6. Leah
Leah
“Cast the binding, then kill her. Don’t hesitate!”
For a second, I think one of the sorcerers is barking orders at the presence floating above me.
I don’t know much about disembodied dark forces, but that doesn’t strike me as a good idea.
The presence agrees. An undulating movement twitches across its surface in a way that seems distinctly irritated.
Then the knife wielder starts to mutter in Cyrax, and I realize the instructions were for him.
The ritual isn’t done. I drag my eyes away from the tip of the knife held inches above me and fix my gaze on the mass of shadow.
It’s growing in size by the moment, the ritual’s words making it swell with a mysterious force.
If you have any power here, make it quick.
It can only be a fit of insanity that has me turning my prayer toward whatever that thing is. I’m not exactly surprised when it doesn’t answer. The knife wielder seems to be nearing the end of his spell.
The mass shifts as if adjusting its awareness. Then it dives toward me.
I gasp in fear, only to be choked by shadow.
It’s everywhere. Filling my lungs, my eyes, and my ears.
I’m drowning in it, consumed by the rush of darkness like a swimmer caught in a riptide.
It fills me, stretching to my toes and fingertips, climbing up in between my ribs and pouring up my neck, filling my head.
An instant later, I can breathe again—can see and hear—but I know the darkness is still there, settling beneath the surface.
Something unfurls beneath my skin, bringing with it an onslaught of sensations I can’t explain. Invisible fingers stroke their way up my spine, the whisper of an unfamiliar touch slides across my legs, and a voice slips like silk past my ears, calling into my mind.
“Ah, so the sacrificial lamb has fight in her yet.”
I’m not alone in this body anymore.
I can sense…him—the voice is definitely male—moving behind my eyes, gazing out of them onto the scene around me. The sorcerers are arguing now, the blade wavering in the knife wielder’s hand as their panicked voices overlap.
“What happened?”
“He’s not supposed to do that.”
“Her eyes—look at her eyes!”
“Tenebrous save us…”
There’s an anger ripping through me, heating my skin, but I know it’s not entirely my own. His presence is simmering with a rage that is infecting me in turn, scorching me down to my nerve endings. My wrists jerk, straining against the bindings.
Did I do that?
“Tell me, little lamb, do you want to be free?” the voice drags across my mind like gentle fingertips.
Yes. “Yes!” I shout the answer in my head, into the same space his words caressed a moment ago. “More than anything.”
The presence within me uncurls, stretching like a cat, and then pounces.
My hands snap open without my direction, fingers splayed, and a column of shadow spins upward from my palm.
It coils around the knife, ripping it from the wielder’s hand, and snaps it back into my own.
I almost fumble it, but the presence inside me forces my grip tight around it like he’s a puppeteer yanking on my strings.
He flips the blade against the ropes at my wrists, slicing through them, then lifts my forearms to cut away the bindings across my chest.
“Stop her!”
There’s chanting around me again—I think the sorcerers are trying to undo what they’ve unleashed—and the former knife wielder has finally come to his senses, lunging at me just as I sit up.
My arm snaps out, the knife in my hand meeting his neck without a moment’s hesitation.
“No!” I scream, my voice tearing out of my throat as the sorcerer’s splits open, his blood spurting over my knuckles.
I try to yank my arm back, but I’m not in control anymore. The presence—the demon possessing me—sends my elbow out, shoving the dead sorcerer to the floor before making quick work of the bindings around my ankles.
He forces me to my feet, the fabric of my nightgown fluttering around me as I stand on the table, staring down at the hooded figures. Some are still chanting, the cup bearer is frantically trying to draw fresh runes on the table, but most are backing away from me—from us.
My mouth opens, but the voice that speaks from it is inhuman. It echoes like I’m shouting into a hundred empty rooms, rumbling out of me with a force that sends vibrations through my whole body.
“You dare to summon me? Insolent fools.” The knife spins in my hand, flicking blood across my nightgown.
The cup bearer abandons her runes and sprints for the door of the chamber.
“I will not be leashed like a dog,” the demon growls. “But you will die like one.”
“No.” I plead with him in my mind. Even though I suspect it’s hopeless, I have to try. “That’s enough. Please, just let me go.”
He either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t care. Instead, he jumps down from the table, taking my body with him. Five more sorcerers managed to escape out the door after the cup bearer, but the rest aren’t quick enough. As they scramble for the exit, the demon attacks.
My body moves in a rhythm I don’t understand, every gesture smooth and sure as it plunges the knife into the stomach of the nearest sorcerer.
The blade is sharp—sharp enough to butcher me, I suppose—and it slices easily through the thick fabric of the robe.
My victim stumbles back, hood falling down to reveal the face of a woman I don’t know.
One of the others screams. The demon spins me in the screamer’s direction and shoves my hand out so the blade sinks into the depths of their hood.
I feel the metal catch against bone, then bite into soft flesh.
The figure screeches in pain and tries to grasp at my arm, but my wrist twists, and they go rigid, slipping off the end of my blade and hitting the ground.
The remaining three scatter, terrified. They’re not fighters. None of them are even armed. The demon hunts them down one by one. It’s a bloodbath, and I watch it all helplessly, a passenger in my own body as he slaughters them.
No, not quite a passenger. Because I move with him. Evey stab, every slash is made by my hands. I feel the strain in my muscles from burying the knife in deep again and again, feel the hot, sticky splash of their blood on my skin, hear their gasping final breaths.
“Stop it. Stop it. STOP IT!” But it doesn’t matter how much I scream into my mind, how much I beg. He doesn’t relent until my nightgown is stained crimson, until I’m up to my elbows in it. Until every one of them is dead, and I stand alone in the chamber.
Alone with the demon who has taken me over.
He has me pull one of the black robes off the nearest dead body.
The man must be my father’s age, his empty eyes shining in what’s left of the candlelight.
My feet move toward the entrance of the chamber, and I glimpse for the first time a set of steps and a shiny brass banister in the gloom beyond.
At first, I’m afraid he’s sending me out after the other sorcerers, but he stops us at the doorway, lifting the hand that still clasps the dripping knife.
“What are you doing?” I ask, the words edged with panic as I watch my hand carve runes into the wooden doorframe.
Finally, he answers me, his voice murmuring inside my head with cool disdain.
“Embarrassing to think you don’t know how a rift is made, considering you just acted as the anchor for one.”
He has me reach out for a lit candle and hold the flame against the nearest rune until it sparks alight.
I watch the fire flare through the markings in quick succession.
I’ve seen this part before, but always at a distance.
In theory, the runes will burn right off the wood after they’re activated, leaving no trace of carving or fire once the rift is closed.
As the final rune lights up, the air in the doorway shudders and splits open. I barely have a chance to take a real look at where I’m going. I only glimpse dark sky and a patch of rocky ground before the demon is shoving me through the rift, into another realm.
Syrus
With a lurch, my eyes snap open and I settle fully back into my body.
I take in the familiar walls around me, the scent of polished wood, and the purple light shining dimly through the window of my home.
I’m no longer split across two consciousnesses, but the change is so abrupt that for a second, I’m unsure what’s happened.
One moment, I was in the woman’s mind as she stepped through the rift, and then the next…
I reach for her mind again, seeking to brush up against that spiky, vivid consciousness I was nestled inside just moments before, and find…nothing. An abrupt, absolute blackness.
Damn it. I should’ve guessed traveling through the aether would overwhelm her.
I rise from my chair, stepping around my desk and thumbing the pin at my collar. It tells me my chamberlain is already waiting outside.
“Vizmodeus,” I call as I pull my cloak down from its hook. My office door opens to admit the pale-faced demon.
“So? Was it what you hoped?” Viz slides an ivory hand through his silver hair, leaving it even more disheveled than usual.
I grit my teeth. “It was…different than expected.”
He flashes an unnecessarily smug smile at me, looking vindicated. “I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Not entirely.”
“Pfft, a coward’s answer. Just admit it was reckless. Or at least not nearly as useful as you claimed it would be.”
I roll my eyes as I shrug the cloak around me, adjusting the fit before I pin it closed.
“You think reading in bad lighting is reckless, Viz.”
“It is, right up there with answering some vague magical summons from Strata for the fun of it.”
I could’ve ignored the pull—of course I could. A few humans dabbling in blood casting aren’t enough to make me go anywhere against my will. But my emotions got the better of me. As physically strong as I am to resist magic like that, I’m weak enough in mind to have given in to it.
“It wasn’t particularly fun, as it happens,” I concede. “The idiots tried to bind me.”
Viz’s bone-white jaw drops. “Are they mad?”
“Dead, actually. Half of them, anyway—the rest escaped. Maybe the fools didn’t know what they were getting into, or perhaps one of them had some sly trick up their sleeve I hadn’t seen before. Something other than the human sacrifice they were attempting when I arrived. That was just lazy.”
His eyes study me from their deep-set sockets, seeing too much, as usual.
“There’s something else,” he says, suspicious. “You should be more…I don’t know…disappointed your little jaunt didn’t play out like you wanted.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, opening the door and heading down the corridor. Viz follows, his voice rising as he calls after me.
“Syrus. Where are you going? What aren’t you telling me?”
I sigh. “It actually does you good to be wrong at least some of the time, Viz. Perhaps it was reckless, but it was certainly useful.”
“What do you mean?” he asks, his jaw tightening in that way it does when he’s worried.
“I wasn’t going to let one of those idiots bind me to him, but there was a woman there—the intended sacrifice. I took her instead.”
Viz coughs in surprise. “Took as in…?”
Claimed. Filled. Inhabited. All of those things and more.
I hadn’t anticipated how intense it would be, climbing into the consciousness of another being.
It was so…intimate. I could feel everything: the quick rhythm of her frantic breaths, the brush of her hair against the nape of her neck, the way her bare skin dimpled in the cool of the chamber.
I knew I’d be able to control her. To bend her to my will. It was why I chose to be bound to her instead of the fools who summoned me. Well, that and…
When I saw her lying there on the altar, terrified and covered in bloody runes, I couldn’t miss the resemblance. But that’s not important.
“I possessed her and brought her here,” I answer Viz at last.
“You…” Viz shakes his head. “Why?”
“Think about it. She may be the answer to our problems.”
He looks skeptical but doesn’t argue.
“And where is this woman now?” he asks instead.
I offer him a loaded smile. “It’s not as if I have much experience opening rifts, Viz. We can’t all be as precise as you.”
I imagine that if it was possible for him to get any paler, he would. “Don’t tell me you lost her in the aether?”
“No, she made it to Infernum, but then I lost contact with her mind. She must’ve passed out when she got here. Which is why I’m going to fetch her now.”
“Quill didn’t say anything to me about the wards being triggered.”
“No, but I suspect my possession of her fooled them.”
“Interesting. Well, if they were going to bend for anyone, it would be you.” His eyes brighten as they always do when he’s untangling a fresh bit of knowledge, pulling a scroll from the deep pockets of his coat and scribbling something on it with the pencil he perpetually keeps behind his ear.
I quicken my pace as I reach the front gates, forcing him to hurry after me. I’m not too worried about the human, but there’s always a chance a mischievous Malicite will find her before I do, and I’d hate to have to kill someone else today.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Viz asks.
“No, I’ll go alone. No use overwhelming her—especially if she’s the type to pass out from a little rift travel.” That could be a problem, but probably not something I need to worry about right now. I pass by the mirror in the entrance hall, catching a glimpse of my reflection in the process.
I pause, considering it. Now that could be a problem to fix right now.
No matter. It won’t take long to stop off at the lake before I go to collect Infernum’s newest resident.