Chapter 23 #3
Director Orion straightened her notes. “And now,” she said, her voice carrying to every corner of the vaulted room, “it is my distinct honor to present the final shield team of the evening.”
I stopped breathing.
“The Horizon Shield. Axis: Jupiter Black. Designation: Ophiuchus.”
The room erupted despite the director’s request otherwise. People were on their feet. Cameras flashed so fast the ballroom strobed white and gold.
My knees went weak. For one terrible second, I thought I might actually fall over. Then Percy’s hand was at the small of my back, steadying me, and the bond flooded with warmth. I straightened my spine, lifted my chin, and let them guide me toward the stage.
We moved as a unit. Nine men in black and silver, flanking me on all sides, and me in the center, Noodle draped around my neck. I felt every stare like a physical touch. Some were awed, some were curious. Charles Callahan was watching from the front row, his expression unreadable.
I kept my gaze fixed on the stage, on the next step, and the next.
We climbed the short staircase, and the applause swelled again.
I took my place at the center of the stage, my shield fanning out behind me in a loose crescent.
Lucas and Percy stood at my shoulders, one on each side, but neither of them stepped forward.
They’d decided this weeks ago. Tonight, Draco would speak for the team.
He stepped forward, and the crowd settled. In his perfectly fitted suit, with his silver-white hair catching the light and his violet eyes alight, he looked like something out of a painting.
“Members of the Assembly, honored guests, shield brothers and sisters. Tonight, you witness something that has not occurred in recorded Aelari history. Two shield teams—Nightfall, and Stardust—have chosen to merge.” A murmur ran through the crowd.
“Tonight, we are ten. One axis, nine bonded, one purpose. We have chosen the name Horizon Shield because that is what we are—the edge of what is known, and the beginning of what comes next.” He turned slightly, and his gaze found mine. “We stand with Jupiter Black.”
The applause started again, louder this time, rolling through the ballroom like thunder. I could feel it in my chest, in the soles of my feet. Draco stepped back, rejoining the crescent behind me, and his mind brushed against mine through the bond— ‘You’re doing fine.’
Director Orion returned to the podium. She was smiling, but there was a tightness around her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“Thank you, Draco. A remarkable announcement.” She turned to the audience, spreading her hands.
“And now, the Assembly has requested a special demonstration. Miss Black and the Horizon Shield have prepared something extraordinary for us tonight.”
My stomach dropped through the floor. She turned to me, and for just a moment, the mask slipped. Her smile became something real, something warm and encouraging. She stepped aside, clearing the center of the stage, and gave me a small, almost imperceptible nod.
I stepped forward, the bond surged around me, nine threads of magic, nine anchors.
I closed my eyes. The first portal opened at chest height, and I held it there, fingers splayed, feeling the familiar tug of spatial distortion at the edge of my awareness.
The bond hummed, feeding me a trickle of magic from each of them, and I took it greedily.
I made a second portal. Then a third, and a fourth. Each one snapped into existence with a soft crack of displaced air, orbiting the invisible center point I’d designated. The temperature in the ballroom plummeted. I heard someone gasp. Someone else whispered, ”Oh my god....”
Ten portals. Twenty. Thirty. My hands were steady. My breathing was controlled. But beneath the surface, the magic was a living thing, a current threatening to rip out of my grip if I lost focus for even a second.
Forty. Forty-five.
Sweat beaded along my hairline as my jaw locked.
The harmonic climbed, a frequency that made the crystal glasses on the nearest tables vibrate.
I could feel the bond tugging at my mental focus, Percy’s armor magic wrapping around mine, Lucas’s water tempering the heat, Aiden’s fire feeding the stability.
They were doing exactly what they were supposed to do. Holding me up. Holding me together.
Fifty.
People were on their feet, whistling, cheering, screaming.
I heard someone, a woman’s voice, shouting, “It’s real!
Oh my god, it’s real!” The applause rolled through the space like a tidal wave, crashing against the stone walls and bouncing back, doubling, tripling.
Camera flashes strobed so fast I could barely make out faces.
I held the portals open for a full minute.
Sixty seconds that felt like an eternity.
My arms shook. My knees threatened to buckle.
But I held, because for the first time in my life, I was showing them something they’d only ever dreamed about.
Not a myth. Not a bedtime story. Not something locked away in ancient texts that the Assembly kept under glass. This was real, and there was hope.
I started to merge them. The smaller portals folded inward, their light bleeding together. Twenty became ten. Ten became five. Five became one massive, roiling sphere of silver-white energy that pulsed and breathed like a living heart.
The applause faltered, then surged again, louder than before.
People were crying. Actual tears, streaming down faces I didn’t recognize.
I caught Tala’s eye across the room. She was standing, hands clasped under her chin, tears tracking mascara down her cheeks.
Malakai beside her had his arm around her shoulders, his own eyes bright.
The merged portal stabilized, and then widened.
The light burned white-hot for one blinding second, and then the image on the other side resolved.
A vast, endless desert of rust-colored sand and rock stretched to every horizon.
Craters pockmarked the surface, and in the distance, a mountain rose so high it scraped against the thin, pinkish atmosphere.
The sky above the pinkish line was black and star-dusted.
Mars. I’d opened a portal to fucking Mars.
People were out of their chairs, rushing toward the stage, phones raised, mouths hanging open. I heard my father’s voice cut through the noise, saying, “That’s my girl! That’s my baby girl!”—and I almost laughed, almost cried, almost collapsed right there on the stage.
I let them look through the portal, but not touch it. Let them see what an Ophis could do. Let the Assembly watch from their front-row seats and understand, for the first time, that Earth was not the final frontier.
I took a breath, steadying myself, preparing to close the portal with one clean, elegant snap. My hands rose, fingers splaying, and I reached for the threads of the bond.
The sound that shattered the ballroom was not applause.
It was a crack. Like the entire building had been split down the middle.
The floor bucked beneath my feet. The chandeliers swayed, crystal shards raining down like daggers.
The temperature plummeted, not the cold of my portals, but something darker, something that sucked the warmth out of the air and replaced it with nothing.
Darkness descended.
Dozens—no, hundreds—of pitch-black tears ripped open across the ballroom.
They bloomed from the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and through them, the bane poured out.
They came in a flood. Multi-limbed constructs of dark matter, bodies shifting and reforming as they moved, no fixed anatomy, no faces, just limbs and teeth and an overwhelming, soul-crushing wrongness.
Class Two and Class Three, from the look of them.
Dozens. Hundreds. The room filled with them in seconds.
People scrambled. Chairs overturned. Glass shattered. The crowd surged toward the exits in a panicked stampede, but the bane were already between them and the doors, cutting off escape routes with walls of writhing shadow.
I slammed my portal closed and the Mars desert vanished, and the last of the starlight winked out, plunging the stage into near-darkness broken only by the red emergency lights and the sickly darkness of the bane portals.
“Formation!” Percy shouted. He was already at my right shoulder, crimson light blazing around his fists, his eyes burning red. “Now!”
My shield moved as one. Percy and Aiden at my flanks. Draco and Eris behind me. Lucas and Rowan on the outer edges. Theo and Phoenix and Jamie filling the gaps. The bond locked into place, all nine of us connected mind to mind seamlessly, as if we were suddenly one soul in ten different bodies.
Across the ballroom, every other shield team was doing the same.
The Duskfall Shield had already engaged, Cassia’s water magic slamming into a cluster of bane near the east wall.
The Sapphire Shield formed a defensive ring around a group of civilians.
The Emberlight Shield was cutting a path toward the main exit, clearing a corridor for the fleeing crowd.
But the bane kept coming. They poured through the black portals in waves, likely drawn by the astronomical surge of magic I’d been building for months. My power. My starlight. I’d been a beacon, and they were starving for it.
Starlight erupted from my palms. Two short swords formed in my grip, each one a blade of compressed starlight, humming with enough energy to cut through dark matter like butter.
The silk dress I wore was beautiful and completely useless. I grabbed the hem and ripped it. The fabric tore with a satisfying shred, splitting from my ankles to mid-thigh, and I kicked the excess away, baring my legs to the cold air.
The first bane reached the stage. It was a Class Three, a massive, six-limbed monster, its body a shifting mass of darkness. It moved on too many legs, too fast, and it was coming straight for me.