Chapter 18
Oh, hey, hi, Stryke. I must have missed your thank you. Also, yeah, we’re all okay, except Scotty was almost disemboweled and dismembered while coming to save your sorry ass, but thanks for fucking asking.
Yep, this would be fun.
“Scotty?” Stryke glanced over at her as she sat on the carpeted floor, her shredded clothing dripping water and blood onto the already-soaked surface. “You okay?”
She nodded and accepted a towel from Taran. “Blade was being dramatic. All the equipment you asked for is in the boat.”
Stryke gestured to Taran, who took off to gather the equipment before the sea demons got a hold of it.
“How thick is the fog?” he asked, his gaze flicking between the three DART agents.
Mace had been peering out the window at the mist; now, he turned back to Stryke. “Three hundred meters, maybe.”
Not good news. “You’re sure? It’s that thick?”
“We were too busy trying not to die to get an exact measurement,” Mace said.
Scotty came to her feet with a wince. If she’d taken a wound in every spot her clothes were ripped, Blade hadn’t been exaggerating. She looked like she’d barely survived a date with Freddy Krueger.
“What’s going on, Stryke?” she asked. “Is this a rescue mission, or are we here to help fix this rift? Because I gotta be honest and say I don’t know how to seal a rift between realms.”
Blade, leaning casually against the map table, looked around the operating center, studying everything except Stryke. “Oh, I’m sure my brother has all the computations figured out.”
“Yeah. I do.” He gestured to Cyan, his heart skipping a beat when she slid him a brief smile from where she was studying the newest images from the underwater monitor. “She’s going to use the amplifier you brought to seal the rift from here instead of underwater. If that fails, we’ll use the diffuser to get everyone off the platform before the rift blows.”
“ Blows ?” Mace had been casually flipping a dagger, but now he went still, and the weapon hit the floor. Cursing, he swept it up in his fist. “It can blow? What happens then?”
“Aquatic demons will fill the Earth’s seas and oceans,” Stryke told him. Told all of them. “The fog will spread. I don’t know how far, but if it reaches land, it’ll support aquatic demons for miles inland. Billions will have to evacuate or will be killed. The oceans will die. The planet will suffer a slow, agonizing death that would likely hit its crescendo when Satan is released from his prison, and Armageddon arrives.”
There was a long, heavy silence.
Scotty finally broke it, her voice uncharacteristically grave. “Wow. That was, uh, stark.”
“So, this is save-the-world-type stuff, right?” Mace popped off. “Because A, talk about bragging rights, and B, I’m trying to beat Wraith’s record.”
Blade punched him in the shoulder. Stryke would have gone higher. Scotty gave her teammate a scathing you’re-a-dumbass look and turned back to Stryke.
“How can we help?”
“We could use your security and combat skills. Help us keep the demons off the rig. While the mages hold the fog at bay, Cyan will do her thing.” He turned to one of X-Oil’s senior crewmembers who had stayed on after Stryke bought it. “Put together an evacuation plan. We may need to make multiple trips through the fog to get everyone off the platform.”
“Yes, sir.” Jackson took off, and Stryke turned back to the agents.
“What do you guys need?”
“Our weapons are still on the boat,” Blade said.
“My people are getting everything out of it right now.” He looked between Mace and Scotty, ignoring Blade’s cool glare. “What else?”
“We need to know what kinds of demons you’ve been fighting,” Mace said, snapping into pro mode. “We also need to know what is and isn’t effective against them.”
“When Taran gets back, he can brief you. What else?”
Blade pushed off the table. “I want to know how you caused this.”
“I didn’t. Anyone else got a stupid question?” He could practically feel Blade stewing but wisely kept his mouth shut.
The door banged open, and Taran burst inside with two heavy duffels and three black backpacks slung over his shoulder. Behind him, a deckhand Stryke didn’t know carried the diffuser device and a metal case that contained the runic amplifier.
“Taran, they have some questions.” He took the case from the deckhand. “Cyan, you need to figure out the best place to work from.”
She nodded. “I’ll need the platform’s schematics.”
He gestured to Twila. “Can you bring those up?”
“Sure thing.”
He looked around at all the expectant faces, people who trusted him to get them out of this. He wouldn’t fail them. He couldn’t.
“We’ve got this,” he said. “We’re all the best in our professional fields, and I need you to give it your all. Let’s get to work.”
Everyone jumped into action, but as Stryke went to join Cyan at the blueprints, Blade’s hand came down on his arm, stopping him in his tracks.
“You never said how this happened.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable request, but Blade had turned it into a dickish demand.
“Short version? An oil company drilled into Sheoul. StryTech bought the rig to seal the breach. But it sprung a leak, and here we are.”
Blade seemed satisfied by Stryke’s answer, but he didn’t budge. “It must have been hard for you to call me for help.”
“You really want to get into this now?” Stryke snapped. “Jesus, Blade, for all you throw shit at me for being a fuckup, your hatred of me makes you stupid and puts everyone around you at risk. So, take your hypocrisy and shove it up your ass.”
“Are you kidding me?” Blade asked, incredulous. “You’re the one who hates me . You think I forgot that time we got into that fight at Underworld General, and the sentry attacked you?”
“The sentry?” Cyan asked.
Scotty leaned over and spoke quietly, but even over the angry roar of his pulse in his ears, Stryke heard her say, “It’s a statue inside the hospital that senses when someone wants to kill. It bites and paralyzes that person long enough for the staff to restrain them. Very painful.”
Cyan frowned. “Isn’t Underworld General covered by an anti-violence spell that prevents fights?”
“Our family is exempt,” Mace said. “We get to fight with each other all we want.”
“Stryke didn’t want to fight ,” Blade said in an angry, accusatory tone, his gaze locked hard with Stryke’s. “He wanted to kill me.”
Son of a bitch. Stryke was sick of this shit. He was sick of letting Blade treat him like a punching bag, no matter how much he deserved it.
“I didn’t want to kill you!” Stryke roared, his hands clenched, his temper finally erupting. “It wasn’t about you! Not everything is fucking about you!”
“Yeah, who then?”
Everyone stared, the crewmembers shrinking back from what probably looked like the start of a brawl. Blade would like that. Screw Blade. He wasn’t getting any of Stryke’s blood today.
Releasing his fury, he barked out a bitter laugh. “Fuck off. It doesn’t matter. I’m out of here. Cyan, meet me in my office with your decision.” He stormed out the door and headed for his office, but he only got a few yards before the sound of running footsteps came up behind him.
“Stryke?” Cyan’s hand caught his and pulled him to a stop. “You okay?”
Sighing, he swung around to her. “Fighting with Blade isn’t anything I haven’t done before.”
She pursed her lips and slid her gaze to the wet deck before looking back up. “Was he right?” she asked quietly. “Did you want to kill him?”
“Back then? No. Right now? I’m entertaining the idea.” He wasn’t serious, but damn, his brother could use a broken jaw.
“Who was it, then? Who did you want to kill?”
Inhaling a deep, ragged breath, he looked out at the boiling wall of fog a few meters away. Hideous faces and horrific images formed in the mist, and the sounds that emerged…he suppressed a shudder. He would not look forward to trying to get to the other side of it.
“It’s not important,” he said. “It’s in the past, and no one died.”
She didn’t appear to have heard him. “Someone close to you? An enemy?”
Both.
“I mean, if you—”
“Me, Cyan,” he blurted suddenly. “I wanted to kill myself.”
She stood there, stunned, but no more than he was. He’d never told anyone that. Not even Masumi, and she probably knew more about him than anyone did.
“Wow,” she murmured. “Because of what happened to Chaos?”
Man, she asked a lot of questions. And for some fucked-up reason, he kept answering them.
“Yeah.” Painful memories flitted at the edges of his mind as he looked out at the fog. “We didn’t know what’d happened to him—his soul, I mean. No one can find him. I thought…I thought that if I was dead, it would be easier to locate him.”
She nodded as if she understood, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She hadn’t killed her baby brother and ruined many lives.
Something in the mist screamed. Fat, crimson veins began to spread through the fog, pulsing and squirming, growing more agitated as if sensing his mood.
“Look,” he said, “we have shit to do and not much time to do it in.”
“You’re right.” She nodded decisively. “We can save this for later.”
“We’re not saving anything.” He started toward his office but heard her quiet snort and knew there would be a later—and she was definitely saving for it.
Cyan was still rattled by Stryke’s confession when she returned to the forward operating center, where Taran was catching Blade, Mace, and Scotty up on events. The team armed themselves as Taran spoke, pulling weapons and tools from their packs, stuffing them into pockets and sheaths, and strapping them onto different body parts.
He’d been so desperate to find his dead brother that he’d been willing to die . Holy shit. How much agony had he been in to consider such a thing?
Focus. You have a job to do .
Shaking her head to clear it, Cyan studied the blueprints, searching for the perfect location to activate the amplifier. Ideally, near electronic machinery, but she also wanted to be as close to the water and broken glyphs as possible.
“Boss.” Jackson gestured to his equipment screen. “We got another heat signature. Headed this way fast.”
“What’s that mean?” Mace asked.
“It’s either a big demon, a mass of small demons, or a blast of evil atmosphere that’ll hit like a storm and add to the fog.” Taran tapped his wrist comms, and the speakers on the bridge clicked on. “ Sea Storm , brace for impact or attack. Mages, fortify the shield. Incoming .”
Suddenly, the platform trembled. Something hit the only window with no cracks, and the thing nearly shattered. The fog closed in, seeping between the smallest gaps in the glass and metal. A moment later, the mages must have regained control, and the mist retreated from the rig.
“This is so fucked up.” Blade lowered the handheld crossbow he’d aimed at the window. “Leave it to Stryke to kick off the start of the end of the world.”
“Stryke didn’t start this.” Cyan zoomed into a center section of the schematic. “The oil company did. Stryke is trying to fix it.”
Blade shot her a look of disappointment. “So, you’re on Team Stryke.”
“I’m not on any team , Blade,” she said, unable to contain her irritation.
She was starting to understand why there was so much tension between the brothers—and in the entire family. She’d also seen how deeply Stryke was affected. He didn’t need Blade’s guilt trip when he was drowning in his own.
“I definitely wasn’t Stryke’s biggest fan when I started at StryTech,” she admitted. “But now…” She shrugged. “Now, I see another side of him.”
“The side of him without clothes, I’m guessing,” Blade muttered.
“ Excuse me ?” She snapped her head around to glare at him because, hell no. She wasn’t putting up with that shit. Furious, she wove a nasty shock spell into his wrist comms and triggered a jolt that made him yelp. “My opinion of him isn’t based on orgasms.” She shocked him again, turning up the intensity. This time, he leaped backward with a curse. “Say something like that again, and I swear I’ll train you to sit pretty and roll over on command. And I’m not in the mood to show mercy.” An image of Blade beating Stryke flashed in her mind, and she zapped him once more. That was for Stryke , she thought, feeling grimly amused when Blade clenched his teeth and took that one like a champ. “You got it?”
“Buddy.” Mace tested the edge of a blade before disappearing it up his sleeve. “Stow it. I hate to agree with Stryke because he’s such a dick, but he was right. We’re in a fuckton of trouble, and your beef with him is turning your focus to shit. Now’s not the time for this. Stop being an asshole and team up.”
Scotty thrust out her fist. “Team up.”
Blade, his expression stormy, looked over at the petite redhead. “So, you agree with Mace?”
“Yup,” she said, “and you’re lucky he said it before I did. I wouldn’t have been as nice. You’re way out of line, and Cyan went too easy on you. She should have laid you out. Deal with your personal shit on your own time.”
The shadows in Blade’s dark eyes writhed angrily, but they gradually disappeared, and he gave his teammates a resigned fist bump.
“Team up.” He shot Cyan a sheepish look. “That was uncalled for. I apologize.”
“We’re cool. Thank you.”
As if nothing had happened, the trio went back to arming themselves and discussing the mission.
Their ability to work together in sync, almost as a single organism, was practically legendary at DART. Now, Cyan saw why. Blade had gone off the rails, but Mace and Scotty had quickly gotten him back on track and on mission. Cyan had to admire the way he’d taken his teammates’ harsh criticism without getting angry or defensive.
“Well,” Twila said, bringing Cyan back to the unfolding crisis. “Where are you going to set up?”
Cyan pointed to a controller apparatus at the very center of the rig. It was two floors up, but it was directly above the deep-water glyphs.
“Right there.” She started toward the door. “Wish me luck!”
A chorus of well-wishes followed her as she hurried down the corridor to the outside exit. She used her comms to tell Stryke where she was going. To her surprise, he was there already, his dark hair slicked back and grooved by his fingers, an ivory column the size of a small banana in his hand.
“I figured you’d choose this spot,” he said.
Of course, he had. She gestured to the object. “So, what is it? And how does it work?”
“It’s an artifact I purchased from an underworld dealer who specializes in rare sources of power.” He hefted it in his hand. “This was carved from the horn of a brojibeast .”
“Wow.” She stared in awe at the smooth, featureless rod, a treasure so rare they were almost mythical. “Those are coveted by all magic users. With that, someone could turn a poison gas spell with a ten-foot radius into one that could engulf a full city block.” She looked up at him, her nerves quivering with excitement. “The mages could use it to push the fog back half a mile or more!”
“Which wouldn’t help us. We’d still have to get through the wall of mist. But as a last resort, they can use it to fight demons that get onto the platform.”
She didn’t like the last-resort talk. “So, what has StryTech been doing with it?”
“Mainly, we’re trying to replicate it. Imagine if DART spellcasters and Underworld General healers had access to something like this.”
Oh, the amazing things they could do. But powerful objects were often used in less honorable ways. Her excitement died a painful death.
“And imagine if the bad guys had access to it too.”
His gaze sharpened at that. “Like all of StryTech’s products, there would be strict controls.”
“Strict controls didn’t save Shanea and Draven,” she shot back before she could stop herself.
Shit. She’d just done exactly what Blade did; she’d brought a personal grievance into a dangerous situation. Swallowing her pride, if not her anger, she reluctantly apologized.
“Sorry. We should give this a try. I’ll warn you, though, my kind of magic doesn’t usually work with amplifiers that aren’t electronic.”
“Which is why,” he said as he turned it upside down, “we had a microchip embedded into it. This is what might have screwed up Quillax’s glyphs. We’ve done some upgrades to the chip since, but we haven’t tested it yet.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that. So, I’m the guinea pig?”
“Congratulations.”
The clang of multiple footsteps on the walkways joined the thrashing of the sea against the rig’s giant supports and the creepy noises coming from the fog and water. Several of the crewmembers, armed to the teeth, lined the railings to watch. At three of the corners, Blade, Mace, and Scotty looked on, their watchful gazes darting between Cyan and the surroundings.
“Good luck,” Mace shouted down. “No pressure. It’s only our lives and maybe the whole planet.”
As she took the device from Stryke, she considered rigging Mace’s comms with an electronic zapper like Blade’s.
“Taran, what is this thing?” She gestured to a big box with gauges and a control panel.
“That monitors oil flow, pressure, and emissions.”
“Do the power lines that run through it also run down to where the glyphs are?”
“The lines aren’t directly connected, but they’re on the same circuits.”
Okay, good. Maybe they had a shot at this. “Oh, one more thing. The rig isn’t operational, right? I won’t accidentally cause an oil spill or anything, right?”
“You shouldn’t. It’s been shut down for almost two months.”
Excellent. Closing her eyes, she channeled the powers that allowed her to weave electrons from all sources into spells. She wove a long thread into the device and then into the control panel, where it shot through the platform’s electrical grid, seeing the line that would take it to the glyphs.
She gripped the artifact tightly. Its power assist wasn’t needed yet, but as the thread began to travel below the water’s surface, her power started to fade.
In her fist, the device sparked a glow. Dim at first, its eerie green-white light intensified as it pushed her energy thread deeper and deeper. In her mind’s eye, she could see the depth as a set of numbers and could even read the temperature and pressure as the existing line transferred data.
The device’s glow became so bright she had to turn away from it. Others shielded their eyes. Mace, Blade, and Scotty popped on sunglasses they’d pulled from one of their dozens of pockets.
Keep going, keep going …
The thread stretched, inching down.
There! She could see the uppermost glyph. Fragments of it, anyway.
Almost there …
The thread stopped.
No !
Clenching her teeth and fists, she strained, drawing on every drop of her abilities. The artifact grew hot in her palm, its glow spreading through the rig as far as she could see, breaching even the darkness beyond the railings, where flying things flitted at the edges, screeching when their leathery wings touched the light.
“You can do it, Cyan.” Stryke’s deep voice, smooth like good whiskey and just as warming, gave her a much-needed boost.
The thread stretched farther until its tip brushed the top of the glyph, and she could see the rest. Hopefully, that was enough.
She imagined the fix, allowing the spell to form through electrical currents. Hope filled her—
The spell sparked, fizzled, and the thread receded.
“No!” she cried, desperately trying again. And again.
But the glow around the artifact was fading, and so was her power. She’d exceeded her limits, and the more she tried to reach into the well for more, the weaker she became.
Hope turned to despair.
“I failed,” she whispered. “I’ve doomed us all.”