Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
LAYDEN
“Layden,” Phoenix says. Her voice is strained. Tight with pain or effort. “I need your power now.”
I don’t ask questions or hesitate. I just summon my runes. But not the usual ones I use for simple magic. I match Phoenix’s, calling the darkest runes. The symbols of my true nature as Famine. As one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As the creature my father made me to be.
I’ve spent so long trying not to be this. Trying to be anything other than the monster he shaped from stolen light.
But right now, Phoenix needs the Horseman.
So I give it to her. All of it.
Runes appear in the air around us. Glowing blue-white so intense it hurts to look directly at them.
They are symbols of deprivation. Of want.
Of endless hunger that can never be satisfied.
They represent every moment I spent buried and starving for connection.
Every century I walked as a weapon while craving love.
And she directs them toward my father.
He feels it immediately. I can see it in his face. The shock. The pain. The runes aren’t attacking him physically. No, they’re doing something worse. They’re severing his connection to this realm’s energy and starving him of the power that keeps him anchored here.
Instead of being real and solid, he’s becoming just a memory of something that once was.
“What are you doing?” he gasps. His form flickers. Becomes less solid.
“Starving you of everything that makes you real in this realm,” I say.
My voice sounds strange to my own ears. Colder.
More certain. More like the creature he wanted me to be.
“This is the monster you made, isn’t it?
Let me show you true starvation, Father.
Let me show you what it means to hunger for something you can never have. ”
The runes tighten around him like chains. My father tries to break free, thrashing against the constraints. But the students’ spirits hold him ruthlessly in place. The combination of their net and my runes is working. He’s weakening. I can feel it and see it as he flickers with translucence.
But it’s not enough. He’s still too strong. Too ancient. Even starved of this realm’s energy, he still has power from the Great Hall flowing through him.
“Phoenix,” I grit out. “Now.”
She nods. She’s been waiting, preparing herself for what comes next.
At her extended hand, the glass around the central atrium shatters and she steps into the center of the circle where the sacrificed body lies.
Her bleeding hand leaves a trail of crimson droplets behind her.
Each one glows as it hits the marble. She kneels down beside the quartered body of the last dead student and presses her bleeding palm against the cold flesh.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to the victim. Her voice breaks on the words. “I’m so sorry this happened to you. But I’m going to make it count, I promise.”
Then she begins to speak.
The language that comes from her mouth is nothing I’ve ever heard before.
Not words, exactly. More like sounds that shouldn’t exist. They hurt to hear, digging deep inside my mind and reminding me of the cold dread of emptiness that comes when you hunger and are not fed.
The endless craving that becomes your entire existence.
Phoenix’s eyes roll back in her head, showing only whites. Then the whites turn black. Completely, utterly black, so that it’s like looking into a void.
The temperature plummets even further. Frost spreads across every surface. The shattered glass. The marble floor. My own skin. I can feel ice crystals forming in my lungs with each breath.
“Phoenix,” I say. Alarm courses through me. “Phoenix, can you hear me?”
She doesn’t respond. Her body is still kneeling on the floor, hand pressed against the dead student. But something about her presence has changed. She, like my father, is becoming less substantial. More like the students’ spirits.
Like she’s not entirely here anymore.
No. No, this is wrong.
She’s going too far. Reaching too deep into that dark realm.
“Phoenix!” I shout, my voice cracking with fear.
Her head turns toward me, but the movement’s all wrong. Too deliberate. Like she’s trying to remember how to be human. When she speaks, her voice echoes like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. From somewhere impossibly far away.
“I can feel it,” she says. Each word reverberates. “The dark realm. It remembers me.”
Oh God. This is what she was before she clawed her way into this world. This is the hunger that drove her to make those blood bargains. The desperate spirit that would do anything to escape the cold. She’s opening herself up to it again.
“The dark is so cold,” she continues. Still in that echoing voice that makes my bones ache. “So hungry. And it wants me back.”
Her hand is still pressed against the dead body. It begins to glow. Not with light because that is not the right word. It is more like an absence of light so profound it creates its own presence. Like a hole in reality.
A hole opens in the air above the sacrificed body, too. Just a small one at first. No bigger than my fist. Through it, I can see nothing. Literally nothing. An absence so complete it makes my mind want to slide away from looking at it.
The dark realm.
Phoenix’s home realm. The frozen hell she escaped from.
And it is such a hungry, hungry darkness.
I can feel it pulling. Not at me. Not at my father. At Phoenix.
The hole widens, growing larger with each passing second, and Phoenix is being drawn toward it.
Her body leans forward. Her shoulders hunch. She is fighting against the pull but losing.
The dark realm recognizes her. It wants to reclaim what it lost twenty-nine years ago when she was born into this world.
“Phoenix!” I grab her shoulders, trying to pull her back. But my hands pass right through her arms. It’s like trying to grab smoke. “Phoenix, close it! You’re being pulled through!”
“Can’t,” she gasps. The word comes out strangled, but at least there’s still a little bit of my Phoenix left. “Need to... push him through first... or it closes... with him still here...”
I look at my father. He’s still fighting against the students’ spirits and my runes, but steadily, he’s also being dragged toward the hole. Toward the darkness.
The spirits tighten their net and begin dragging him closer to the portal Phoenix opened.
But Phoenix is being pulled faster. She’s going to go through before we can push him through. And then the portal will close. My father will stay here. Phoenix will be trapped in that frozen hell forever.
No. Absolutely not.
I will not let that happen.
I summon more runes. Every representation of starvation that I have carried inside me. I wrap them around myself first, letting them sink into my skin and fill me with their power.
Then I reach out to the hungry darkness pulling at Phoenix.
And I show it something even tastier.
With the dark power bursting through my veins, I direct it toward my father.
I show it his vast reserves of power. His angelic essence. His eternal life force that has burned for ages beyond counting.
I show the darkness that he is warm where Phoenix is now cold. She’s empty now, but he is full. He’s everything the darkness craves.
The pull shifts. Subtle at first and then more and more intense.
The darkness recognizes my father as a more substantial feast. It begins pulling at him instead, drawing him toward the hole with a force that makes the air crackle.
“What—” my father gasps. “What did you do?”
“Gave the Hunger a different target,” I say. My voice is rough. Strained from the effort of redirecting that terrible pull. “You wanted me to be Famine? Let me show you what that really means. Hunger recognizes hunger. And that darkness is starving.”
The students’ spirits surge forward. They understand what we are doing now. They wrap their net tighter around my father. Begin pulling him toward the hole with renewed purpose. Toward the darkness that is now focused entirely on consuming him.
Phoenix’s eyes clear. The black fades back to her normal color.
She gasps and falls backwards to the floor away from the darkness at the center of the student’s body and the swirling darkness above him.
She looks at me with shocked understanding even as my father continues fighting.
Of course he does. He’s been fighting against his fate since the moment he was spawned.
But the combined force of Sabra’s magic, my runes redirecting the Hunger, the students’ fury, and Phoenix’s connection to the dark realm is too much.
He is being dragged toward that darkness nevertheless. Inch by inch.
But then, right when we’ve almost got him to the hole, his hand shoots out like a striking snake. He catches my wrist in a grip that feels like it might shatter bone.
“If I’m going,” he snarls, “you’re coming with me, son.”
He yanks hard and I’m pulled off my feet, sent stumbling with him toward the darkness. I try to catch my footing but his grip on my hand is inextricable, and the forces we’ve put in place are driving him with a motion it’s too late to stop towards the hole.
I see Phoenix’s eyes widen. Panic floods her face. She’s still kneeling there beside the dead body and serving as the conduit.
She’s got both hands on the sacrificial body, and I can tell she’s fighting to close the hole. To save me even if it means my father stays here.
“Don’t!” I shout at her. My voice cracks with desperation. “Keep it open!”
She was willing to sacrifice herself to save this world and everyone in it from my father. To save me.
I can only do the same for her.
Her eyes fill with tears. “Layden, I can’t watch you go into the dark!”
My father drags me closer to the hole. I can feel the cold radiating from it now. It’s far worse than any hunger I’ve ever experienced. Worse than being buried alive, or starving in the forest for two hundred years. Worse even than the agony of having my wings shorn off.