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If he was surprised that I’d tapped into the language, he didn’t waste time showing it. Step by tedious step, he gave me detailed instructions that I carefully followed to unite or disentangle or destroy. The demon language flowed through me, rich with telepathic nuances unavailable in English.
Hours later—or at least that’s how it felt—I’d resolved the knot from millions of strands to a single bulging balloon with two outlets. Even though I’d been lying down the whole time, my entire body ached, muscles quivering at the end of their endurance.
Rhyzkahl gave me the final steps. I simultaneously activated the refeed to Earth’s flows and the pressure release to interdimensional space. For a moment, nothing happened, then the pre-anomaly shrank and vanished with a pop that seemed to echo throughout the universe.
A weak chuckle rasped out of me. “We’re still here, so I guess it worked.” The world flows seemed intact and had regained much of their previous luster, but the number of interdimensional rifts had increased. Damn it. At least no anomalies. I reassessed Xharbek’s shield-dome of potency over Beaulac. Now it quivered like fluorescent lime Jell-O rather than the surface of a bubble, but it appeared stable enough.
Zoop. Sha.
I sat bolt upright. “What the hell?” The sound was the dimensional fabric opening and resealing, which told me something had come through. But I had no idea what, and my attempts to track it yielded zilch.
Zoop. Sha.
This time, I caught an echo. Whatever-it-was had passed through somewhere to the south. Within seconds, the Beaulac shield-dome flattened as if an invisible weight slowly pressed down on it.
Zooooooop. Splort. Sha.
I couldn’t have missed that one if I tried. A compact ball of bluish potency flashed and rotated about ten miles away, even as the shield-dome re-expanded. Narrowing my eyes, I focused in on that area. The parking lot of Ruthie’s Smoothies—a known hot spot that now had a brand new irregularity. “Gotcha, you little bitch.” As soon as I finished dealing with this crap, I could go investigate the—
The Earth flows winked out. My heart lurched in shock, but a heartbeat later they flickered back to life in sections, like power returning to a city, grid by grid. I blinked, then blinked again and shook my head. Something was different. The flows felt the same, but the color seemed off.
My head throbbed with the effort of holding the lord-sight for so long, which was probably why the flows looked odd. I released it then gasped with relief under a perfectly normal blue sky and a perfectly un-normal demon tree. We’re still here. The world is still here. Good enough.
I staggered to my feet with Thank you for your help on my tongue, but the words crumbled beneath sudden revulsion. Tendrils of red potency crept along the ground and wound through the trees like arcane kudzu. Everywhere.
Rhyzkahl startled, recoiling from the strands nearest him before steadying. “Rakkuhr,” he murmured, eyes alight with victory at odds with the dismay in his voice. “They succeeded.”
Aghast, I took in the sight and feel of the sinister alien potency of the demon realm. Terrible comprehension hit me like a hammer between the eyes. The rakkuhr hadn’t popped into existence when the flows went dark. It had already been here. Undoing the tangle of the pre-anomaly had somehow opened a pathway that made it visible to othersight.
“How can it be here?” I sputtered. “It’s not native to Earth. How did it . . . ?” I yanked my gaze to the flows as my dread flared into pure, unadulterated horror. Not only was the rakkuhr on Earth, but it permeated the flows as well. Throughout the world, rakkuhr seeped from every rift. And there, at the rubble of the Beaulac Police Department, a.k.a. ground zero, rakkuhr streamed from the demon realm to Earth.
Nauseated, I pulled away from the flows. “What did you mean, ‘they succeeded?’ Was this the Mraztur plan? Flood Earth with rakkuhr?”
Rhyzkahl surveyed the coils of rakkuhr, brow furrowed. “Not this soon,” he said as if to himself. “Not this much.”
All that rakkuhr at ground zero . . . I sucked in a sharp breath and pressed a hand to my stomach. “Cory. Is the rakkuhr the reason why he and the others are changing?”
“Changing? How?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Red gel pod and metamorphosis.”
As if I’d thrown a switch, Rhyzkahl regained his composure and put on a neutral mask.
Well, that answered my question. “You’re attacking Earth,” I said, anger rising. “Why would you maniacs do that?”
Rhyzkahl gestured toward his orbit. “I am attacking nothing.”
Hands clenched, I fought the urge to pound him flat with the potency at my disposal. But through my haze of rage, I mentally replayed the last few seconds. He’d been shocked and damn near appalled by the amount of rakkuhr, right up until the moment I mentioned people changing. Then he became all lordly.
I carefully banked my fury and stepped off the nexus, walked up to him and folded my arms over my chest. “People are changing. That didn’t surprise you, which tells me you were expecting it.” I lifted my chin. “Is that your goal? Mutate everyone?”
Rhyzkahl met my gaze levelly. “With so much rakkuhr, such is always possible.” An unpleasant smile curved his mouth though a glimmer of fear haunted his eyes. “Have you never wondered why the nyssor and mehnta resemble humans so closely?”
He could have slapped me with a fish, and I wouldn’t have been as shocked. Nyssor were demons who looked like adorable human children, except for eyes with sideways-slit pupils, and a mouth full of hundreds of needle-sharp teeth. And mehnta looked like human women, except for the wings beneath a hard, shiny green carapace on their back, and a dozen or so tentacles in place of a mouth. And sure, I’d wondered why those two species resembled humans, but I’d chalked it up as yet one more weird thing about the demon realm.
But humans mutated by rakkuhr made perfect and horrible sense. Of course, it also confirmed Rhyzkahl had known the rakkuhr influx would happen, and that people would be mutated by it.
“This is an attack, and you were a part of it,” I said with sad weariness. “Part of the Mraztur’s plan to send rakkuhr pouring through to Earth.” I shook my head, feeling numb and sick. “Even after how you betrayed me, I never expected your end goal to be the destruction of my world.” I sighed. “You really are a piece of filth.”
