“You did not come to me simply to provide sustenance.” He tapped his finger against the empty glass. “What is it you want?”
“You’re right. Comforting you isn’t on the top of my to-do list.” The voice of the essence blade echoed in my mind. “Who is the vile oppressor?”
He flexed his scarred hand. “You will believe nothing I say.”
“Humor me. Who is the vile oppressor?”
Rhyzkahl regarded me with contempt. “You. Mzatal. It is difficult to choose which to name.”
I threw up my hands. “You’re a captive because of your actions.”
“And you are an oppressor because of yours.”
“Serving justice doesn’t make me an oppressor!” I caught myself before I blurted out further defensive justification. The asshole was baiting me. I stood and folded my arms. “Let me clarify. Xhan said, ‘Treacherous. Traitor. Vile oppressor.’ What did it mean?”
His gaze narrowed on me. “Tell me how Mzatal came to be on Earth.”
Aha! It wasn’t Rhyzkahl’s weakness from the lightning strike that would dredge answers from him. It was his craving for information from beyond the confines of his prison. “I’ll answer that one. Then you answer mine.”
“On my honor.”
I snorted. I’d been taught that demons held honor above all else, but Rhyzkahl and company had clearly demonstrated how much steaming bullshit that was. “You’ll probably just lie, but I’m in a good mood.” I shrugged. “I’ll play along.”
“Agreed.”
This would be interesting. “An Earthgate from the first age is open. Mzatal came through it.”
“An Earthgate? Where?” He staggered to his feet. “How?”
“Sorry, dude. One question. One answer.” I spread my hands. “Your turn. Who is the vile oppressor?”
He ground his teeth and gave a grunt of frustration. “The one who held Xhan.”
“Do you mean today? Mzatal? Or you, before?”
“One question. One answer.”
“One clear answer,” I said.
“It is clear to me. Clarity for you was not specified in the agreement.”
“Fine.” I clearly showed him my middle finger. “The gate is about thirty miles from here”—I pointed in a vague southerly direction—“that way.”
He went lord-still. “Crystals?”
“Uh huh. Big and shiny. I gave you where and what. That’s two answers.” He couldn’t do anything with the information, so there was no harm in throwing him a few crumbs—extra incentive for him to answer my questions. “Now, tell me clearly, using a name I know, who your blade meant by ‘vile oppressor’.”
“Mzatal.”
“You owe me another one.”
“I owe you nothing. You volunteered a second answer.” He leaned close. “But I will tell you what I have told you before. Your lover’s hands are not clean. Do you abide slavery?”
Cold rage filled my veins. “You’re trying to implicate Mzatal in slavery? You who had your Earth flunkies kidnap innocent women to use as sex-slave currency for demonic lords?”
He gave me a smug look. “You know nothing of it.”
I swayed, dizzy.
• • •
Sunlight streams through the library window, but it cannot compete with his radiance.
Breath catching, I step closer. “I know my heart, my lord Rhyzkahl.”
His hand rests on the frame of my portrait. I seem so young, captured on canvas by Lord Szerain. Could it truly have been only a year past?
“Elinor, it is my will that you abide here.”
“Do you always get what you want?”
He lowers his head, eyes on mine. So beautiful. “Yes.”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The sound teases my consciousness. My consciousness. Kara. This is a vision. I need to follow the ticking. Marco Knight told me I can camera-fly, but how? Looks like I’ll learn by trying. I reimmerse in Elinor’s experience, aware this time.
I conjure Giovanni’s face in my mind to give me courage, and I pray my voice does not tremble when I speak. “Forgive me, my lord. It is no longer my desire to abide.”
No, damn it, I’m still in Elinor’s perspective. I need to escape it. I’ll fly my camera-view up there, to the top of the bookshelf. I can do this. Uno. Due. Tre . . .
The world shatters and reforms.
One. Two. Three.
Moonlight floods the library. Rhyzkahl’s back is to me.
A different time, but not the bookcase camera-view I was trying for. It doesn’t feel like Elinor’s perspective either. Did I screw something up?
His hands grip the frame of Elinor’s portrait, and he drops his head. He heaves out a deep sigh and pushes from the wall. He gazes long at her image then drapes it in deep red silk.
Not Elinor’s perspective. I’m me. Of course I’m me.
I sneer. “Did you fuck her over as badly as you did me?”
He turns on me, and his face twists in fury. “What are you doing? You should not be here!”
“I can be wherever I damn well please.” I lift my chin. Why wouldn’t I be here? “You burned all of your tell-Kara-what-to-do privileges.”
He advances on me, grips my shoulders. Shakes me hard enough to make my teeth clack together. “Depart. Now.”
This is no meek Elinor he’s dealing with. I snag a book from the nearest shelf—War and Peace, hardback—and whack him on the side of the head. For good measure, I drive my knee into his groin, delighted at his grunt of pain.
He releases me and staggers back, overturns a bookshelf. I sidestep, but he recovers in a heartbeat. Lunges. Grabs my hair at the scalp. Drags me. “Kara, go home.”
“Fuck off!” I slap my hands over his to hold them close to my head, twist my body in a move that should break his wrist.
He pivots with me, snakes an arm around my neck and gets me in a headlock. “Kara, stop! You need to remember—”
The world tilts. Shade and sunlight beyond. The nexus. Dizzy, I claw at the arm around my throat. The world tips back, wobbles drunkenly. The library and moonlight.
Rhyzkahl’s hold is like iron. I kick and struggle to no avail. “Let me go!” The Nexus. War and Peace. Light. Darkness. What is he doing to me?
“You don’t belong here, Kara.” Dappled shade. Red silk.
“No!” I fight down the panic and call up my rage instead, lash out with the one weapon I have in my grasp. “It’s you lords who don’t belong here! You don’t even know where you came from!” Vicious mind control by the demahnk prevents the lords from even considering certain topics. I seize onto the deepest secret I know and wield it as a white hot spear of hatred. “What’s your real connection to Earth? You and all you lordly types.”
Grass and flowers. The world stabilized. Heat. Humidity. Home.
No dream-vision, yet Rhyzkahl still held me. Breathing hard, I scrabbled at his arm. “How’d y’all come to be so high and mighty in the demon realm, huh? Where’s your mama? Who’s your daddy?”
The sound ripped through me like a horrific wake-up call. What have I done? He’d dragged me out of the Elinor vision after I screwed up the attempt to camera-fly, and I’d repaid him with crushing pain. My stomach clenched, and I tasted acid. Sure, I’d been disoriented, but I’d wanted to hurt him, to pay him back for the pain he’d inflicted on me. I’d overreacted, and now I had no idea how to fix this. Usually the demahnk intervened to ease the excruciating headache, or sometimes a sufficient di
straction could pull a lord from the mind-loop of agony. But I’d unloaded on Rhyzkahl with the heaviest weapon in my artillery.
“I’m sorry,” I choked out, even as he curled into a fetal position against the trunk of the tree. The leaves murmured. I lifted my eyes to the brilliant canopy. “I swear I didn’t mean to hurt him this badly.”
The shade around him flickered with emerald and sapphire sparkles as if the sun shone through gem stones. I didn’t know if the tree was telling me to go the fuck away since I’d done enough damage, or saying It’s okay, I’ll help him.
It was beautiful, and I felt like shit.
Tears stung my eyes. I spun away and fast-walked to the house. The headaches encouraged the lords to forget the thoughts that triggered them. Maybe this one would also erase that I was a cruel bitch.
But even if Rhyzkahl didn’t remember what I’d done, I would.
Chapter 15
I slumped to sit at the kitchen table. Fillion mewed fiercely, then climbed up a chair and onto the table, trotted over to me and jammed his head into my chin.
“You just want a treat,” I said but accepted the nuzzle. And of course gave him a treat. Cats were pretty cool for cheering a body up.
Ooh! I pushed up from the table and ran to my bedroom where Squig was curled into a tight ball of fur on my pillow. I carefully scooped her up then hurried out back as quickly as I could without jostling her fully awake.
Rhyzkahl still lay huddled at the base of the tree, eyes squeezed shut and face etched in pain. As gently as possible, I settled Squig into the crook of his neck. Neither kitten nor lord opened their eyes, but Rhyzkahl shifted one hand to cup the kitten closer and murmured a word that didn’t sound like demon and definitely wasn’t English. Squig yawned mightily then revved up a loud purr. The lines of pain in Rhyzkahl’s face eased a bit.
Exhaling in relief, I slipped away and returned inside, then snuck a peek out the window. Rhyzkahl was stroking the kitten with gentle fingers. Good. We both felt better now.
My phone buzzed with a message from Idris. <Video chat in five?>
I texted back confirmation then headed to the war room with its video conferencing setup. At precisely five minutes after his text, his call came in, and the wall screen lit up with his image. He sat at a table in a mobile camp, camouflage net overhead and DIRT personnel bustling in the background. Sweat-streaked soot and grime covered his face, and one sleeve of his maroon fatigues hung in tatters. A heavy bandage was visible on his forearm.
“Looking good out there, Idris,” I said. “How bad is the arm?”
He shrugged. “Only fifteen stitches. I’d just sling-shotted a reyza when a savik decided that getting its claws on me was more important than anchoring the rift.”
“Ouch. Glad you’re still in one piece,” I said. “Would you mind writing up how you do those arcane shield busters?”
“Sure can. I’m in touch with a guy who wants to design a gun for arcane specialists—combination mini-grenade launcher, super-Taser, and rifle. He says he can build it where it’ll fire a disruptor sphere that can be followed with bullets.”
“Dude, my squad would pee themselves if I handed them a weapon like that,” I said. “If you think your guy is legit, tell him to work up a prototype. I’ll make sure it’s seen by the right people.”
“Awesome. From your message, it sounds like I have a lot to catch up on.”
“Uh-huh, and there’s more since I called.” I proceeded to brief him on the pre-anomaly tangle and the situation with the rakkuhr and the mutations. I gave him a moment to curse his demonic lord-father’s part in it before I moved on to Giovanni’s arrival. After that, I texted copies of the Jontari memoir, and we spent a good five minutes hashing over possible reasons for why we’d been kept in the dark, and by whom. Even though we didn’t come up with definitive answers, it felt good to talk it out with another summoner who shared the same confusion and outrage.
I went on to describe my discovery of the AWOL four in the Beaulac area. “It was odd. Like they’re here but not.”
“You could check out places that’ve had arcane activity in the past to narrow down where they might be holed up.”
“Good idea. I’ll do that.” I scrawled a note to myself. “Now for the other big news. Fixing the pre-anomaly powered up the Spires, and Pellini and I kind of finished switching them on. Turns out they’re a gate that’s been dormant for thousands of years. Kadir’s Earthgate. It’s working.”
His face lit up, then he let out a whoop and leaped up to punch the air. “A gate! That’s incredible!” He dropped back into the chair, grinning. I found myself grinning as well. I hadn’t seen him enthused since before the Mraztur captured him.
“That must mean the ways are open,” he continued. “Summonings might be possible again.”
“Right, though I wonder how having a gate will affect the need to summon.” I tugged a hand through my hair. “I don’t know if the demons can use it. Lords can come through. Kadir is on Earth . . . somewhere. And Mzatal is working rifts with Helori for transport. You’ve probably seen him mentioned in DIRT reports from China, Nigeria, and Australia.”
I might as well have thrown a wet blanket over his joy-fire. “I thought you’d found a way to bring him through,” he said then slammed his fist against the table. “So, just like that, the qaztahl have access to Earth with Kadir as the gatekeeper. After all we went through.”
“At least it has a gatekeeper. I don’t know what the hell Kadir is up to, but we need Mzatal’s help, and he’s dominating the other lords right now.”
I took in his demeanor and tone. “Tessa?! Where? What happened?”
“She was on the roof of a building overlooking the rift. As soon as I spotted her, she ducked down. By the time the incursion was settled enough for us to check it out, there was no trace of her and no clue of what she was up to.”
A pang of sympathy went through me. Idris was Tessa’s son, but he’d never had a chance to know her—or know what she felt toward him, if anything. Hell, we weren’t even sure if she had any clue she was his mother. I had no doubt that, where she was concerned, his emotions were a messy soup of longing, confusion, and anger, along with an aching need to know the true story.
I tilted my head. “I’m thinking of having her house painted black,” I said. “And I’m stealing her rosebushes. I’ll probably end up killing them, but I’m feeling kind of immature and petty.”
“And take that stupid Welcome sign, too.”
“Ha! I’m burning that thing.”
A whisper of amusement crossed his face, then he nodded to someone off camera before looking back at me. “I need to get going. Rift burped.” He smiled. “It was good talking to you, Kara.”
“Ditto. You take care of yourself.”
The screen went blank.
“Kara?” Pellini called from the front room. “You need to come here.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Cory?” I shoved up from the chair and broke into a run. “Is he okay?”
“Honestly, I have no idea,” Pellini said.
I slid to a stop then could only stare. The red rubbery egg was gone, and the sofa bed had buckled under the weight of a four-foot-wide sphere of what looked like polished obsidian laced with pulsing luminescent red veins.
I finally found my voice. “That’s him?”
Pellini gave me a look. “Unless someone snuck in, kidnapped Cory, and left a small asteroid behind, I’m thinking that odds are it is indeed him.”
I moved close and peered at the surface in amazement. “The arcane is active
all over it, so I’m going to assume Cory is still alive and well in there.”
“If the egg was Phase Three, and the final mutated form is Phase Four, then what is this?” Pellini asked.
“Phase three and a half, I guess,” I said with a shrug. “The Feds didn’t have anyone in a ‘meteor’ phase. They’d concluded that the Fours were emerging changed from the red jelly egg—the chrysalis, according to their terminology.” So was this the last phase before the mutation? Worry resurfaced. What would Cory be when he emerged?
“I’m betting this is the actual chrysalis,” Pellini said then leaned close and squinted at the sphere. “How long do you think this phase lasts?”
“I have no idea, but my oh-so-accurate guess is not too long. They had a couple of people who’d already been transformed and who weren’t discovered in this chrysalis stage.” I shook my head. “My tongue keeps wanting to say ‘crystal-fitz.’ Let’s keep it simple. Pod.”
I regarded the pod and my poor, smushed sofa bed. “I’d love to try and roll him into the corner to clear space, but I don’t dare. Not after people died when the gel-stuff was disturbed.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t anyway.” When I shot him a perplexed look, he continued, “Squig and Cake were chasing Sammy through the living room as I came in, and when I tried to avoid stepping on a kitten, I lost my balance and fell against the pod. Hard. That sucker didn’t move a millimeter.”
“Weird.” I cautiously placed my hand on the surface. “It doesn’t look big enough to be that heavy.”
“I’m not sure it’s an issue of weight, per se.” Pellini spread his arms and nodded down at his bulk. “I ain’t exactly a little guy, and it felt like falling into a building.”
Curious, I gave an experimental push, then a harder one. The thing might as well have been Thor’s hammer.
“Y’know, I think Cory can stay right where he is,” I said, earning me a bark of laughter from Pellini. My phone rang, a welcome distraction from Cory’s predicament, even with the caller ID showing Knight. I headed out to the porch before answering. “Hey, Marco.”
“Kara,” he said, voice strained. “I’m sorry about yesterday.”