Chapter 38
38
ELENA
T he curse hit Elena like a blow. It stole her breath and sunk its ink-dark teeth deep into her bones, digging into her marrow until she feared she might splinter apart.
Sammael howled her name. She wanted to turn to him for help, to ask him what was happening to her, but Katerina’s curse held her in its grip, pain coursing through her until her head arched back and she shrieked.
How dare the Dimi curse her, when Elena was the one who had been wronged? She had been loyal. She had done everything right, and damnation was to be her reward?
She refused to accept this as her fate.
Righteous anger swelled inside Elena, bursting her skin. She called forth the power Sammael had taught her and felt a vital force rip free, following the path of her rage, flowing through every limb until her body could no longer contain it. It exploded from her fingertips in bolts of darkness blacker than the night itself.
She opened her mouth to scream in triumph. Look at me, she wanted to say. Look at the magic I can wield, and dare to stand against me now.
But instead of words, a black cloud spilled from her mouth, tasting of old blood and the hopelessness of despoiled souls, buzzing like a hive of angered wasps. As if magnetized, the cloud fused with the bolts from her fingertips. She willed it to devour Katerina, and it swarmed toward the Dimi, intent on revenge.
But it never reached her.
Elena’s howl of victory died in her throat as the cloud hovered between the rowan-fires. She focused on it, forming it into a spear that could pierce Katerina’s heart. But the cloud didn’t hold its shape. No matter how hard Elena tried, it broke free from her control again and again. It stretched wider, thinning, and then, with a crack of silver-blue lightning, a rip emerged in the fabric of the night.
Aghast, Elena watched as the cloud became a man-sized doorway, a ragged mouth emitting faint, despairing wails. Demon-corrupted, silver-blue flames poured from it. They shot along the ground, ignoring Katerina, tongues of fire searching until they found what they were hungry for: A Shadow’s blood. The tongues licked the earth where Niko lay, tasting, devouring. Then they licked him .
Elena shrieked.
“Stop this!” Katerina’s voice echoed in the clearing, raw with grief.
“I can’t.” The words were Elena’s, but the voice wasn’t her own. It was layered, spoken in the timbre of a thousand others. With horror, she realized that the tear in the night was a portal into the Void itself—what Sammael called The Darkness that Eats All Things. Her voice had become one with the cries of damned souls, stolen by the Grigori and condemned to an eternity of servitude, their spirits powering the Underworld and the Void. The very cries that fueled the Darkness that had devoured Drezna and Satvala.
Somehow, Elena’s magic had called this portal into existence.
Her power wasn’t like Katerina’s at all. It came from the Dark, and she had been fooling herself to think otherwise. It had ripped a hole in the night, and set a terrible force loose upon the world.
Baba Petrova had always taught them like calls to like. Well, here was the proof. Elena had violated her vow to Sant Viktoriya. She had brought shame on everything she’d sworn to uphold. She had used a dark power, and now the Void itself had come to claim her.
Katerina’s curse echoed in her ears: Cleaved to a demon, may your soul walk in chains.
The doorway sucked at Elena, tugging, as if the chains Katerina had cursed her with had sunk hooks into her flesh—and deeper still, into her very soul. She took a step toward it, then another. Obsidian smoke writhed in its depths, vicious as a nest of snakes. Terror shot through her as she fought to stay where she stood, but it was useless. The Void called, and the Dark inside her answered, pulling her forward. Claiming her.
“Help me,” she tried to say, but the words stuck in her throat. Her legs moved without volition, taking her closer and closer to the rip in the night. She tried to turn her head, to look at Niko, but all she could see was blackness, pulsing, calling her home. The more she struggled, the harder it tugged. She screamed, thrashing in the Void’s grip, and stepped closer still.