Authors: Heather Killough-Walden
And then she blinked, and frowned. The mists in front of her coalesced, swirling together as if caught in a mini-tornado. Evie became fascinated as the tornado grew taller and thicker and began taking on humanoid attributes.
An arm, two arms, a leg, a pair. A head.
A face.
The mist-girl’s hair was long, though not quite as long as Evie’s. Her eyes were roughly the same shape. And in a deciding moment filled with tragic epiphanies, Evie realized who it was she was staring at.
It was the girl that Charles Ward had murdered.
As Evie stared at her, she saw other things. Movie clips played in her mind’s eye – a dorm room, a hand-me-down car, a pet dog, a bedroom in an old house kept exactly as it was when its owner left for college. “Diana Layton,” Evie whispered, somehow knowing the girl’s name. It was her life Evie had been seeing. Her powers as a seer were growing.
The girl studied Evie in odd, misty silence for several seconds and then the fog of her face moved forward and down and then back and up. She had just nodded.
Before Evie could do or even ask anything else, Diana’s strange misty arms came around from behind her back. In her foggy fingers, she held a small black leather-bound book.
Evie looked at the book. It was out of place in this mist-filled, astral space. It was solid and dark and there was something about it that felt so wrong, she wouldn’t have been able to describe the feeling if writing about it.
Diana’s ghost came forward, holding the book before her like a gift. But the book pushed an aura of evil ahead of it almost as if it were a warning.
Evie took an unsteady step back. Her legs were weak. She felt uncertain.
Diana stopped in her forward motion, hovering over the spot Evie had just vacated. All around them, the walls had more or less reformed, but in the room with her were dozens of the wispy ghosts. None of them possessed the tangible qualities of Diana’s ghost, but she knew what they were all the same.
Again, Diana held the book out, raising it a bit, insisting that Evie take it.
Evie looked from Diana’s strange empty fog-formed eyes to the book and back again. Then she straightened.
Take it, Evie. Take the goddamned thing and destroy it.
It wasn’t so much a mental command she gave herself as a shot of resolve. She reached out, grabbed the spine of the leather journal, and took it out of Diana’s wispy grasp.
It felt heavier than it should have. It felt positively evil. The book nearly vibrated in Evie’s grasp as she pulled it back to her and turned it over. Her fingers shook where they poised over the top right corner of the front cover. She’d never hesitated in opening a book before. She loved books. She was an author, after all.
But the otherworldly part of her – the part she was only now growing used to – knew that there were no words in this book worth reading.
Destroy it.
With that final bit of self-encouragement, Evie pried open the front cover. The first page was filled with red-brown ink symbols, ancient and strange. A whispering sound filled the air, ominous and low.
Evie grabbed the top of that first page and steeled her nerves. The book’s vibration became stronger, the whispers louder, and Evie felt her weak heart hammering away with everything it had left.
She braced herself – and ripped downward, tearing the blood-covered page from the book.
There was a flash, bright and red and somewhat painful, and Evie stumbled as the room around her disappeared to be replaced with a vast, empty landscape. To her left stood a crumbling mansion. In front of her were several figures in black, fighting in hand to hand combat.
The horizon stretched in cracked earth and distant lightning.
From inside the mansion came an insidious sound, a roar like that of a giant wounded beast. Evie’s blood ran cold. She stared at the mansion, waiting for the other shoe to drop even as she once more wrapped her fingers around the top of a page in the journal and tore it out.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Thane pulled himself off of the dusty, cracked ground and straightened once more to his full height. He was sore but alive. Sort of. He’d never really been alive. He’d simply been
created
one day by the incredible force of sheer need, and set to rule over a land that had grown too crowded with mistreated souls. It was a dirty job, right now in particular, but he guessed that someone had to do it.
A few yards away, the three Akyri he’d knocked out were coming-to and pulling themselves up off of the broken ground as well. Thane watched them through stormy eyes, his chest pumping with the effort he’d put forth in this fight.
In front of him, the demon who had temporarily gotten the upper hand with him gazed at Thane through red-ringed eyes that were both determined and contrite. The Akyri didn’t want to be here doing this. None of them did. But they were bound.
Thane!
D’Angelo’s vampire voice bounced off of the walls of his mind in what felt like a desperate last attempt at some kind of communication. Or a warning.
Thane watched the demon’s body tense, ready to charge and attack once more, when suddenly the Akyri went stiff, his eyes grew wide, and a field of lightning crackled to life and cocooned him. The Akyri cried out in pain, fell to his knees, and slapped his palm over the insidious warlock’s mark on his neck.
Thane looked to his left. The other Akyri were in the same boat. All were on their knees, their handsome faces contorted in pain, their hands clasping the sides of their necks.
The lightning continued for a few seconds more and then crackled away, leaving a group of heavily breathing men bent over in the dirt. Thane turned to watch the one closest to him. Slowly, the Akyri sat back on his heels and removed his hand from his neck. The mark was gone.
Thane’s eyes widened. He glanced at the others. The marks were
all
gone.
“What the –” he muttered. But then he heard a soft, female sound from behind him and spun in place. Maybe ten meters away, a beautiful young woman was kneeling on the parched ground, her head bent, and a small black book in her hands. Pages littered the ground around her, all of them glowing with a weak red light. The book itself, however, was encased in the same kind of crackling cocoon that had taken the Akyri.
Thane knew who she was at once. There was an aura around her that spelled it out for him as strongly as an actual introduction would have. She was D’Angelo’s queen. And the book she held was the one he had directed his Anime to retrieve. Whatever she’d just done to the book had somehow freed the Akyri from the warlock’s bonds.
Thane glanced over his shoulder at the Akyri. They were no longer watching him, however. They were no longer concerned with him in any way whatsoever. Every one of them was making his way toward the mansion – the mansion where they knew Charles Alexander Ward waited inside.
Thane didn’t have to wonder what was going through their heads. They had murder on the brain. It was wrong on so many levels to bind an Akyri, he wouldn’t know where to start.
But
they
did.
He would have smiled if it wasn’t for the woman. He turned back around to face her, concern thrumming through him. She was bent in such a way that her long, thick hair obscured her features now, and she appeared to be in pain. Both of her wrists were bound with gauze, but blood stained them anyway.
At once, he started in her direction, but he didn’t get far. The blast that expanded from behind him was so strong, it lifted him up off of the ground and threw him dozens of feet into the air. The impact felt solid, as if someone had sucker punched him in the back; it stole the wind from his lungs and sent stars swimming before his vision.
Thane’s eyes closed automatically, and his mind began to spiral. His body knew what to do, though. It began to evaporate. It felt strange; he’d done it before, but long, long ago. It was discombobulating. Suddenly, he was viewing the world through millions of tiny eyes, and they were blurry and indistinct. He wanted to shut them, but there were no eyes to shut, not really.
It was short lived, thankfully, and Thane stumbled as his tall form once more coalesced and solidified, from the tips of his boots to the top of his dark head six and a half feet up. He regained his balance, ran a hand through his dusty hair, and settled his gaze on the astral plane’s horizon.
In the distance, the illusory mansion Charles Ward had created was in flaming pieces that crackled noisily in the otherwise eerie silence.
*****
Roman’s father had been a warlock, and that meant that there was an inherent magic to Roman that he was able to mold and shape around him to suit his needs. Over the years, this magic had only grown stronger and, as things were at the moment, he was one of the most magically powerful beings on the planet.
Even so, there was only so much he could do against fire.
A fledgling vampire could not protect himself against it at all. It was only Roman’s incredible age that allowed him to pull the strength from within himself just then and form a shield around his body. He knew the shield wouldn’t last long. Fire was the ultimate destroyer for his kind. Keeping the shield up, in fact, was sure to drain him faster than anything else could, save perhaps walking unprotected in the daylight.
But he was happy to have it when Ward reared his head, drew a deep, rumbling breath, and then released a jet of red-black flame upon Roman the likes of which he had never seen.
The blaze tore at his shield, warping it with angry heat. Roman felt sweat break out along his brow, dampening his hair and clothes. The effort to maintain the essential, magical barrier between himself and the flames that would have consumed him was so difficult, it was like trying to hold a snowflake in your hand in the summer heat without allowing it to melt.
Ward’s wrathful blaze bludgeoned the force field, battering it with angry energy that little by little began to wear it away. Roman could feel it thinning. The air was heating up. His muscles began to ache as he pulled strength from his own physiology in order to hold the shield just a little while longer.
Thane!
He could only pray that Thane had gotten the message and that he wasn’t so overwhelmed with Akyri muscle, there was nothing he could do, because there was still no reply.
The shield around Roman crackled, throbbing in its final death throes.
But something moved behind Ward. It was difficult to see at first through Roman’s blurry sweat-soaked vision, but when he blinked and re-focused, he saw it again. Wisps of smoke. Tendrils of spirit.
The Anime were in the mansion.
He bared his teeth in pain and effort as he watched the Anime take the book from the table upon which it sat and disappear once more through the mansion’s windows.
Just a while longer. Just a little bit….
A flicker of flame shot through a newly formed hole in his shield over his chest, licking out to kiss his skin with its infernal heat. Roman’s strangled sound of pain was made through fangs that gleamed in the firelight and begged for blood.
I imagine this is what Malachi felt when he died, Your Majesty
, came the fierce, furious whisper in Roman’s mind.
Brought down with a bolt of lightning. And what is lightning but white hot fire?
Roman felt another breach form in his shield, but this one was fortunately at his back. It was fading fast and Ward’s power wasn’t waning, despite the now missing black book.
Roman glanced to where the book had been seconds ago.
And that’s why
, he thought. The book may have gone, but the string of magic that linked Ward to its powerful capabilities still existed; it ran from Ward’s dragon body right out the window through which the Animes had escaped.
As long as that book still existed, Ward would be as he was now.
Roman inhaled a hiss of pain as the rift in the force field over his chest widened and more of Ward’s evil fire made it through. As it was now, he wouldn’t scar. He was old enough that his vampire blood would heal the wound. But if this went on much longer – more than a few
seconds
longer – there would be no hope.
As it was, Roman felt himself faltering. His heart hammered hard, his lungs labored, and his eyes burned in his face with a fire almost as hot as Ward’s.
Just when he felt the last of his strength to withstand the flames slipping, he sensed the change around him. It was abrupt and startling. It felt like the very air gasped.
Ward drew back, his fire retreated with him, and suddenly everything was still. A beat passed. And another. Roman could hear himself breathing, each intake ragged and choked with smoke.
All of a sudden, Ward’s massive monster head reared and a screeching bellow of rage emitted from his dragon’s throat. The sound shook the walls and ramrodded through Roman like the ultimate warning bell.
Something was coming. Roman couldn’t tell what it was, but on the winds of time, the cold, metallic taste of it was drawing nearer. And this was Roman’s chance. Ward was clearly distracted. Whatever was happening was forcing the warlock to ease up on the fire. So, with nearly everything Roman had left, he wrapped his hands around the metal tail spike that kept him impaled to the wall behind him and pulled. He screamed as he did it, a sound of sheer strength and pain, and little by little, the spike retreated, leaving him bleeding and pierced.
But free.
Once the tip of the spike appeared from his abdomen, Roman willed his body into mist. At once, he was light and malleable, and the wounds he had suffered began to regenerate. He moved through the mansion’s living room, putting distance between himself and Ward.
Behind him, Ward’s massive body began to morph a second time, shrinking and writhing as the scales and tale disappeared and the color of his skin muted back to its normal hue. Roman wondered why, but he had never been one to waste his chances. In light of the development, he considered taking on solid form again so that he could finish Ward once and for all, and with his bare hands.