“What is happening?!” Lynette shouted, the air around us quivering with the familiar weight of her magic.
“Shut up, Lenny!” Azrael shouted back, snapping his fangs.
“Here,” Bastien spoke, his tone the most controlled out of all of us, even though it teetered on the edge of breaking. He placed the end of his tether over Tobias’ body, the dark blot now covering his arms. Azrael handed his over, and I followed suit, Bastien twisting the lines together into a cord that pulsed a white-hot light. Turning the end downward like a dagger about to plunge into a sacrificial lamb, he drove the end of the corded tether into Tobias’s chest. As if he’d been struck with a bolt of lightning, Tobias’s body thrashed, his back arching off the table as a horrid scream tore from his depths, more monster than man.
“Together!” Bastien shouted as Azrael and I both flanked his side, each covering one another’s grip on the cord. “Pull!”
Azrael snarled, the veins in his arms bulging. Bastien gritted his teeth, remaining quiet as he pulled with concentrated effort. Being the man I am, I dug my heels into the ground, shouting at the top of my lungs, “You shadowy shit-stain! You will not take another from me!”
The gems embedded in his hands and chest burst to life, the shadows surrounding those areas of his body dissolving as the viscous matter retreated.
“Again!” Bastien shouted.
My nails dug into the meat of my palm as I tightened my grip, pouring any remaining strength into the effort. With a sudden jolt, a horrible tearing sound filled the room, and the three of us were sent shuffling backward.
The sound of sopping wet fabric hit the ground in front of us, a puddle of teeming shadow roiling towards us with another monstrous roar.
“Cease!”
The Command rolled over the room like a wave of pressure. Lynette stood by her table, her legs trembling and chest heaving as she stared daggers at the shapeless mass. A section of the swirling ooze peeled back, revealing Sancha’s familiar smile curled back over blackened teeth.
“The Sleeper’s interference will not stand, and his children will know no rest till this world belongs to me once more.”
His children? What were they talking about?
Lynette grunted as the wave of pressure lessened, the undulating mass reaching up toward Tobias once more. Beside me, Azrael was a streak as he wrapped the cord around his forearm, barreling down on the Umbral with impossible speed. He wrapped the cord around its mass, pulling it taut across Sancha’s throat, halting its advance towards Tobias.
With Lynette’s Command lessened, Bastien and I joined Azrael, latching onto the cord and dragging the Umbral several feet back, leaving a smear of black ichor as we moved.
“This world is rightfully mine!” bellowed Sancha, tendrils of inky darkness lashing out toward the table, but falling just shy.
The Source’s blessing pulsed in my chest, reacting to the Umbral’s words. Releasing one hand from the tether, I pressed it to the gnashing face exuding from the ichor, the heat surging through my limb as a branch of blinding lightning coursed through the mass, reducing it in an instant to a puddle on the floor.
Silence fell over the room, the cadence of our labored breathing the only reprieve as the vile sludge slowly seeped through the floorboards.
Lynette fell back onto the table, holding herself upright with trembling arms.
“Was that the Cardinal?”
“Tobias,” Bastien breathed, scrambling to his feet once more and dashing over to the table. Azrael was the second to reach him, and I kept my distance for a moment, too afraid to confirm what I could already feel.
“He’s not breathing,” Azrael whispered.
Bastien fumbled with his pocket, swearing as he pulled back a bloodied hand, the phial with the next spell component shattered in the scuffle. He braced himself against the table, a hand on either side of Tobias’s peaceful face as tears fell into his coppery curls.
“We have to keep going,” Azrael pleaded. “Please, Bast. We have to do something.”
“The spell won’t work if he’s already dead,” Bastien whispered.
“You can bring him back, like you did before?”
I stood, unmoving, at the edge of a sorrow that felt too immeasurable to comprehend. When would the tears come for me, I wondered, though in that moment I felt nothing but numbness echoing through me like the coldest of corridors. After everything, we had failed him. The crushing reality was too much to bear. I wanted to shout. To curse the heavens and tear my clothes. To sit in the ashes to mourn like the days of old. The last hope of Tobias Greene had evaporated before our eyes, and there was nothing I could do.
“Too much of his magic has returned to the Ether,” Bastien explained. “He’s already been revivified once. It was never meant to be done a second time. There just won’t be enough of his magic left to bring back. It will have gone back to the Source.”
The Source.
Could it be possible? The Source dwelled within me, but did that mean I would be able to perform miracles? If Tobias’s magic returned to the Ether, but there was no Source to welcome it….
