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Thank fuck I didn’t make her clothes disappear because her body is for my eyes only.
“What is it?” I growl, irritated my time with her has been interrupted.
“Calashte is under attack,” Truett says, and I lock tight over the hardness in his tone. “A legion of demons, twisted fae, and some nobles.”
Rage sweeps through me, and blue arcs of electric magic crackle from my fingertips. “Nobles? Who?”
“Jago,” Uriens says. “He’s leading them.”
“Ariman?” I ask.
Truett shakes his head. “He hasn’t been spotted, but that doesn’t mean he’s not out there. It was a blitz attack, and they’re sweeping through the city. Our people are fighting, but we can’t push them out. We need your help.”
“Of course,” I say and then turn to Nyssa who scrambles to her feet. She looks scared, and I quell the crackle of power as my hand rests against her soft cheek. “It will be fine. I’ll go fix this, and I’ll have Uriens return to the castle with you. Stay in my suite until I come for you, okay?”
Nyssa nods and I bend to kiss her. As I start to pull away, her hand locks around my wrist. “You won’t get hurt, will you?”
Fuck, that makes me feel good… that she worries. A first for me too. “I’m the mighty king of the Underworld. I’ll be fine.”
Her smile is wan, but she nods again.
I turn to Uriens, an original fallen and as trustworthy as they come. He’s also powerful, and I’ll need him. “Take her straight to my suite at the castle and then join us in Calashte.”
“As you will it,” he says with a slight bow. Reaching out, he takes Nyssa’s hand and bends distance away.
“Let’s go,” I say to Truett, prepared to bend distance, but something on his face halts me. “What is it?”
“Sorcha has been staying on the outskirts. A small house.”
“And?” I prod impatiently.
“She’s gone. There’s blood everywhere.”
I don’t feel bad that Sorcha’s potentially dead. She should be in the river, and had it not been for Nyssa’s kindness, she would be. But I don’t like seeing my friend upset. Sorcha is his sister, and he bears love for her.
“We’ll find her,” I say, but it’s the least of my worries for the time being. “Let’s go.”
Truett and I bend distance to a small plateau that overlooks the small valley of Calashte. There’s active fighting going on in the streets, buildings burning. The first thing I do is quell the fires, and they extinguish with a hiss, leaving nothing but smoke wafting upward, which I blow away with a mere thought so I can see what’s going on.
My eyes scan the distance, my powers allowing me to distinguish the demons from the fae. They’re the monsters Kymaris created when souls were sent her way. She’d take the most evil and vile—serial killers, rapists, sociopaths who had no conscience—and she’d recreate them into horrid-looking creatures, hideous even by Underworld standards. She had hordes and hordes, locked in cells in the mountains around Otaxis, and part of her plan to overrun the First Dimension was to let them loose on the population. She would have succeeded, if it hadn’t been for Zora and Finley vanquishing her.
Well, Zora, really. She held a part of Kymaris within her after the changeling ritual was completed, and it was her death that killed our sinister queen. Finley’s part was important too. She figured out that she had a twin sister, rode into the depths of Hell to free her, and then ultimately, she was the one who had to drive the dagger into her sister so Kymaris would die. I hated her for that, but once Zora was reborn, I let it go.
I wish I had time to round up the demons and toss them into the river en masse, but I don’t. I send out a searing blast of power aimed only at the twisted, and they all burn from the inside out. Their screams pierce the air, startling the enemy fae. Their physical bodies crumble to ash and float away, their evil souls being unmade.
Immediately, the Calashte fae who had been preoccupied with the demons turn on Jago’s forces, and the fighting intensifies. There’s no way for me to employ mass destruction like I just did on the demons without harming our own, so I open my hand and call forth my sword that rarely sees use these days. Truett follows suit, and we leave the plateau, bending distance right down into the fight.
Once in the thick of things, I easily distinguish friend from foe, and I tear through the enemies without resistance. My power and strength are unmatched, and I relieve bodies of their heads with my sword and unmake their souls before their corpses hit the ground. I walk through the streets, swinging my long blade, sprayed with the black blood specific to the fae and daemons.
And I look for Jago.
Without the demons to overrun the Calashte residents, and with me at their side, it takes hardly any time to turn the tide. With only a few enemy fighters left, I order Truett, “Capture one of them.”
He nods, and they converge on a large incubus fae backed into a building. I focus on his sword, turning it white-hot so he screams and drops it. Truett and his men jump him, dragging him toward me.
He fights and snarls, but he can’t overpower the three equally powerful fae who have him. They force him to his knees, and he sneers, “You might as well kill me. I won’t tell you a thing.”
I smile at him blandly. He’s going to die, and he knows it. But he will tell me everything I need to know first.
