I hoped he was right.
* * *
Before leaving,I had called Regina and Phillip asking for them to guard Krystan and Travis’ house. Emma had been there. Their relief was evident at hearing from me, and when they asked where I was going, they didn’t fight or ask to go with me. They showed up with a surprising number of guards considering how I’d seen Emma lay waste to their numbers. The agents of Veritas went to work painting more glyphs. The more the better. The agents themselves had glyphs painted on their faces.
Stepping through the portal, I was immediately struck by how bright it was for nighttime.
Smoke and blood filled the air, instantly coating my tongue in a patina when I breathed it in. The great building the Luxis has been residing in was ablaze. People screamed and ran around the massive piazza. Some stopped to cry and watch the flames eat the basilica like a great beast.
In Italian, they exclaimed over the loss of St Peter’s. Dark shadows shot up and out of the blaze, zooming around in the sky in a dance of exultation. One slammed into the body of a man near me. He turned to the woman with him and began choking her. As she fell to her knees under his grip, gasping for her husband to stop, I took the few steps forward, chanting and calling my power forth. I easily ripped the evil spirit out of the man, but it slipped from my grasp. The spirit shot into the air then dove back down, this time landing in the woman’s body. On her hands and knees, she twisted around to face me, her lips stretching up in a smile far past a normal human’s smile.
“You’re too late.” It was Emma’s voice entwined with ancient ones. “Their pride is laughable. They kept the books together thinking they could protect them. The Luxis thought they could keep something in the dark fromme.Me.” She laughed, a horrible cackle that echoed everywhere around me. “I am one with the darkness. They cannot keep us separate now. I will join the Stygian with this world, and everything will be made one. We will be whole, we will be complete.”
“And after that?” I couldn’t help the sneer on my face. “You think you’ll be satisfied with this one world?”
The woman didn’t blink. “We will find more. We will bring all the worlds together. We will be one.” Emma’s many voices boomed.
The evil spirit was jerked out of the woman as if by someone else’s hand.
Turning, I saw Leonidas striding toward me, his arm stretched out lit with power. My brother was covered in blood and soot. A raging war beast full of fury and violence.
The man helped his wife to her feet and they ran.
“Ylang?” I asked.
“Our Masters live,” he said.
“The books?”
Leonidas didn’t say anything. His face spoke volumes. Emma had done what she claimed. That was it. She had everything she needed to end our world.
25
Aglass of scotch sat on the kitchen counter of my apartment, but I hadn’t picked it up. I simply stood there, my arms braced on the kitchen counter, looking at it. Blood and ichor covered my face and arms. I killed every creature from the Stygian I could find outside the burning Basilica. Leonidas and I laid waste to the spirits possessing civilians and causing violence. We sent them into the light where they dissolved.
When we’d finished, I kept hunting. Three portals later, I found a nest of the She and slaughtered the cackling, demonic little girls who liked to feast on the entrails of the innocent. They’d managed to rip my shirt away from my body and my pants resembled swiss cheese. The sting of the tracks their sharp nails on my body had reduced to a numb throb.
Emma couldn’t absorb them now. I found it satisfying in that moment to find a way to deny her that scrap of power by destroying them first. When I’d emerged from the sewer, a group of young people saw me and ran screaming for their lives.
Standing in the kitchen, I recalled my memory of meeting Damien, the former head of the Order of Tenebrae. He ordered a bourbon and put it front of him, never taking a sip. Sometimes rolling the glass in his hands as if testing himself to see how long he could sit there with the discomfort of temptation. As if he were devoted to the pain of the addiction rather than the addiction itself.
I knew it wasn’t the golden liquid I was wrestling with.
I should return to the purple house. Tell Krystan and Travis how I failed. Tell the Veritas it was only a matter of time before the Stygian would collide with our plane.
No sound had been made, but I knew when Emma was in the room with me.
“Why do you haunt me?”
“Is that what I’m doing?” she asked, curiosity tinging her voice. I couldn’t reconcile the familiarity of the woman I loved and the alien affectations that were getting harder to ignore the longer she went around devouring creatures from the Stygian. Emma grew more distant, as if she were becoming another creature, unfamiliar, but curious about this world. I was nothing but an experiment to this strange being.
“You have to stop this,” I said.
Instead of answering, Emma walked up and slid her hands along my chest, until one slipped into the collar of my shirt to skim my collar bone with a soft finger. I tensed under her touch. My stomach clenched, a war of desperate need and repulsion going through me. I bared down on the rising sensations until I didn’t know if I wanted to destroy her or fuck her.
Her fingers delicately skated down my sternum, causing a shudder to go through me.
Whirling around, I grabbed her hands and slammed her into the wall.
