, your world won’t survive it. You’ll all die.”

Crack.
Mathran collapsed onto his face as Iriel delivered a kick to the back of his head.

“Ugh,” she said, shuddering. “My head feels worse than a hangover from Aglaian wine. What did I miss?”

“The potential end of the world,” said Kay, walking over and nudging Mathran’s body with his foot. “Out cold. Good shot. Except I’m pretty sure he was going to give us a clue.”

Raj groaned, pushing himself up onto his elbows. “About those summoners?” He waved a hand vaguely towards the encampment.

None of the summoners had approached us, because they were fixated on the doorway. A small group approached the shimmering line dividing the chasm from the ground.

“Oh hell,” I said. “If they sacrifice themselves, Veyak gains power.”

“We have to knock them out first,” said Kay. “If they’re even alive.”

With the others it had been hard to tell.
Kill them,
a voice whispered in my ear. The same voice had urged me to kill those other summoners, before.
Veyak.
The god didn’t care
who
died. It just wanted death and destruction. Magic swarmed below my palms before I even called it–and stopped as it reached the hand I’d interlaced with Kay’s.

His eyes widened. “Did you feel that?”

“Yeah. The deity’s pissed off.”

“I’ll say it is,” Raj murmured, sinking back to the ground. “What’s with that chasm?”

“It’s not a chasm,” said Kay. “It’s a doorway. Someone opened a doorway.”

“To where?” asked Iriel.

“Not Earth.” Raj scrambled back. “Oh, shit. Not those weirdos again.”

I looked where he pointed, and saw a red, smoky shape moving from the doorway. Like an animal.
Animals,
Kay had said. So someone had put magic in a living creature. A conscious one? Considering the fury I’d felt—still felt—I’d say the creature was well aware of what had happened to it. And angry enough to take it out on every magic-wielder it could find.

“Kimaros,” I said. “Shit. I knew they had something to do with this place.”

It prowled like a cat, but that was where the similarities ended. Red smoke swirled, masking its pit-like shadowy eyes. Swearing in a language I recognised as Klathican, Iriel staggered towards it. She gathered magic in her palm, and a warning rose in my throat–too late.

The bolt reached its mark, to my surprise, without intervention from the god, but the kimaros split in two. Just like the one in London. Two smokelike monsters split to either side, circling our group. I moved forward, ready to attack, but the deity’s presence pressed against me. Crap. Everything was unstable, and as long as it was, we had no chance of using magic to break down the kimaros like last time.

Magic surged high, again, the rising level prickling at my skin, vibrating in my bones. The whisper—more of a feeling than a whisper—promised me power, if only I’d unleash it. I shook my head angrily. I might not be able to out-magic the god—yet—but I wasn’t about to let it break me like it did those summoners.

Speaking of… they’d divided into smaller groups. Two held another up between them and cut his throat. The summoner didn’t even flinch before his life was extinguished.

And the kimaros grew, like it fed off the magic thick in the air. Both beasts dissolved into smoke and reformed as lion-sized creatures, blurring too quickly for me to get an opening to attack.

Raj pushed himself to his feet and shot a bolt of lightning at one of the beasts.

The beast divided, again, so now we faced
three
enemies. Three swirling smokelike clouds of rage. I could only assume Veyak hadn’t struck Raj or Iriel down because it was more fixated on the summoners. Or on Kay and me.

“Well, that’s bloody fantastic,” said Raj, sinking to the ground, cross-eyed. “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a raging mad god hell-bent on destruction and his hellhounds of doom.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” I said, glancing sideways at Kay… but he’d disappeared.
Crap.
Had he turned invisible? The deity had almost killed him already. Veyak had picked him as a target.

I couldn’t it turn him into a puppet like those summoners.

I called on magic, abandoning all reason, but as the deity’s power rushed towards me, it also swirled around the kimaros–all three of them. They grew even bigger, sparks flaring from their smoky skin, dark eyes gleaming.

They were pure magic, all right. They
were
Veyak. The deity was a living magic source.

We had to kill it. But if Veyak
was
magic, how could we…?

Swearing, I pulled on magic like I had last time, feet braced on the rock-hard soil. Hands clenched around the purple-red streams, I directed the magic, trying to force the creatures back into one form like I had on Earth. I’d rather face one super-powered deity than three.

The three kimaros hissed, switching from smoke-form to creatures once again. Raj backed closer to Iriel, who’d moved as far from Mathran’s prone form as possible. Kay had reappeared and now stood in an attacking stance, and I could tell it was killing him to hold back—but he’d already seen what the deity could do to him. And every time we struck, the creature grew more powerful.

Except for me. I stepped forward, placing myself between the monster and the others—movement behind me told me Kay had caught onto my plan. My senses seemed to be in overdrive, enhanced by the magic—footfalls on the ground, the static noise of the creatures as they reformed around the energy swirling in the air, the shiver-like aftereffect of the magic we’d already used. Those whispers grew, engulfing my senses—taste, smell, touch—but Kay’s hand on my arm steadied me back to reality. One look at his dilated pupils and I knew the god was having a similar effect on him.

A surge of determination rushed through me. I grabbed Kay’s hand, so tight my nails dug into his palm. “Fight it, Kay,” I whispered. “Fight it.”

For us. I knew what I wanted, and it wasn’t the power of a mad deity.

I reached out with my free hand, and tugged.

One kimaros tumbled into the other with a hissing screech. They dissolved in a yowling mess, but didn’t disappear entirely. The third dived at me, but I hit back with the magical equivalent of a sucker-punch. Kay shook his head, coming to his senses in time to join me in another attack. Together, we pulled the magic from the two remaining creatures until they crashed into one another in an explosion of white light. White light. The magic had come from me, not from Veyak.

That’s what I’d use to fight the deity.

Magic flared again, and at the same time, a figure dropped to the ground over by the doorway.

The summoners were sacrificing each other one by one, and as the latest fell, the kimaros roared.

The ground buckled under my feet, jerking me off-balance and knocking Kay’s hand out of mine. The world flipped over, red sky flying towards me.

My back hit the ground. I bit back a scream as the impact jarred through my bones. Someone shouted my name. Kay. The world pieced itself back together in fragments–the blood-red sky, the misty cliffs behind the doorway, the magic-wielders heading that way, the kimaros now smaller and reduced to one shadowy body again, the bodies of the two summoners we’d killed lying near Mathran.

He wasn’t unconscious. He clung onto the ground with both hands, grimly, and power surged from his skin and into the ground itself. The earth shook again, and the kimaros pushed back, even its insubstantial feet struggling to find balance. I pushed myself to my feet and nearly fell over again, the ground swaying and reforming in steep hills and plunging valleys.

Mathran must be using Aktha’s power. He was helping us? Or maybe he’d realised if he didn’t fight Veyak, we’d all die. Him included.

“Ada!” Kay ran towards me, aiming magic at the kimaros. His eyes flared black and a shadow fell over him. I choked on a warning, and the magic dissipated. He backed towards me, away from the beast.

“Veyak’s making it impossible,” he said, through clenched teeth. “All right. If I can’t fight without provoking that deity, I’m going to have to go invisible and stop those crossing to the doorway.”

“You can’t,” I said. “If run off without me, you won’t be protected.”

“Someone has to. The deity can’t see me. When I turned invisible just a couple of minutes ago, it lost sight of me. I couldn’t sense it anymore.”

I stared. “You’re kidding. The god couldn’t
see
you…” My gaze drifted over the summoners. “Is it watching through
their
eyes?”

The deity had only attacked us when we’d been near the summoners. And when Kay had contacted it directly.

“Holy shit,” I said. That explained why Veyak hadn’t instantly struck us down as soon as we set foot on Vey-Xanetha. The deity was raging mad, but it could only sense us when we used magic to draw attention to ourselves, or when one of its puppets attacked us.

Did that mean—if we took out the summoners—we might have a chance of winning this?

I didn’t dare consider the possibility that the fight could only end with the deaths of everyone on this world.

“Don’t you dare get killed,” I said to Kay.

“Wasn’t planning to,” he called, and only I caught the flash of fear in his expression before he turned his back. “Watch out for that deity.” And he vanished, leaving a blurred impression on the magic in the air.

I turned back to Iriel and Raj to see them gaping wide-eyed at us.

“Tell me that wasn’t the concussion,” muttered Raj. “Did Kay just disappear?”

“It’s a little complicated.” I glanced up at the sky, which had returned to blood-red again. It really did seem like the god only appeared whenever one of us used magic. “And our friend is recovering.”

The kimaros shook itself, trailing sparks. What Mathran did had affected it in some way. But it was part of Veyak, and I wasn’t sure it
could
be killed. If Veyak was magic itself…

I reached for the magic, willing it to stay under control, and pushed at the kimaros.
Veyak, go away. I’m adamantine. You can’t control me, and you have to stop!

A shadow descended over my head and the lightning swallowed my scream.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

KAY

I stared for a moment as Ada disappeared under a cloud of magic. That shadow again. I’d been dead right—Veyak and third level magic looked exactly the same.

The same shadow followed
me,
and the deity was closer to gaining power over me than the others.

But the other two gods were still alive. Mathran had channelled Aktha.

I couldn’t worry about that now, not when the summoners were metres from the doorway, and on their feet again. Several seemed to have figured out what Mathran had done and were running towards him over the uneven ground.

Which meant the deity knew, too. And Ada and the others were over there.

But I had the element of surprise. I needed to stop the summoners and close the doorway, and right now, none of them had a clue I ran towards them, invisible—not daring to look back in case I lost it, ran to help Ada, and got myself killed.

A flash of lightning behind me told me another summoner had died. There weren’t many of them left.
Dammit, Veyak.
Sure, they’d walked into this, but the deity had manipulated them. Like it was trying to do to me.

If Ada wasn’t here, it
would
have.

A glint caught my eyes from beneath the doorway. The three spheres had been placed at intervals

on the ground. They
were
holding the doorway open.

How to destroy pure magic sources without using magic? Ada could absorb magic to an extent, but this amount–it was like when the Campbells had used that bomb, surely too much for one person to contain, and Veyak was in the way. If I tried the same, I’d burn from the inside out.

The summoners turned around, as though sensing I was nearby. Shit. Maybe the deity could sense me after all, even though I was invisible. Or sense my magic. But I’d reached the first sphere. The heat pouring from it felt white-hot even from a distance. I crouched down, and immediately knew touching it would burn the skin off my hands.

Lightning flared above Ada again
. Hold off the damn magic force, Ada. If anyone can, it’s you.

A group approached the doorway, passing within a hair’s breadth of me. I had seconds to make up my mind, and while I might not be able to use magic, I could stop them.

One blow brought down the first before the others realised something was wrong. I stabbed a second during the confusion, and though I missed the heart, the summoner fell immediately. They were effectively dead already, their lives burned out.
So why does Veyak want their sacrifice?