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“Not without a plan,” Carver said. One of his eyes pulsed with a dull glow as he stared at the house. I knew what was happening. He was scrying, his very gaze penetrating the walls. That same eye rolled towards me, and Carver gave a little smile. “Mister Graves. Perhaps you’ll enjoy what I have to propose.”
“Fire away,” I said.
Something passed between me and Carver then, a strange sort of understanding that we weren’t going to be as lenient with the Viridian Dawn as the last time. When they were working under Deirdre Calloway’s command, they were inefficient, mere nuisances who thought that magic was fun, that dabbling wasn’t at all dangerous. Times had changed, and clearly, so had Carver’s approach to minimizing human collateral damage.
“Smoke them out,” he said. “Like rodents out of hiding. Be creative. It doesn’t matter how you do it, only that it happens.”
I smiled. “Consider it done,” I said, entering the shadows at my feet to access the Dark Room.
This was going to be easy. I’d already physically been in the Viridian Dawn’s base before, so I knew my way around, which meant less risk of shadowstepping into the wrong place. I rushed through the Dark Room, aiming to emerge in reality in a spot in the house that I knew wouldn’t be occupied: the middle of the staircase.
And just as I suspected, I was right. I crouched to keep myself hidden in the house’s already ambient darkness, clutching at the bannister. From where I stood, I could see maybe a dozen of the Dawn’s cultists gathered on the ground floor, their faces shrouded in hoods, lit only by the flames of so many black candles.
On the ground glistened a circle drawn in blood. In the center of the circle was the carcass of some small animal I couldn’t identify. I didn’t want to. It would only make me angrier. The cultists chanted strange, mangled words in a language I couldn’t recognize, but even without understanding I knew that this prayer was meant to open a gateway. And the audacity, the utter nerve of the Viridian Dawn to experiment with something they couldn’t possibly understand filled my blood with a quiet, humming rage.
See, I knew that my soul was going through some sort of metamorphosis, a transformation that no one, not Carver, not even Hecate could cleanly explain to me. Over time, as I became more comfortable with my power, the darkness that pulsed in my veins grew stronger, taking hold of my head and my heart. I’d learned not long ago that I enjoyed inflicting pain on those who deserved it. I knew in some part of my bones that I enjoyed killing those who deserved it.
And everyone in the Viridian Dawn qualified.
I did nothing to telegraph my presence, not even the cool, smug lines I’d rehearsed so frequently in my head for just such an occasion. I summoned the flames as quickly as I could, hurling a globe of molten fire directly at the center of the ritual circle. It exploded with a crash and a hiss, catching the cultists in the area of effect – and lighting their ceremonial robes on fire, just as I’d hoped. With my other hand I launched a second fireball, directing it at a couch placed right next to a bookcase. Thank you for the kindling, I thought.
As the room filled with screams and with smoke, I sank back into the shadows, unheard and unseen. The Viridian Dawn’s collective cries of anguish rang in my ears, echoes that followed me as I sprinted through the Dark Room. Something bubbled up in my chest as I ran, something like laughter. I let loose, letting the joy spill from my lips, the music of my laughter going dull and numb as it entered the dead air of the Dark Room. I took one last step, my foot hitting the grass outside the Viridian Dawn’s house, landing gracefully.
The dark of night glowed with the brilliant amber of fire, and I turned to reposition myself and appraise my own work. Somewhere behind me, Carver grunted approvingly. Sterling clapped me on the back. Asher nudged me.
“You okay there?” he said, his tone uncertain, his eyes seemingly worried.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said, my eyes locked on the fires licking at the windows, on the front door as I waited for the Viridian Dawn’s survivors to stream out of it. The rats. The rodents.
“I think you’re enjoying this a little too much, Dust,” Asher said.
“Huh?”
He went silent and gestured at my face. I felt at my cheek, the tip of my finger finding the dip of one of my dimples.
I didn’t know I had been smiling.
Chapter 11
The air was thick with smoke. It didn’t take long for the cultists to come screaming out of the building. The smarter ones threw themselves at the lawn, rolling in the grass to smother the flames. The dumber ones ran like headless chickens, directly towards the bushes where we stayed hidden. Maybe there was a garden hose nearby that we hadn’t spotted. Whatever the case, the cultists came at us like lambs to the slaughter.
Carver hissed, then flicked his wrist, and the night filled with even more screaming as the sound of bones cracking shattered the air. Pale fire lanced from his fingers across the yard, his bone-breaker spell disabling and crippling the cultists that were still on their feet.
Gil rushed into the fray, choosing to use his fists over his talons, which were still deadly weapons despite their bluntness. He smashed his knuckles into the cultists, thoroughly relishing the violence. I watched impassively as the cultists, kids in their twenties, all of them, writhed and retched in the grass, reeling from agony. Sterling huddled over one of them, feeding from the throat of a boy who was crying. It was all I could do not to laugh.
And Asher, the one person in our group who had the best reason to detest the Viridian Dawn, walked among them, standing in the midst of the bodies twitching and tearing at the earth. He didn’t have to contribute to the fight at all, and it looked like he had no plans to. The rest of us had done enough to suppress the cultists.
As I watched him throw his head back, as faint threads of green mist streamed from the nostrils of the injured cultists and entered Asher’s mouth with every inhalation, I slowly understood what he was doing. Asher was feeding on their pain, on the ambient magic of agony. The question was what he was planning to do with that power.
I didn’t get a chance to ask. Just in front of the burning house, a scintillating white oval ripped open in reality, appearing right out of thin air.
“No,” I shouted, looking to Carver for guidance. “But we stopped them. I stopped the ritual.”
“Apparently not,” Carver snarled, his glare focused on the rift.
He raised a hand, his skin erupting with amber fire as he began muttering the same incantation he’d used at Heinsite Park. The rift began its horrible shrieking, the terrible whistling that heralded the widening of the black hole at its center, and the coming of the shrikes. With the same guttural words, that same unknowable language, Carver slammed his fist into the portal, shattering it utterly.
With the rift destroyed, the only sounds left in the night were the crackling of the house as it burned, and the agonized groaning of the surviving members of the Viridian Dawn. Sterling walked up to us, wiping his bloodied mouth with the back of his hand.
