Drowning In The Dark: #4 The Veil Series (18 page)

T
he storm raged
for an eternity and for no time at all. Adrift, lost, and alone, I weathered it because there was no other option. Lightening fractured the sky. The seas boiled. This wasn’t death. Death wouldn’t be tumultuous, of that I was certain. Closing my eyes, shutting down, I hid inside myself where the ravaging storm couldn’t penetrate.

I
curled
my toes in the white sand, ignoring the painful bite of heat. The sun beat down, lashing my skin, but it didn’t seem to matter. Not really. Out across the azure seas, the storm raged on. Lightning twitched and bucked through dark mushrooming clouds, but it was distant, someone else’s battle. Here, where I stood, all was calm. I tilted my head up and welcomed the heat.

“Where are we?” Akil asked.

I turned my head, expecting him to be behind me, but I was alone. He was close though. I knew it the same way I knew I wasn’t really standing on a beach. Shielding my eyes, I scanned the endless stretch of blazing white sand. Nothing. Not a blade of grass or a bird in the sky. The washed-out blue sky funneled to the silvery, flawless sand.

“This is a phantom place,” Akil said.

“I come here when I have nowhere else to go.” When Damien beat me to within an inch of my life, when the pain smothered me like the sunlight pouring over me now, when my humanity failed. “What’s happening?”

He sighed, and although I was alone, I felt his breath on my neck and his fingers in my hair. “I failed to protect you from yourself.”

“I don’t understand.” Lightning licked across the distant sky, but no thunder followed.

“I believed the infusion would be enough to prevent this. I did not want to believe what the collapse of the veil would do to you.”

Yes, I remembered. On the street, the veil fell, and the netherworld flooded through. The power burned me. So much power… “The power of two worlds.”

“Yes. Half bloods are conduits. Torn between worlds. Belonging to neither. When the veil fell, you were exposed. I cannot stop what you will become. Only half bloods have the strength to stop half-bloods.”

“Stefan?”

“I do not know his fate.”

“Will I survive?”

“Yes.”

I sensed he wanted to say more but was afraid to ask. “Is this surviving?”

“Yes.”

His whispers touched my cheek. I pressed my hand against my face, imagining it was his. “Val was right, wasn’t he? I’ve lost.”

“No, you are here. This place keeps you safe. This sanctuary protects the heart of you.”

I smiled. Ironic, that the place I’d created to escape my owner had become the place I’d use to cling onto my humanity. I could thank Damien for that.

“Do you want to go back?” Akil’s words lapped at my mind the way the silken waves lapped at the diamond shore.

The storm heaved out at sea. Black clouds frothed. Death stalked that storm. I feared that, perhaps, I was the storm. Akil chuckled, and I wrapped my arms around me, inexplicably cold despite the sun.

“You are destruction,” he said. “You are the storm. You witness the destruction of your demon. If you do not go back, everything Val foresaw will come to pass. It already happens. You have a choice. Embrace what you are, take ownership of your control, be all you can be. Or stay here, weather the storm, ride it out, and hope when it passes, there will be something worth returning to.”

The pain on the street had been too much. My humanity had peeled apart. I was here because I’d let go. My demon owned me now. “I’m not sure I’m strong enough to go back.”

“You will not know until you are tested.”

Fear chilled me to the bone. I knew I was capable of horrible things. I felt the lust for destruction, the desire for more. It was seductive, tempting, a madness. If I went back, there was an equal chance I’d embrace the dark, not the light.

D
emons
. Many. Everywhere. I tasted their acidic burn on my lips and breathed their potent scents up my nostrils and down my throat. Elements licked at my demon flesh, probing, seeking, exploring. I saw through demon eyes, absorbed through demon skin. I stood inside the storm as it raged through the back street. The wind howled, and my kin howled with it. They scurried, skittered, climbed walls, and spilled through doorways. There were many. I was one. I could stop this. But did I want to?

Tremors shivered through my flesh. The harsh wind tore burning ashes from my body and sent the embers skyward. I would be free like those embers. A smile ticked across my cracked lips. Free. It was all I’d ever wanted
. Let the power flow. Let the heat consume. Destroy it all, and be free.

I saw a light in the dark. He shone, sparkled; he was glorious. I watched him walk closer. The wind tugged at his crystal wings, and they sang like distant bells. His ice-bound body carved through the storm. This one was strong.
I know strong.
He stopped before me, a beautiful creature with a sharp and deadly gleam in his diamond eyes
. Ice. My opposite. My enemy. He knows me.
Recognition flared in his eyes, and then he struck. Fast, low, he flicked an ice-encrusted sword. I laughed, danced back, and called the heat of fire to me. The flames were hungry for his death. I offered them freedom, lashed heat, and fire, and flame at my enemy. His ice hissed. He lunged, twisted, fast and sharp, like a shaft of light slicing through the dark. His wings flared, daggers of ice sprouting from each quill, and then they struck. I flung up a curtain of fire but not quickly enough. Ice punched through my molten flesh, evaporating with a sigh, but not before he cut deeper. I snarled and staggered. He stalked around me, weaving through the howling wind, marking me with his eyes, sword pointed at my chest.

“I know you’re in there, Muse. Stop this now. Before I kill you.”

I smiled then laughed. It sounded like flames spluttering. “Kill me? You cannot kill me. I am destruction.”

“I can see that.” He remarked, flicking his gaze behind me. “You are Muse.”

For the first time, I saw my surroundings. Flames rode high, devouring buildings, skipping and dancing from one roof to another. The fire was free, and it was hungry.
Yes. Go. Feed.
I shuddered, pleasured by the fire’s thrill.
Beyond this street, there is more. A whole city waits, its beating heart throbbing with power. It waits for me to take it.

“Don’t do this,” the Winter King warned.

I flicked my gaze to him and wondered why his tone was sad. “Join me. You are kin. We are the same.” Doubt clouded his gaze. His sharp features hardened. Fractals skittered beneath his glittering flesh, and then with a shake, I saw the moment he denied his nature. His eyes blazed bright, and hoarfrost coated his flesh. “Fool.” I snarled. “We could have it all.”

“Once, I would have.” A grin slanted across his lips. “You’d be proud.”

He tensed, poised to strike, and I lashed out, curling a ribbon of fire around my arm and whipping it across his body. He snarled and turned away. I pressed on, swirling a firestorm around me, listening to it roar and bay. If he would not join me, then he was my enemy and must perish.
It matters not that he is a prince. The princes do not have my power. I am destruction.
We danced, he and I. Fire rained from the sky, and all around, razor-edged ice glinted. He summoned avatars of snow, but they tumbled beneath waves of heat. He sliced the air with thousands of diamond daggers, and I devoured them all. The more we battled, the more I sensed him failing. He could be strong, but he denied himself. It would be his undoing.

Flames licked over him, driving him back against a crumbling wall. I shoved a blazing shoulder into him, drove the heat through him. The wall collapsed, and we tumbled inside the burning building. He cursed and tried to scramble free, but I pinned him beneath me
,
admiring how his wings melted and the ice-armor fractured. Steam hissed and spat where my fire licked his icy flesh.
Spreading black hands on his pale chest, I sunk my heat into him. He bucked, cried out. His face twisted in pain.
He is mine. He will die.

“Muse, please… This isn’t you.”

I leaned in, spread my wing high, and soaked up the flames as the Winter King succumbed beneath my power.
“You could have been magnificent.”

“Please…” He gasped. “Don’t turn into the thing the demons want you to be. Don’t let Val and the princes win.” Pain rolled his eyes back. He was strong. Even as fire flooded him, he fought, but not enough. Still, he held back. Why was he letting me kill him? Why was he not fighting?

Something inside me shifted, like a brick dislodged in my very foundation. I faltered and twitched, distracted by a wicked slither of emotional pain. I looked down. I saw with human eyes. Stefan. Limp beneath me. With a cry, I pulled my hands back, but it was too late.

H
e couldn’t be dead
. I refused to believe it. With a furious snarl, I swiped at the air and extinguished the flames while shaking off my demon. I grabbed his arm and dragged him out of the smoldering building. Demons lunged in. I didn’t even give them a second thought. With a mental snap of my fingers, they burst into ashes. After the sixth or seventh, the others fled. I hefted Stefan’s dead weight beside the burned-out shell of a car and shook off my demon. “Stefan…” He was still demon, his skin pearly smooth, lips soft against hard features. Eyes closed, he could’ve been sleeping if he wasn’t so still. “Stefan…” I pressed my fingers to his neck, searching for a pulse. “Please, please… You can’t be dead. No… no…” I couldn’t find a beat. “God, no.” Pressing my ear to his chest, I listened for his heart, but over my own thundering heartbeat and sawing breaths, I couldn’t make out any sound. “Goddammit, you’re not dead, you’re not—” I tried his wrist. Snowflake fractals swirled beneath my touch. That was good, right? “Stefan?” There, I felt his pulse, a fluttering beneath my fingertips, weak, but alive.

Aware of an audience, I looked up and saw the lesser demons crowded rounded. Dozens. Tails twitching, eyes aglow. Beyond them, the street bore the scars of battle. Some buildings had crumbled to rubble. The sky twitched, rippling with the colors of the veil. Boston’s high-rises were dark, like tombstones marking a dead city. Val and the princes were out there. I had to stop this now. I had control. I was back for good. I was stable. I could do this. But at what cost? Stefan didn’t move.

“Please wake up. You could have killed me. Is that what you meant? You came back to kill me. To stop me…” He’d beaten his demon. He could have killed me. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t really fought. In the end, he’d controlled it. He’d won.

Somewhere deep inside the city, an explosion rumbled. It wasn’t over, at least not for the rest of us. But for Stefan? I clasped his head in my hands and peered down at his peaceful face. “I have to go. I’m sorry. I know I promised, but I can’t stay with you.” I kissed him on the lips, wishing—not for the first time—that the world and its troubles would just leave us in peace.

Standing, I sent a snarl out to the lessers. “I know you understand me. Guard him. Don’t let anyone or any beast close. Don’t touch him. You stay, and you protect him.” Their demon eyes regarded me without an ounce of emotion. I had no idea if they’d obey me or tear him to shreds as soon as my back was turned. “Do this, or I track you down and burn you all.” I singled out the biggest, ugliest, six-legged, slick-skinned thing. Beside him, I surged my element into a lesser and turned the demon inside out with flame. The horde whimpered. “Understand?” The ugly beast snuffled the ground and rippled its lips in a snarl. I took that as a yes. They scurried from me as I strode away. I glanced back once and saw them all watching me with piercing eyes.

F
ollowing
the sounds of distant gunfire and spikes in heat, I jogged along empty sidewalks and barren streets. In some places, the netherworld had spilled over, tainting Boston with its bruised touch. Streetlights dripped thrashing black vines. Manholes hosted misshapen trees that corkscrewed skyward, creaking and groaning under the weight of their awkward twitching branches. Shadows layered over shadows. Halfway to Joe Moakley Park, a helicopter swooped low, followed by the sleek, arrow-shaped body of an Accipiter—hawk demon. Hunters gathered on building rooftops, squawking and bickering like oversized gulls. Some clutched what I assumed to be bodies in their talons, tearing at their prey with needle sharp teeth. I tore my gaze away and focused ahead. The world was going to hell. Had Stefan gotten Ryder to safety before the veil fell? I didn’t think so. Either way, I couldn’t help either of them now.

The closer I got to Dorchester, the louder the sounds of battle became. Deep booms, and high-pitched demon cries rattled and shook the night air.

I stumbled on a group of militia corralling a handful of lessers with Tasers and rifles. I could have made short work of them, but they had it in hand. Drawing unwanted attention to myself wasn’t wise. The militia would just as likely lash out at me.

I felt the tug of Akil’s element with every step. He was somewhere up ahead. There were other elements mingling nearby. Princes? I would have to face them. My brother too. And any remaining half bloods. I’d kill them all. Boston was mine.

An explosion buffeted the air. Troops pounded the street, hurrying ahead of me, heading into the fray where the sky bled crimson rain and the park writhed with things not of this world. And I marched on, wondering if I was walking headlong into my final moments.

M
ovie battles seemed so organized compared
to the chaos churning inside the park. As many people fled, as rushed into the mayhem. You can’t
smell
the battlefield at the movies. I smelled it before I could see it: the stink of hot, wet metal, of choking oil-black smoke, sweat, and shit. I coughed the stench from my mouth—or tried to—but a fug hung several feet off the ground. As I broke through a hole in the fence surrounding the park, my steps faltered. Swaths of parkland suffocated under the rippling crawl of lurid black and purple netherworld undergrowth. Demons tore into militia and enforcer lines, their sheer numbers enough to plow through human barricades. People died in the time it took me to blink. Fear and disgust clawed into my thoughts, trying to pull me free, wrench me away from the madness. Forcing my feet to move, I skirted the fringes of the park, weaving between the burned-out husks of abandoned cars. It hadn’t taken long for the world to go to hell. The netherworld had washed over this part of Boston like a tsunami of devastation. What would happen if we couldn’t stop it? How long before Boston drowned?

Spotting a footbridge spanning Old Colony Avenue, I quickly pounded up the steps. All along the bridge, snipers reloaded and fired. The cacophony and the visceral odors overloaded my senses and draped me in blessed numbness, but the sprawling sight below stole my breath and briefly, my wits. The battle on the park was just the beginning. Further back, where Old Harbor used to be, the netherworld had invaded in all of its vicious, surreal glory. Poison consumed the city I called home. When Akil had said the veil would fall, I’d heard the words, but I couldn’t have known it would be like this. Ragged lightening sheared the sky asunder. The netherworld boiled like the storm inside my mind. It rolled and heaved forward, a hungry crawling monster devouring everything in its path.

“You gonna make yourself useful?” One of the snipers nudged me away from the handrail. I stumbled, reeling out of his way, and then ducked as a high-pitched screech blasted me from behind. The hunter came in hard and fast. It swooped so close I felt its reaching talons snag my hair. It sunk its claws into the sniper’s back and hauled him skyward. He screamed, arms and legs flailing. The hunter cawed, snapped its long beak, and beat its wings, trying to rise.

“No, you don’t.” I spilled heat through me, over me, and sent it out in one vicious whip. Fire licked up the back of the lesser. Its screech burrowed into my skull, and then it let go of its prey and took to the air. The sniper collapsed at my feet, stunned, face gray, but coherent enough to witness me burn the hunter from the inside out.

I helped him up, ignoring his wide-eyed thanks and turned my attention to the demons below. I could kill them. No, I could
destroy
them. One by one, I hooked into their internal heat, singled out each demon from the melee, and blasted their existence from Boston with a mental click of the fingers. It was too easy, like squashing ants. I steeled myself against the cruel lust, packing the demon desires neatly behind the restraints of my humanity. This was my purpose. My name. And hell help, me, it felt right. I worked beside the snipers on that bridge until my eyes streamed. My body trembled. We appeared to be winning. The demon numbers thinned, rebel and enforcer ranks swelled, and then the first of the princes came through, and the world went to hell in a hand basket. He came out of the heaving dark like the bow of a vast ocean liner, looming too high and too vast to comprehend all at once. Bullets skipped off his stone armor. We might as well have been insects throwing pebbles at him. The helicopters circled his monstrous head, guns rattling, but he barely paid them any attention. Moon-like eyes regarded the people like scurrying ants at his feet. The power rolling off him numbed my skin and unnerved my demon.

“Can you turn that one to ash?” the sniper I’d saved yelled above the sound of the choppers and the groaning bulk of mega-prince.

I shrugged a shoulder. Fire and stone? I’d need to funnel enough heat to melt him. Doable? How the hell was I supposed to know? It wasn’t as though I knew what I was doing.

“We’ll cover you. Get down there.”

“Listen, if a big-ass, black-skinned, lava-veined demon shows up, don’t shoot him, okay. He’s on our side.” I hadn’t yet seen Akil. The battle spread too far, but I sensed him close. He’d be here.

“No promises.” The sniper flashed me a crazed smile and boomed orders to cover me.

The enforcers fell back behind their armored vehicles. Someone fired an RPG. The rocket exploded against the prince in a bloom of rolling orange flame, but it only seemed to piss him off and barely chipped his armor. I stopped, planted my feet, and released my demon. Raw hunger, liquid fire, and explicit power tingled across my flesh. I flared my wing, readied my stance, and drew in the heat. My reserves were limitless, like trawling a net through the ocean. Heat from this world and the unrefined heat from the netherworld rippled around me. At some point, mega-demon noticed little ol’ me burning bright a few hundred yards in front of him, little more than a firefly. This firefly packed one helluva bite.

His voice—spoken directly into my mind—grated, like stone on stone, an abrasive noise that set my teeth on edge.

I grinned, not that he could see my tiny smile on my itty-bitty face. “I burn you. Yes?” The fire strained at my control and burst free. Lashings of ethereal energy spun away, twisting and writhing as it rushed toward mega-demon. As soon as my power made contact, fire flooded up his legs and bloomed across his chest. He spread his arms, admiring its climb, not concerned in the least.

Well, shit.
I poured more through me, trying to convey furnace-temperature thoughts. Sniper fire cracked to my left and right, picking off demons as they attempted to tackle me. I lit up like a beacon for all things demon.

Mega-demon lifted a foot and slammed it down, quaking the earth below the entire park. Stumbling, I fell to one knee. Wasn’t I meant to be some uber-powerful she-demon? Hello, Mother of Destruction here. There had to be more to this, more I could give. I jerked my head up. Mega-demon crouched down, oblivious to the bullets raining over him. I met his huge eyes and thought of Stefan and how he’d brought me back from the brink of madness. I thought of Dawn, and how the brave little half blood had stared into the face of death, accepting her fate. I thought of Ryder, his stubborn determination and need to protect is family. Nica—sweet Nica—she’d died believing I needed to be stopped. I owed it to Nica, to everyone, to become all that I could be. My friends, my family. If I didn’t stop this beast and those that would surely follow, everything I loved would be gone.
Hope, when the storm passes, there will be something worth returning to.

Standing tall, wing held high, I lifted my chin, glared into the curious face of a demon the size of a mountain, and reached out to the warm, beating heart of Boston.

Akil was right. Until tested, we never know what we’re capable of. It is only in the eye of the storm we discover who we truly are. Fire consumed me. Heat overwhelmed my flesh, spilled through my veins, filled my mind, and scorched my demon body until solid became liquid. Fire is not good. It isn’t bad. It just is. I
became
fire and soared high with the taste of freedom on my lips. I sought the soul of mega-demon—the center of his power—and set it ablaze, drowning him in flame from the inside out. A river of molten heat flowed through him, and laid him to waste. When the fuel had burned away and my power had nowhere else to go, I withdrew, snapping back into my body with a sudden, painful jolt that dropped me to my knees. I kneeled and poured all my remaining effort into staying conscious.