32. Max
MAX
T he train ran on magic and Stormglass. It sped along the border of Colorado and New Mexico, heading for the eastern fringe of the Zodiac Covenant.
Caspian, Aelindor, Drakken, their aides, two commanders, and senior war advisors packed the VIP carriage. The Spartans filled the other four cabins—battalions of the elite, with a dozen war mages embedded in the ranks. Enough power on this train to level a fortress.
The VIP cabin was built for function, not comfort. Bolted-down leather seats. A long center table. Armored windows letting in slats of gray daylight. Warded steel walls.
The heirs and their high-ranking officers huddled around the table. They studied a three-dimensional magical hologram floating above its surface—the continent rendered in light. Every strategic position marked. Every border drawn in sharp detail .
A dark-skinned woman in a plain shirt and trousers—the only person aboard not in uniform—swept her fingers along the eastern edge. There, a jagged column of black, smoky void cut through the terrain like a wound that refused to close.
I knew what that column represented. The DarkVeil.
A massive, uncrossable chasm cloaked in impenetrable shadow.
On the other side lay the rest of the old United States or its ruin.
For eighty-one years, east and west had been severed.
We didn’t know if the East Coast states still stood.
If they did, they wouldn’t know about us either.
“They came out of the DarkVeil.” The woman’s voice was tight. “First a couple. Then a squad. We suspect a horde behind them.” She paused. “The squad slaughtered two villages on approach.”
“Captain Jessa Holt,” Frost whispered beside me in the corner of the cabin.
“One of the three remaining eagle shifters. They handle long-range reconnaissance and intelligence extraction. We had five. Two were compromised and killed by the White Witch’s mages.
Of the three still alive, Captain Holt is the one here with us.
The other two are deep undercover: one in the Pallid Court, the other in the Haven. ”
I nodded. I needed to absorb the war’s shape as fast as possible. A decade underground had left me blind to everything above.
Aelindor let me sit in on this brief. A privilege I hadn’t earned by any measure even from the sidelines.
Neither he nor Caspian introduced me. But Frost was assigned to me.
Drakken hadn’t objected to my presence, or if he had, the argument had happened before I arrived.
Other than one glare when our gazes met by accident (or misfortune), the dragon prince ignored me.
Nikolai had stayed behind at the fortress. Word was, he wasn’t pleased about it.
I should have felt like an imposter. A first-year cadet in academy fatigues, wedged into a corner while generals plotted war.
But the feeling didn’t stick. Three heirs projected enough combined alpha power in this enclosed space to flatten most cadets.
The general and commanders added their own weight.
Yet I shrugged it off easily. Their power pressed against me the way storm pressed against a mountain, present, acknowledged, and the mountain remained.
I felt at home with the heirs. Natural as breathing.
“Nothing has come out of the DarkVeil ever since it first appeared,” Drakken said. “Just eternal darkness over the chasms. People went in. Didn’t come out. We stopped sending scouts after we lost dozens.”
“Are you saying these creatures aren’t mutants, Captain Holt?
” Commander Lee asked. She had deep brown skin and dark eyes that ran calculations behind every question.
Part mage, mixed heritage: East Asian and African.
Black fatigues with dark charcoal accents, silver rank insignia at the collar, the Leo crest in gold over her left breast. Drakken’s house.
“No, Commander Lee.” Captain Holt drew a sharp breath. “They’re demons. Not low caste either. The moment I sighted an archdemon among them, I flew straight to the fortress. I didn’t stay to help.”
She looked wrung out. She’d beaten the train to the heirs on wings alone.
“Right call, Jessa.” Caspian nodded. His hair was unkempt, stubble darkening his jaw.
The disheveled look should have undermined his authority.
Instead, it made him look like what he was: a man running on combat instinct since the alert dropped.
“You followed protocol. Reconnaissance assets don’t sacrifice themselves to defend a village.
You got the intel to us. That’s the mission. ”
“Are you sure, Captain Holt?” Commander Lee leaned forward. “Their kind hasn’t walked this earth in living memory. Only the White Witch’s inner circle has ever pulled off a summoning.”
“Positive identification, Commander.” Captain Holt’s voice was firm. “I’ve studied the archives on supernatural species since I was fourteen. Training protocols covered every branch. These match every illustration, every behavioral marker. I know what I saw.”
“Why now?” Caspian murmured, rubbing his jaw. “What changed?”
My heart hammered. Were the demons drawn to the one inside me? If I carried a demon, did that make me one? The thought hit like a stone dropped into cold water.
Then another realization. During the Sorting, the dragon fire had stripped my disguise and exposed me as a woman. But it hadn’t found the demon. The creature had taunted the dragon fire from inside me, and the dragon hadn’t reacted.
Did that mean the demon outranked a dragon? It was ancient—I’d always known that from the arcane knowledge it carried. Or maybe it wasn’t a demon at all.
I waited for the creature to comment on the news of demons pouring from the DarkVeil. Even a taunt would give me something to work with.
It only yawned. Mockingly.
“Everything’s changed,” Aelindor said. His gaze found me. I sat straighter. “We’ll know more about the demons coming out of the DarkVeil soon. We’ll be there in three hours.”
Three hours could pass in a blur. As the heirs continued their military brief, I peeked out the armored windows.
The landscape had shifted. Snow-capped mountains rose against the gray sky, peaks vanishing into low cloud.
The world after the Rupture was grim—wounded earth, barren wastes, the ruins of a civilization that had tried to kill itself.
But the mountains didn’t care about our wars.
They’d been here before the Q-bomb. They’d outlast us all.
I’d seen pictures of the old world. Skylines. Parks. Rivers that ran clean. Aelindor wanted to bring it back—rebuild what the Rupture had leveled, restore his home. But nothing got rebuilt in wartime. And wars had continued for centuries.
And if the White Witch won, there’d be nothing left to save.
The train banked through a curve. In the distance, a town of dusty yellow nestled in a valley. We’d passed a dozen satellite villages, camp cities, and towns since our departure. The demons hadn’t reached this far. It was our mission to make sure they didn’t.
“This puts another front on a line that’s already stretched to breaking,” Aelindor said, a distant look in his blue eyes. He got that way when things turned dire. How desperately I wanted to shoulder his burdens. They weighed heavily on him, on all the heirs.
“We’re the center kingdom.” Drakken shook his head. “New Columbia plays neutral in the north. We face hostiles on three borders. Mutants from the wastes. The White Witch to the west. And now demons from the east.”
“I wonder if this demon invasion has anything to do with Xander.” Commander Marco spoke from the end of the table.
Marco, the pale-skinned vampire commander, had ridden with Team Wraith into the Scorched Wastes, the unit that had accompanied the heirs and found me half-dead there. He wore oxblood fatigues, silver rank insignia, the Sagittarius crest over his left breast. Nikolai’s stand-in for this deployment.
“Why do you think this might be the Collector’s doing?” Commander Lee asked.
“Xander rules the southern kingdom,” Frost whispered to me. Aelindor had definitely tasked the aide with keeping me current.
“I know the name,” I whispered back. “But not much beyond it. ”
Captain Holt’s gray eyes swept over me. The officers had glanced my way, assessing and cataloguing. They knew who I was: the cadet who’d wrecked the Sorting, stripped bare by dragon fire. My power remained unknown, and unknowns made soldiers itch.
Holt had missed the Sorting, so her confusion was simpler: what was a first-year cadet doing in this room? She didn’t ask, though.
No one would question Aelindor.
“Xander claimed the old state of Texas,” Frost continued. “His followers call him the Saint. Everyone else calls him the Collector. He hoards anything rare or priceless: artifacts, paintings, vintage cars, wine, animals.” A pause. “And people.”
My skin crawled. My parents had drilled one rule into me about leaders: distrust anyone who wraps power in scripture. There’s a thin line between saints and sinners.
Across the table, Commander Marco answered.
“The DarkVeil borders three territories—ours, part of New Columbia, and part of the Haven. Captain Holt reported the demons emerged from the triangular junction where our border meets Xander’s and the Veil.
Yet they advanced straight into our territory.
Not his.” He let the implication sit. “Our intel says Xander has employed summoners of late.”
“Nikolai’s intelligence and my own recon both confirm Xander’s intent to move against us,” Caspian said.
“Part of New Mexico sits in his territory, and he’s pushing to expand.
There’ve been skirmishes along the southern line for months.
He’s getting impatient. The White Witch hasn’t launched a major offensive against us in a while. ”
“The White Witch is waiting,” Aelindor said.
Caspian frowned at him. “For what?”
“What we’ve all been waiting for,” Aelindor said vaguely. He didn’t elaborate.
His gaze touched mine. My heart skipped an icy beat. I prayed whoever the fuck was waiting had nothing to do with me.
“Xander’s been content to let the White Witch and us bleed each other dry,” Drakken said. “Hoping to swoop in after. Preach peace and love on the surface. Armed takeover underneath.”
“Is it true he keeps a living head in his collection?” one of the advisors asked.
“The head belongs to an oracle.” Aelindor’s voice went flat. “Xander and his sorcerers used dark magic to preserve it. Keep it alive after they murdered her. The oracle is now trapped in a glass case for eternity, leaving Xander the sole audience for her visions.”
I shuddered. That was a terrible fate. I hoped I’d never meet this evil Collector.
The train burst from a tunnel. The sky darkened. Thick clouds churned overhead, pressing down. And there, across the vast plain running parallel to the tracks, was the DarkVeil.
An unbroken curtain of shadows stretched from ground to sky. Living darkness. It ran to the horizon in both directions. Within it, deep chasms dropped into eternity.
Even from this distance, I felt a sudden pull .
Fuck no. That wasn’t home.
A second later, I understood that the longing came from the creature in me. It felt something in that void. Recognition. Kinship.
Icy water crashed through me. I shouldn’t have come. The Sorting had missed the creature in me, but the DarkVeil wasn’t a test. It was judgment. If whatever ancient evil lurking within the Veil sensed what lived inside me, and if those demons recognized one of their own?—
My palms went slick. My throat closed. I gripped the seat’s edge to keep my hands from shaking, forced my breathing steady, my face blank. Showing my turmoil and fear in front of the heirs would be my downfall.
Beneath the mask, every scenario I ran ended badly.
Shit.
Then, suddenly, a swarm of demonic things poured across the plain and surged toward the train.
A blink, and they were already here. Slamming into the carriages.
Clawing and tearing at the armored walls.
Before I could shoot to my feet, a pair of red eyes locked onto mine through the cracking window.
Not Nikolai’s crimson. His were predatory but magnetic. These were hollow. Vile.
“Demons!” I screamed.
“We’re under attack!” Drakken roared.