Chapter 35 #2
Her laugh was brittle as the shroud lifted, revealing the streets lined with hollowed elementals.
Some wore familiar faces, others were strangers, but none of them were with us anymore.
Ice skittered down my spine. Their eyes were wrong.
Empty. No flicker of self. No resistance.
She had their souls trapped in tiny glass jars while she siphoned their power and played with their bodies like puppets.
Power not their own pulsed through them in a sickening rhythm. The stench of rotting meat made me gag. She must have had one hell of a shield up to hide this from supernatural senses.
“Oh God,” Liz breathed beside me.
Eloise stepped through the elementals. She looked radiant, but it was a ruse. Her face flickered between the sallow reality and the glamor she was projecting.
White Castle burned behind her, not with flame, but with warped magic that peeled paint from walls and left the air tasting metallic and wrong.
She smiled when she saw me. “There you are,” she drawled, as if she had found me hiding in the kitchen during one of her legendary parties. “I was beginning to think you’d hide.”
Hudson growled low in his chest, power rolling off him like a storm front. “This ends now.”
Eloise laughed. “Oh, Principal. This is just the beginning.”
The hollowed elementals moved. Not charging. Not rushing. Advancing. In perfect unison.
Hudson’s reaper steel flashed beside me. Suit up—we’re at war.
He met them head-on, his scythe slicing across their chests. They should have fallen. Should have screamed. Should have died. But they didn’t, because they were already gone, and the part of them that felt pain was held hostage.
An arc of elemental magic shot out from my grandmother. Liz and I raised our hands and uttered a deflection spell. The vibrations made my bones ache because, damn, she was channeling a huge reserve of power.
“Cora,” Robert shouted from behind me. He barreled through the spirits hovering behind us in a line and grimaced as he brushed against the other side. “I got most of the folks out.”
“You see, Granddaughter, no one has to die. Just give back what you stole,” Eloise called.
“Most?” I whispered to Robert.
He grimaced. A door to the left of us creaked open and Karen, the owner of The Pit, strode out, brandishing a shotgun. Strapped to her waist were a bunch of pouches containing goodness knows what, and she’d looped a clip of ammunition across her torso
Rockhard and Lenson were a step behind her.
“Most,” Robert reiterated.
Rockhard grinned. “Cora, looking forward to the wedding.”
Why was he talking to me about the wedding? This was hardly the time or place.
“Don’t look at us like that,” Lenson grumbled. “Everyone needs something to look forward to, especially when everything has gone to shit.”
“And my invite seems to have gotten lost,” Karen snapped. “Given I’m responsible for your meet cute, I’d expected a little more gratitude.”
“It was overlooked. It won’t happen again,” Rebecca stated.
Karen grinned, pointed her gun at Eloise, and squinted. “Tell me again why I can’t shoot the bitch.”
“Waste of ammunition,” Rockhard said.
Dave and Ezra began battling the elementals with their fists.
Bones crunched, but nothing kept them down.
Every strike that should have dropped them only slowed them for half a second.
Their bodies bent in impossible ways, bones cracking and resetting as if pain had been edited out of existence. But the living were starting to tire.
Harry rolled his sleeves up and grinned. “Only the dead can fight the dead.”
Was that our new motto? Had I missed the vote?
Harry’s fist slammed into an elemental, and the body went down like a sack of potatoes. Oh, that was our new motto. As you were.
I grimaced as Eloise hit us with another wave that made my knees buckle. Lenson caught my elbow. “I got you.”
“Oof, she’s packing some punch,” Rockhard said.
“This isn’t combat,” Dave snarled, slamming an elemental into a parked car hard enough to cave the door in. “It’s slaughter.”
“For you,” Eloise corrected.
The spirits surged forward, drawn by the carnage. I felt their panic clawing at my spine. They wanted to help, but they didn’t know how.
Harry took down another elemental. Okay, we were doing this. I was doing this. Fuck.
I closed my eyes and made a decision that would absolutely come back to haunt me. Literally. “Stay with me,” I whispered. I dragged Donn’s power through my veins and slammed it outward.
The veil thinned. Ghosts screamed as gravity claimed them.
One by one, they solidified. Flesh snapped into place.
Breath hit lungs that hadn’t drawn air in decades.
The spirits gasped, staggered, cried out in shock and pain and wonder.
Then, they looked at the hollowed elementals and, more importantly, the woman at the center of it all.
They swept forward in a wave, channeling all of their fear and rage into a fight for their afterlifes. They’d been held here or dragged back from their peace, and they were pissed.
The fight turned brutal, and the street exploded in violence.
Eloise retaliated with uncontrolled magic that scorched the earth and shattered stone.
Rebecca stayed close, taking down anyone who got too near, while Karen shouted with glee every time she threw potion bombs at the hollowed-out elementals, which made them explode.
My grandmother’s hold was slipping. We were winning.
But I felt it all. Every solidified soul was a drain, a thread pulled tight around my ribs.
Our eyes met across the street—Roberts women on opposite sides of a war.
Her gaze flickered to the left and her lips curled up. She thrust her hand toward Rebecca.
“No,” I shouted.
Power slammed into my friend’s chest, vicious and precise.
Rebecca gasped, her back arching as her heart stuttered beneath the force.
Ezra roared her name. I didn’t think. I reacted.
My magic snapped around Rebecca’s heart before she’d even fallen to her knees.
Ezra abandoned the fight and caught the woman he loved in his arms.
Rebecca collapsed, but her heart kept beating. Once. Twice. Alive. But the cost was immediate. Spirits screamed as their bodies unraveled. Flesh faded. Weight vanished. They were yanked back into incorporeal form, ripped from solidity like it had never been theirs to keep.
Eloise watched it all with dawning delight. “Oh,” she breathed. “There it is. Love was always your weakness. I taught you better than that.” She turned to me, eyes bright and knowing. “You can only hold one miracle at a time. How fascinating.”
I staggered, my vision blurring as the truth landed like a blade.
She smiled wider before vanishing, her words left trailing behind. “I’ll see you soon, Granddaughter.”
The magic collapsed in on itself. Hollowed elementals fell, finally inert. White Castle stood broken. Rebecca lay breathing. Barely.
Hudson was at my side in an instant, arms wrapping around me as my knees buckled. “Cora. Stay with me.”
“I’m here,” I whispered, though the world was already dimming. “I’m still here.”
But Eloise had learned something vital tonight, and next time, she wouldn’t leave us breathing.