Chapter 28
I closed my eyes and tried to center myself, searching for that quiet place inside me where my magic lived and breathed.
Wind slid across the clearing, cool and eternally restless, lifting strands of hair from my face and carrying the faint scent of damp earth and approaching rain.
It hissed through the trees in the distance, sending an endless rush of leaves shifting against one another, filling the silence without breaking it completely.
I drew in a slow, even breath, letting the dusk settle against my skin.
But the quiet wasn’t what I needed right now.
This wasn’t the kind of magic that fed off of calm and steady emotions.
It was the chaotic kind. The kind that brought you to the edge of what you were and made you tremble in its shadow.
Tonight, I needed the darkness.
Relaxing my shoulders, I forced myself to stop fighting it.
To stop pushing it away and running from it the way I always did, usually on instinct.
Sometimes out of fear. Instead, I turned inward and reached for it—into that vast, terrible darkness that lived somewhere deep within me.
Into the part of me that came from Lucifer.
The part that felt like standing at the edge of an abyss and knowing one wrong step would send me tumbling into the void.
It rose to meet me eager and hungry, a presence that felt both foreign and intimately mine all at once. Power that sang through my veins in a haunted melody I had been pretending not to hear since the moment it first woke inside me.
But I was done running.
“Step one,” said Caleb beside me. “Match the barrier’s frequency.”
I nodded without opening my eyes and placed both palms flat against the invisible wall.
The barrier thrummed beneath my touch, revealing itself in those rippling waves of bluish-white light.
I could feel its magic as surely as I could feel the ground beneath my feet, solid and strong and intricately woven together by Casters whose power had shaped this town long before I was even born.
At first, it was all just noise. A cacophony of magical signatures layered on top of each other, each one contributing to the whole. But I forced myself to listen deeper, to find the pattern beneath all the chaos. The one rhythm that held it all together.
There.
A pulse. Tenacious and inexorable, like a heartbeat that had been beating for generations. I felt it pulsating through the barrier, through the ground beneath my feet, through the air itself.
I took a breath and reached for my own magic, pulling it up from that dark well inside me. At first, I tried to match the barrier’s frequency exactly. To mirror it the way Caleb had told me to. But my power didn’t want to be contained that way. It wanted to surge and consume and destroy.
Gritting my teeth, I pulled it tighter, shaping it with deliberate control, molding it note by note until it began to resemble the barrier’s pulse instead of the wild, chaotic thing it wanted to be.
I forced it into alignment with the barrier’s rhythm even as it fought against the constraint.
It felt like trying to hold back a tidal wave with my bare hands.
Like trying to contain lightning in a bottle.
But slowly, agonizingly, I found the rhythm.
My magic synced with the barrier’s frequency, vibrating in perfect harmony. For one beautiful, terrible moment, I felt connected to the boundless magic that surrounded Hollow Hills. Felt myself become a part of it.
“Good,” breathed Caleb, feeling the synchronization without my having to tell him so. “Now introduce the counter-frequency. Nice and easy.”
I knew this was going to be the hard part. Maintaining that perfect synchronization while simultaneously creating its opposite, like singing two different notes at once.
I reached deeper still, pulling up more of that dark power I’d spent so long running away from. It came willingly, flooding through me in a rush that stole the breath from my lungs.
I could feel Trace through our bond, his presence stabilizing me as a mixture of love and apprehension bled across our connection.
And I could feel Dominic too, not just his eyes on me but his essence, dark and powerful and overwhelming, as it threaded through mine in ways I was still learning to understand.
Where Trace radiated care and concern and the fierce need to shield me, Dominic whirred with something closer to awe, as though watching me wield this kind of magic satisfied something primal in him.
I split my focus, half of my magic maintaining the matched frequency while the other half began to build something different. A counter-vibration that scraped against the barrier’s natural resonance like nails on a chalkboard.
The barrier resisted immediately. I felt it push back against me, the magic flaring brighter where my hands touched it.
But I didn’t let up.
I poured more power into the counter-frequency, letting it build and build until it felt like my entire body was vibrating with it. The magic spilled out through my palms, crashing against the barrier in waves that rippled the air around me.
“Jemma—” Trace’s voice sounded far away.
I shook my head without looking at him. I needed him to be quiet. To not break my concentration.
Step three. Sustain it.
The power required to maintain both frequencies simultaneously was staggering. Almost too much for me to bear. I could feel it draining from me, pulling from reserves I didn’t even know I had. My legs trembled with the effort as sweat beaded on the back of my neck despite the evening chill.
And still I pulled more.
The darkness inside me surged upward, eager to be used.
Maybe too eager. I could feel it trying to take over, to consume me the way it would consume anyone who wasn’t strong enough to contain it.
This was Lucifer’s power. Raw and ancient and utterly merciless.
It didn’t care about control or restraint. It only wanted to devour.
But I didn’t let up. Instead, I reached for my anchors, feeling Trace’s presence through our bond like a lifeline thrown across turbulent waters. His concern and protectiveness instantly morphed into strength. Into the unwavering certainty that I could do this and that I wouldn’t fall.
And Dominic, dark and immovable as bedrock, his power intertwining with mine without the slightest hesitation. His confidence in me fueled me from the inside, slipping beneath my thoughts with the wordless certainty that this darkness wasn’t something to fear. It was something to wield.
I pulled from them both, letting their strength pour into the fraying edges of my control until the darkness stopped feeling endless and started feeling like something more solid. Something I could hold. Their presence kept me moored and human even as I channeled magic that was anything but.
The barrier fought back harder. Its magic lashed out at me, trying to repel the foreign frequency I was forcing into it.
Energy crackled along my arms, burning through my shirt sleeves as pain lanced along my shoulders, but I refused to let up.
I dug deeper. Wielded harder. Poured every ounce of magic I had into it, never breaking my contact even as my wings erupted from my back.
The transformation was instantaneous and violent. Black satiny feathers tore through the back of my shirt as the massive wings unfurled behind me, easily spanning ten feet across. They were dark as midnight and edged in an ethereal glow that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.
Power flooded through me with their arrival. Raw Nephilim magic that amplified everything I was already doing. The counter-frequency intensified into something sharper and more precise. I felt the barrier beginning to crack beneath the assault.
“That’s it,” said Caleb, his voice tight with excitement and something else. Something that sounded a little like fear. “Keep going, Blackburn. You’re doing it!”
The barrier tried one more desperate counterattack, its magic surging against mine in a wave that should have thrown me backward. A wave that should have broken my concentration and sent me sprawling.
But I had anchors.
I felt Trace double down, holding firm and feeding me his strength with a devotion that made my chest ache. Felt Dominic’s essence like a dark star at my back, his power bolstering mine without me even having to ask.
They held me together, just as they had always done.
And I shattered the barrier.
It didn’t happen all at once. First came hairline fractures in the magic, visible only as distortions in the blue-white light. Then larger cracks, spreading outward from where my hands pressed against it. The pulsating frequency I’d been matching began to wobble and destabilize.
And then, with a sound like breaking glass amplified a thousand times over, a massive section of the barrier disintegrated. The magic dissolved into the air like smoke, leaving a ten-foot breach where the wall had been. The remaining barrier strained at the edges, trying to close the wound.
“Hold it, Blackburn! Hold it!” Caleb’s voice cut through the ringing in my ears. “Whatever you do, don’t let go yet!”
I kept my hands pressed near the fractured edges of the opening, feeling the barrier’s remaining magic clawing at the gap, desperate to knit itself back together.
My power buzzed through the breach as I maintained the counter-frequency, forcing the empty space to stay empty.
Even when it felt like it was burning me from the inside out.
Even when my wings trembled with the effort.
Caleb began to chant in Latin, words I didn’t recognize flowing from his lips in a rapid-fire cadence.
His magic rose around us, distinct from the barrier’s magic and from my dark Nephilim power.
This was pure Caster magic, built on structure, command, and careful restraint, every syllable locking into place like pieces of a spell only he could see.