Chapter 24 #3
“This whole elaborate setup, the sacrifices, the spirit you pulled through to make me... what did you call it? Motivated? You went to a lot of trouble. Which means you can’t just force us.”
She’s right. I can see it in my father’s face. He needs us to choose this.
“Are you so sure about that?” Sabra suddenly speaks up. I’d almost forgotten she was here. “Maybe it would be true we needed your consent—if you hadn’t already cracked the barrier. You left a rift the size of the Grand Canyon pointing the way thru.”
Then Sabra grabs Ammit who screeches at her rough handling as Sabra drags her and walks over to where we stand in front of my father over the sacrifice in the center of the atrium glass.
“Sabra, stop,” Phoenix pleads. “Vlad is dead. You’re free!”
But Sabra just keeps talking in a dead monotone, as if Vlad’s compulsion lives on even though he’s a pile of smoldering bones.
“A crack so wide you’ve made this world the nexus point, like he said.” She hikes a thumb over her shoulder at my father, who grins expansively as he watches the plans he manipulated play out before him like the puppet master he is.
“Spirits are drawn here.” Sabra says, right in Phoenix’s face, a death grip on Ammit who still struggles to get away. “So thanks for that.”
Phoenix frowns, still clearly upset, but there’s something like confusion as she watches her best friend, brows drawn together.
“You think you know everything about how I got here,” Phoenix whispers, and I’m not sure if she’s talking to Sabra or my father.
“You know about the blood bargains and the generations of vampires I used to build my power. But you don’t know what it was like before that.
You’ve never been to the place I came from. ”
She takes a step forward, an inch away from Sabra’s face, ignoring Ammit who still cries and squirms in Sabra’s relentless hold.
“I existed in a dark, frozen realm where every moment was a misery,” Phoenix says. “For longer than my memory goes back, there’s just cold beyond cold. Darkness beyond darkness. There was no light, or warmth, or hope. Only endless hunger.”
I can hear the truth in her voice and I understand now why we’ve always felt like such kindred spirits. She understood me from the first day she pulled me from that tree.
“I clawed my way out of that hell,” Phoenix continues. “I made bargains I’m not proud of. I used people I shouldn’t have. All because I couldn’t stand another second in that frozen abyss.”
Phoenix’s face snaps toward my father now, and her eyes are blazing.
“You’re right. I did crack the barrier. I found the way through.” Her voice drops to something cold and deadly. “And I can find the way back.”
My father’s expression shifts from amusement to annoyance. “You think you can send me home so the angels will destroy me? You forget who is the pawn here, and who the predator. I am outside the runes, little fool. You are the animal caught in the trap.”
“Enough stalling,” Sabra says, and then with the hand not holding Ammit, she lurches forward and slices Phoenix’s palm with a ceremonial-looking knife she suddenly produces from her sleeve.
I lunge only a moment after Sabra does. But Sabra clearly anticipated my move, because she spins her knife on me, bringing the razor-sharp blade down to slice across my cheek. I ignore the pain and grab Phoenix, yanking her away from Sabra.
Phoenix and I stumble backwards, but apparently Sabra’s gotten all she needed, because while we’re still in shock from her sudden actions, she’s busy driving the same ceremonial knife into Ammit’s gut.
Ammit screams and looks down in shock as blood soaks the front of her white linen shirt, the blade embedded deep in her belly.
Sabra yanks the long knife free without mercy.
Ammit stumbles forward, hands pressed against her gushing stomach as she falls to her knees. Blood pools beneath her on the marble floor, spreading in dark rivulets that follow the grooves between tiles.
“Sabra!” Phoenix cries, cradling her sliced hand to her chest. “What are you doing?”
Sabra glares in her direction but doesn’t answer.
The runes beneath our feet begin to shift.
The golden symbols that make up the circle start rotating in opposite directions, inner rings moving clockwise while outer rings spin counter.
They pick up speed, becoming a dizzying blur of light and motion.
The air pressure in the atrium drops so suddenly my ears pop.
Sabra lifts the bloodied stone knife above her head and begins to chant.
The words are guttural and ancient, in the same language I heard her use when we first worked magic together in the courtyard.
Her voice rises and falls in a rhythm that feels older than time itself, syllables heavy with meaning I can’t understand but somehow recognize deep in my bones.
Ammit gasps. Her hands fall away from her stomach wound. Her head tilts back, eyes rolling white as her mouth opens in a silent scream. For a terrible moment, she goes completely rigid.
Then she collapses onto her side, utterly still.
Dead.
But Sabra doesn’t stop chanting. If anything, her voice grows stronger, more insistent. The spinning runes glow brighter, shifting from gold to white-blue, the color of winter starlight.
Ammit’s body jerks once. Twice.
Her chest expands with a deep, shuddering breath.
Her eyes snap open, but they’re different now. Not the predatory, hungry gaze of the goddess who was just possessing this body.
These eyes are wide with wonder and confusion, filling with tears as they land on Sabra.
“Sabra?” The woman’s voice is hoarse, trembling. “Baby girl?”
Sabra drops the knife. It clatters against the marble as she runs forward, falling to her knees beside the woman who no longer seems to be Ammit. “Mom!”
What? I thought Sabra’s mom died years ago. And the woman is far too young to actually be her mother.
But Sabra pulls still pulls the woman into her arms fiercely, both of them crying now. “You came back, Mom. You really came back.”
“Of course I came back.” The woman’s hands shake as she reaches up to touch Sabra’s face, as if she can’t quite believe she’s real. “I promised you I would. I promised. You trusted the grimoire.”
They cling to each other, rocking slightly. Sabra sobs into her mother’s shoulder in broken gasps. The woman holds her back just as tight, whispering soothing words I can’t quite make out over the sound of their weeping.
“What is this?” My father’s voice cuts through the moment like a blade. His handsome face is twisted with fury as he stares at the two embracing women. “What have you done?”
Phoenix takes the moment of distraction to press her bleeding palm against my cheek, combining our blood. The sensation sends an electric shock through me.
Our mingled blood drips onto the marble floor, and where it lands, symbols begin to glow. Not the golden runes of my father’s magic.
These are different. Darker. Hungrier.
They’re intuitive blood mage runes, mixed with angelic runes her magic is pulling from me. I empty my mind except for a permissive, giving attitude aimed directly at her to ease the passage of power from me to her.
The temperature in the atrium drops so suddenly I can see my breath.
“What are you doing?” my father demands from the edge of the circle. For the first time, he sounds uncertain.
Phoenix doesn’t answer him. She’s focused entirely on Sabra’s renewed chanting, which has shifted to a new rhythm now that her mother is safe in her arms. I feel the blood that clotted on my cheek suddenly begin to flow in a steady drip, drip, drip onto the floor.
Around us, the six dead bodies of the students begin to stir. Not the mangled one in the center atrium display. But all the others.
The students whose bodies were arranged around the rune circle’s perimeter. There’s been so much going on, I’ve barely given them thought in all the chaos, but now I see them. Six bodies, positioned at precise intervals.
They don’t stand up. Instead, something rises from them. Translucent forms, shimmering and insubstantial. The spirits of the murdered students, pulled back from wherever they’ve been trapped.
They look confused at first, disoriented. Then their eyes find my father, and their expressions shift to something terrible. Recognition. Understanding. Rage.
“We didn’t choose this,” one of them says. Her voice echoes strangely, like it’s coming from very far away. “But this, we choose.”
They move toward my father in perfect unison. They aren’t walking—they have no feet. They simply drift, like smoke on a current of air.
My father actually takes a step back. I’ve never seen him retreat from anything in my entire existence.
“This won’t work,” he says, but his voice has lost its confidence. “I’m eternal. You can’t—”
“We can try,” another student’s spirit says.
They circle him now, and I can see something forming between them. A glowing blue-white net, woven from their combined essence. It’s beautiful and terrible at the same time.
“Fools!” my father cries, waving his hand toward us.
Except that whatever he intended to happen clearly doesn’t, because frowning doesn’t even begin to describe the fury that takes over his face.
“What did you do to me?” he screams.
Did he just try to use his Devourer’s Fire on us? Clearly Phoenix or Sabra or something stopped it. It sure as hell wasn’t me.
“Your son’s blood protects us,” Sabra calls to my father, voice triumphant as she clings to Ammit, who she just called Mom.
I have no idea what the hell is going on, but maybe Sabra is on our side after all?
Maybe she really was freed from Vlad’s compulsion as soon as my father killed him.
Stupid move on his part, to let his pride get the better of him and forget that a mere human witch might have any power to make countermoves. But he always did underestimate the humans. And pride was the sin that always did him in with each power grasp in the past.
Phoenix looks at me, and the trust in her eyes makes my chest ache. “Your father was right. I’m the crack in the barrier. I’m the way through. But I can feel it now. I’m not just the crack. I can channel it, too.”
Understanding slowly dawns. Father created the circumstances to finish what we couldn’t last time we tried this.
Or maybe Phoenix has finally just fully come into her own.
Though I suspect being the conduit will mean opening herself up to that dark realm again.
And her worst fear. Because there’s a very real possibility she’ll be pulled through herself.
No. I won’t let it happen. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her.
She looks at the circle, then at Sabra, then at my father who is starting to realize what we’re planning. He tries to back away, but he’s caught in the glowing net of the fallen students, who drag him, screaming, past the runes, into the dark circle of his own creation.