31. Where Gods Go to Bleed
WHERE GODS GO TO BLEED
NICO
Iwas burning from the inside out.
The pentagram's channels had my blood and my blood was feeding the mechanism and it was tearing the world apart above me, and every nerve in my body was on fire.
The Clavis had taken control of the current and the current was flowing outward through the channels and upward through the cracks in the ceiling and into the widening portals that were opening above the city like wounds in the sky.
I screamed. The sound bounced off the stone walls and came back to me and changed nothing.
“Nico.” Elara's voice came through in my head. “Listen to me. Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I need you to hold on. He's coming.”
“Who?”
“You know who. I can feel him. He's close and he's moving fast and he has given up more than you can imagine to find you. Hold on.”
“I can't stop it. The pentagram is using my blood and I can't pull it back.”
“You're not meant to stop it yet. I'm sorry, Nico.
I'm sorry for what I did. The activation had to happen. The Clavis had to open. If I had refused the spell, Vane would have killed us both and found another witch and the opening would have happened without anyone in the room who knew how to close it.”
“You planned this.”
“I planned to be here when it mattered. That is not the same as planning the pain, and I am sorry for the pain, and I need you to hold on for three more minutes.”
I gripped my own body. My arms wrapped around my ribs where the cuts from Vane's blade were still bleeding freely into the channels, and the pentagram's glow intensified with every drop that left me.
Above my head, the ceiling was cracking.
Stone fragments broke loose and rose upward, pulled toward the portal the way debris was pulled toward a drain, and through the widening gap I could see the sky.
Not the sky. What had replaced the sky. A churning red-black void that pulsed with the same rhythm as the channels under my knees, and shapes were moving inside it.
The demon came through.
It dropped from the portal and landed in the chamber twenty feet from me, and the impact shook the stone floor and sent cracks radiating outward from the point of contact.
More demons came through. They scattered into the chamber and the corridor beyond it, moving with the disoriented aggression.
Vane stood at the edge of the pentagram with his arms spread and his face tilted toward the portal above. His expression was beatific. The expression of a man watching his life's work come to fruition.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Look at them. Look at what was locked away. Look at what they told us was too dangerous to coexist with. Centuries of fear, and all it took to end it was one door and the will to open it.”
Beyond the chamber, I heard the sound of fighting.
Sabine's voice, followed by the wet impact of a body hitting stone and the snarl of a creature that did not belong in any corridor built by human hands.
She was fighting. Her own team was fighting the demons that were coming through the portal, and the note of panic in her voice told me she had not anticipated this part of the evening.
“Sabine,” Vane said, without turning. “Focus.”
“They're not stopping. The wards on the corridor are failing and they're not responding to the suppression sigils, Marcellus, they're ignoring everything we—”
“They are newly freed. They will orient. Focus.”
“This isn't what you—” She stopped. The sound that cut her off was not human.
The bloodstone pulsed. I felt Draco's pulse through the pendant against my chest.
“Elara.”
“I feel him. He's here.”
The chamber door came off its hinges.
Draco came through the doorway and the air in the room changed temperature. His eyes found me then he found Sabine.
She saw Draco coming and her face changed.
What replaced it was the face of a woman who understood, in the space of a single second, that every contract she had ever built and every escape route she had ever planned and every contingency she had ever prepared had failed to account for the thing that was moving toward her.
Draco pinned her to the wall with one hand. His fingers closed around her throat and lifted and her feet left the ground and she grabbed his wrist with both hands and it made no difference.
He didn't speak. He didn't monologue. He didn't explain.
His other hand went into her chest.
The sound it made was the sound of a body being opened from the outside and his hand came back out with her heart in it and the heart was still beating when he dropped it on the stone floor beside her feet.
Sabine's eyes went wide. She slid down the wall and landed in a heap that had been a person three seconds ago.
Draco let go of her throat and turned back to the chamber.
Vane had not moved from his position at the edge of the pentagram. He looked at Sabine's body in the corridor the way a man looked at a piece of furniture that had been removed from a room he was redecorating.
“She served her purpose,” Vane said.
“Nico.” Elara's voice in my head. “Reinforcements.”
They came through the corridor behind Draco.
Remy hit the first demon he reached with his bare fists.
It was brave and stupid as the demon backhanded him into the wall and he got up and hit it again.
My parents flanked the corridor entrance, their combined magic forming a barrier of gold light that held the demons at the threshold, and the barrier was weak and flickering but it was there and it was buying time.
Vane watched all of this with the patience of a man who had anticipated company.
“Draco, you look diminished.”
Draco crossed the chamber toward him.
“You burned your sun tolerance.” Vane tilted his head. “I can smell the absence of it. You poured a thousand years of accumulated daylight into the search to find your boy, and now you're standing in front of me at, what, forty percent? Thirty?” He smiled. “I taught you better than that.”
Draco hit him.
The impact drove Vane backward across the chamber. He hit the far wall and the stone cracked behind his shoulders and he came off it smiling, and then they were fighting.
Remy went down. A demon had gotten past the barrier and landed on top of him and its weight drove him into the floor and its hands were at his throat.
Then his hands came up.
The light that came out of them was not gold like his parents' magic.
It was white. Pure, blinding, pouring from his palms in a flood that had nothing controlled about it.
The demon on top of him screamed and the sound of it was a sound that did not belong in a world built for human ears.
The white light tore through its body and the demon dissolved before falling as ash.
Remy lay on the floor, breathing hard, staring at his own hands.
A second demon came at him. He raised his hands and the white light hit it and it died the same way.
Draco was holding his own against Vane but the gap was visible. Every exchange cost him more than it cost Vane. He was slower. His strikes landed with less force.
Vane drove an elbow into Draco's jaw and sent him stumbling. Draco caught himself, came back, and Vane met him with a combination that opened a cut along Draco's forearm that bled freely and did not close.
Then Vane floated.
His body rose three feet into the air and hung there, suspended, and his eyes changed.
“A trick from a warlock I absorbed in the sixteenth century. Useful man. Limited imagination, but he understood the mechanics of soul consumption in a way that had practical applications.” He spread his hands. “I have been collecting for a very long time.”
The demons in the chamber turned toward him. Their movements synchronised. Their aggression redirected. And one by one, they collapsed inward, their bodies folding and compressing and streaming toward Vane in ribbons of dark energy that poured into his chest.
He was absorbing them. Eating their souls the way a fire ate fuel. Each one that entered him made his body larger, denser, the pale grey suit straining at the seams as the mass underneath it expanded. His face lengthened. His hands thickened.
He dropped to the floor. The impact cracked the stone beneath his feet. He was eight feet tall and still growing and the eyes that looked out from the reshaped face were not Vane's eyes anymore.
He charged Draco.
The collision drove them both into the far wall and the wall gave. Stone and mortar exploded outward and they went through it into the corridor beyond, and the sounds that came back were the sounds of a building being used as a weapon by two creatures who had stopped caring what survived the fight.
“Nico.” Elara's voice, urgent. “Let go.”
“Let go of what.”
“Answer the bloodstone. Let it in.”
“If I stop fighting, the portal opens wider.”
“The portal is already open. You cannot close it from the inside. You close it from outside, and you cannot get outside while the pentagram holds you. Answer the stone, Nico. Answer it now.”
I stopped fighting and the bloodstone answered.
The pendant broke apart. The chain fell away.
The stone itself cracked along a seam that had been invisible until the threshold told it to open, and what was inside was not a stone.
Two blades. Crystal, blood-red, each one the length of my forearm, shaped from the material of the bloodstone with edges that caught the pentagram's light.
They fell into my hands and the fit was absolute. My fingers closed around the hilts and the power that came through them was the power of my own blood reflected back at me.
The pentagram's hold shattered.
The channels beneath me went dark. The grooves in the stone cracked and the blood in them boiled and evaporated. I stood up and the enchanted chains on my wrists fell away.
I tested the weight of the blades in my hands and my body knew how to use them.