Chapter 47
green light, rose fire
With Jess and Callie leading, part of the team went up what remained of the front steps. Miren, Hope, and Tamsin held back to set up a defensive position just inside what remained of the narthex. Now elevated rubble, it gave them a view of the courtyard in the event of a counterattack.
But inside, there were too many places to hide, and Jess kept going, drawn in by something unseen.
Despite the destruction so far, the chapel and its cross-shaped transepts remained lit by flickering ward pots suspended from the floor in medieval-looking steel baskets. The changing movement of the flame-like light made the shadows jump and shift, adding another layer to their growing tension.
Jess stopped, then crouched. She tipped her head, listening. Just behind her, she heard Callie, her breath coming in short, constricted bursts—but to Jess, it had a grounding effect. She turned to look at Callie. Nothing was said outright, but the inference was loud.
Jess looked down the nave of the building, pointing out each group of old concrete columns that led through the remaining pews, now broken and stacked like tank traps. Each pile of wood was a hiding place, every column a possible sniper position.
Callie, determined to stay by Jess’s side, missed a signal from Jess to break to the left and see what was behind the line of support posts that held a mezzanine on both sides of the church. Callie felt a gentle hand on her shoulder as Jess softly pushed her away.
“You can do this. Go around,” Jess whispered. “Meet me on the other side.”
Callie looked at Jess, catching the thought of rolling her eyes. Clutching her staff, she started forward, adjusting her grip, then shifted to the first pillar. Dust was drifting down from Hope’s initial salvos, creating an eye-irritating mist. Callie blinked, then wiped her eyes.
The first two pillars offered shadows, but just ahead of the third, Callie heard the exhale before she saw him.
Sharp, ragged, and feral, one of Max’s enforcers rolled from behind the next pillar in the line. He’d started low, but as he rose, he kept getting taller, wider, and was picking up speed.
Out of position, Jess couldn’t get a direct shot, and she watched as Callie hesitated, then planted her left foot and leveled her weapon.
The shot erupted from the end of the staff just as Callie’s attacker accelerated.
It was not a spell she had chosen. The staff—the ancient entity within—Solrien—immediately judged and passed sentence, then meted out her decision.
A spear of violet light lanced forward, pure ancient and furious. It caught the man dead-center, mid-stride. He had disappeared, possibly choosing to mow over Callie with sheer brute force, but the shockwave caused him to reappear in a moment of impossible stillness. He was held by the force of the light, then crumpled forward, pierced through, almost quartered in a sickening, visceral thud.
The plasma rod he was carrying tumbled to Callie’s feet. It was over in seconds.
Callie slipped to her knees, then turned away as the torso rolled over, blood hissing and popping from the heat of the blast.
Jess appeared beside her. Her boots were sliding in the rubble. For a breathless moment, she stared. Not at the corpse. At Callie.
There was no question as to what had happened. No, did you get him? Are you okay? The enforcer was gone. His life force erased.
Callie trembled. Her lips parted, but she stayed silent. With a glance forward, Jess crouched beside her slowly, carefully. There was something in her eyes as well. Not fear or shock.
Pride.
Then, something sharper, a wave of relief.
“Callie…” she whispered, testing.
She reached to wipe a smear of blood from Callie’s cheek, but hesitated. The blood wasn’t the problem. The cost of the moment was.
Callie didn’t look at her. She couldn’t yet—her gaze was fixed on her hands, on the staff. Solrien’s stone was pointing upward, glowing softly.
“I…I didn’t think,” Callie gasped. “I heard him…his last…breath. I just…he was going to…”
“You didn’t need to think,” Jess cut in, fierce and quiet. “You knew.”
Callie allowed herself another moment, but it was interrupted by the screaming echo of a plasma burst from the courtyard. Jess held out her hand.
“We gotta move.”
Callie closed her eyes. Her knees hurt, and her jaw ached from clenching, but she had stopped trembling.
“She told me…the worse the hate directed against me…” Callie swallowed, forcing the rest down. “—the more I have to keep my heart where it belongs.”
Callie stood on fresh legs and allowed a look at the body. The man’s head had been twisted, his rune-tattooed face visible, but his teeth—those remaining in his gaping mouth—had been filed to points.
Callie had done it. And she would do it again.
“Who would do something like this to his followers?” she asked quietly. “That man was…we’ve got to stop Max.”
Solrien’s stone pulsed with a soft wisp, ready to fire.
Passing two more pillars was without incident, but approaching a pile of broken pews, Callie slowed.
First, an impression, and her staff began to angle like a divining rod, targeting someone or something low on the sanctuary floor.
Like the first incident, she heard a soft shudder of breath. Instead of waiting to be attacked, Callie accelerated, then turned, bringing her weapon to bear.
A man—or a woman—wrapped in a soiled charcoal cloak, Callie couldn’t tell, had their bloodied hands held to their face, trembling in fear. Yet as Callie pointed her staff, one hastily bandaged hand came up. Not in defense, more of an invitation.
“Just kill me. Get it over with.”
A soft green glow came from the tip of Callie’s staff. No purple rail of obliterating energy—just a gentle light that bathed the figure, and Callie knew.
“Hold still,” she said—both a directive to the crouching person and to Jess, poised a few feet away with a blade ready.
“Show me your hands,” Callie asked, her teeth gritted because she had heard the stories and knew the cost of what she was going to see.
“Ple… ease…end my worthless life,” a voice gasped, moving the other shaking hand from their face, “…he took my fingers.”
Callie swallowed hard. The person at her feet was a woman.
She held up one hand, bloody bandages hanging, then the other. Her index and middle fingertips had been severed at the joint, her thumb as well. As a witch, this was akin to being banished from magic—or at least the use of magic in a battle setting.
Bleeding from the fresh wounds, the woman slouched toward the floor.
“Leave me be.”
Callie caught her before she hit the ground. “No.”
This woman had been offered as bait. Now unable to cast a spell or trace the sacred curl of an ancient sigil, this witch had been unmade—excised from the sanctity of magic.
“He left us out here. There are more that couldn’t be made to follow his insanity.” She held up her hands. “Do you not understand?” she whimpered. “He wants to ruin all of us.”
“Bastard,” Callie seethed—and suddenly the glow from her staff was changing. The light was becoming warmer, the harsh green glow shifting to a warm rose tone edged with gold.
Callie was angry, but she leaned down to the woman.
“Max does not understand the power of his own magic.”
Callie reached, roughly grabbing the cowl of the woman’s cloak, and pulled her straight, face to face.
“Listen. You are not over. You live. Magic is not just in the hands.”
“I made so many mistakes,” the woman cried. “He promised us so much in return for our loyalty. I can’t feel it anymore. That wonderful current, the tether to all things…it’s gone.”
Callie strengthened her grip, pulling the woman closer.
“Then we will make you a new tether. You don’t need sigils to matter. There is more to magic than most will ever touch.”
Tears streamed freely now, but Callie didn’t flinch from them.
“He cut your fingers, not your worth. You are not finished.”
Callie reared back and lifted. The witch came off her feet.
“Stand,” Callie commanded firmly, “because your life—our lives—depend on it.”
Jess stepped to Callie’s side. She was also crying. Watching from the shadows, she saw Callie reach out, push away the horror of what Max had inflicted, and offer safety. Scant moments earlier, she had destroyed a man without hesitation, and now, again without thought to her own safety, offered her heart to a sister witch thought to have been an enemy.
Jess—the once battle-hardened Raven—stepped and carefully took the woman’s arm.
“Come with us. We will get you to safety. Then we’ll find Max.”
The injured witch pulled away. There was Jess, bloody and angry, but her dark eyes conveyed a confusing message.
“You’re…her,” the witch gasped, “you’re the Raven.”
Jess’s jaw clenched. Even here, she was known, the terror of her early years. She shook her head.
“Whatever he took,” Jess said gently, “he didn’t take all of you. We have to hurry. Let’s go.”
In the moments when they took the wounded witch back to the narthex entrance, few words were exchanged, and the duo returned to the hunt, their steps quickening.
The moment they were alone, Jess pulled on Callie, bringing her close enough to touch foreheads.
“You did right,” she said, her voice shaking. “You saw her….Callie. That you could share your heart…” She sniffled. “He’s an animal. We have to find him.”
Callie reached, putting her hand behind Jess’s head, and they touched foreheads. It was suddenly quiet, and Callie whispered, her voice angel soft,
“I love you too.”
Down the nave, one of the smoldering ward pots collapsed, the metal clanging as it rolled across the floor. The moment broken, Jess pointed ahead to the altar.
“Look,” Jess whispered, pointing toward the unearthly glow at the back of the sanctuary.
A massive box sat on the altar a hundred feet away—less a coffin and more of a sanctified prison. The walls were rough-hewn quartzite, opaque, with bands of amber and charcoal. Aged iron braced its edges with metal coils drifting along the sides in some perverse art deco motif.
The stone on the front of the box was crystalline, almost clear. Inside the crate-like cage, behind the glass—the impossible.
Movement.
Jess stopped and stared again, frozen in place with too much distance between them and the altar.
A soul vessel, a dangerous, rarely used, ancient containment vehicle, could have been constructed using something as small as a tea diffuser. It could be safely sealed to hold a captive witch or wizard and then maintained by a well-versed keeper.
In the magic world, they were considered archaic and inhumane, but this was large, ornate, and almost regal in its design.
What—or who—it now contained didn’t exactly appear to qualify as human.
“Jess,” Callie whispered, her steadying hand briefly on Jess’s shoulder, “Head on a swivel, babe. We have a ways to go.”
Jess nodded but had barely heard Callie.
Suddenly, Callie’s hand took Jess’s arm.
“Do you trust me?” she asked quietly.
It wasn’t requested in love or with devotion. That was a given. Callie had asked the question as a strategy.
“We circle each other. Max is here, somewhere. I’ll keep an eye on you, and you keep an eye on me.”
She’d tried to keep her voice as calm as possible, but the shapes in the sanctuary were beginning to be familiar. The pillars, the archways—and most of those landmarks were recalled in her visions,