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“What the fuck?” she whispered to Raven.
“He’s completed the ritual. It’s happening.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Deadly. Listen carefully.” She dragged Daisy down so they were face to face. Raven’s eyes turned white. Her voice turned deep, and unearthly. “Two gates will open. Two afterlives. Heaven. Hell. Yin. Yang. One cannot close without the other. Balance must be maintained. One cannot exist without the other. And we cannot exist with them.”
She slumped and breathed hard. When she slid her eyes back to Daisy, hers had returned to their normal shade. Hairs on the back of Daisy’s neck lifted as though the weight of this moment was too heavy for reality.
“You need to hold the gates until Mary arrives,” Raven explained. “She will know what to do.”
What did Mary have to do with this? “This is madness.”
“This is what we’ve been telling you all along.” Raven’s jaw hardened. “The fact that none of you believed us is not on us. But we will do everything in our power to make this work. Now go. Hold the gate.”
Raven shoved Daisy toward the hole in the wall. Hold the gate. Whatever the fuck that meant. Her mind was awhirl with what she’d learned.
The state of her being was in such a flurry that she couldn’t control the power leaking from her body. It seemed once she’d triggered them outside, the rest wanted to come out to play. Electricity skipped from her fingertips. Metal objects in the lab rattled. Yellow poison itched her palms, and as she got to the wall, claws ripped out of her fingertips.
What the fuck? How was this even possible? All she’d taken was their blood.
Parker had said their maker, their biological mother Gloria started with perfect when she’d created Daisy. Gloria herself had said she was special.
Daisy had thought it was because she could sense both virtue and sin… but… maybe Daisy had these gifts all along? Maybe she’d always had the extra organs inside her body.
When she arrived at the hole and peeked through, she wished she hadn’t. Inside, where sewage water used to run in a culvert, the way was empty. Damp, scratched-out gouge marks had dug into the concrete. Hadn’t the replicates done that with their fingers?
But it wasn’t the scratch marks that worried her. It was the ritualistic dual circles next to each other sketched out with chalk into a warped ven diagram. A five-pointed star inside each. At the apex of each star sat an item. On one circle, Daisy recognized items from Julius’s home. Those strange dust free marks on the furniture. Now she remembered what had been there. A Fabergé egg that belonged to Julius’s wife. He’d told Daisy it was her most prized possession. At another point on the star was a doll. A candle, a jewelry box, and a stuffed animal missing an eye finished the star. On the other circle were disgusting objects. The carcass of a chicken, freshly killed. Bones. Some kind of eel. Human teeth. Another candle, this one sputtering and made from black wax. Bridging the middle of the circles, one foot inside each, Julius stood facing the opposite curved brick wall with his hands in the air. He chanted some stupid occultist shit that made no sense. It was probably gibberish.
He wore no pants.
His hair had been hacked down to the scalp.
He was insane.
Daisy straightened when she realized that’s all he was, a madman without pants. It almost felt wrong to put him down.
“I can’t believe I looked up to you once,” she sneered.
He faced her and his eyes weren’t his own. Two demonic black eyes looked back at her. Daisy gasped. The shock to her system made her realize other senses were firing in her body—telling her something wasn’t quite right. That telekinesis sense that could fit between atoms went haywire. It was as though the atmosphere was changing. Popping. Equalizing… or the opposite. Imbalance.
The hairs on her arms lifted beneath her suit, making her skin feel tight.
Something evil was coming. Knowing this could be part of Evan’s precognitive skill, she acted immediately. She trusted her gut and threw the knife at Julius, aiming for his neck—just as a long crack rent the ground, splitting the ritualistic circles in half.
Her knife went sideways and hit a solid wall of air and clattered to the ground. Two holes opened up in the ground on either side of the thing that wasn’t Julius and he grinned.
