Chapter Twenty-Nine

Doppler

I’d dwelled deep in the pits of darkness since the chimera killed Jamie Novak. My involvement, no matter how small and futile, was met with torment. The punishment would’ve been worth it if I’d actually managed to do something. All I did was falter too long to make any real difference.

“Oh, you made a difference.” The chimera slinked through his shadows, circling me like the vulture he was, craving to pick at the remains of my hollow body. “Reaching out to Dorian the way you did—that was a very bad move.”

The fact he hadn’t slain me, hadn’t crushed my being to dust yet meant Dorian didn’t fully grasp my garbled message. He was still missing too many pieces of the puzzle because I’d kept them well hidden for so long.

“Because of you, Enchanter Evergreen is on my path, likely struggling to piece it all together, and it’s only a matter of time until he realizes Peter Graham is much harder to read than once before. Then he’ll connect the dots, learn a devil’s at play, and do what The goddamn Inevitable Future always does, which is inter-fucking-fere.”

Rage swelled, bubbles of tar boiled over and burst nearby, and I prepared myself for another grueling round of torment. But the anger subsided, and the chimera shifted his demeanor as the shadows took on a cooling effect, cradling my body almost like the perfect bedtime pillow.

“Obviously, I have to take Dorian’s body now.” The chimera knelt beside me, his expression painfully forced into a smile. “No more games, no more waiting. We could claim his body and both live the lives we want.”

I laughed, wheezing as blood and tar soaked my chin. The amount of torture the chimera unleashed because of my actions, and yet he wanted to work with me.

“I’m offering you an opportunity, a chance to live, really live, puppet.” His smile twisted into this bizarre sincerity like the nickname held affection or charm, yet he possessed neither. “No strings on you, right?”

“You’re only asking because the devil’s too weak to take Dorian.” I slowed my laugh to a haunting chuckle meant to scare and mock the foolish demon. “Your plan failed, Dorian’s mind didn’t break, and now you’re wondering, do you have time to kill all those kids? Will the guilds be staking them out? Discreetly, of course. How long before Milo realizes exactly who you are? What will you do without all your branches? After all, the thousands before didn’t help. Enchanter fucking Evergreen thwarted you all the same. Will Dorian have his emotional walls at the ready if you did manage to skirt around threats and pick off one or two more students? Has the bastard learned some healthy coping mechanisms?”

“I see your telepathy is doing wonders.”

“Don’t need to be a mind reader to gauge what you’re thinking.” I resisted the shackles seeped in tar and the shadows of muck keeping me pinned on my back. “You’re more transparent than you let on, demon.”

“You will help me take Dorian’s mind—”

“You think my finite magic can overpower the full extent of Dorian’s branch? He’d shatter my very being if instinct took hold.”

That was why I avoided him, that was why I had a plan to break his mind—chisel away at it layer by layer. That was why I went to such excruciating lengths to get the life I deserved with the two men I loved most: Finn and Milo.

Hell, I was surprised Dorian hadn’t been destroying those he perceived as threats since I’d abandoned him. After all, it was the work of manifestations that kept Dorian’s branch in check, preventing him from unintentional outbursts.

“You will help me.” The chimera dug his fingers into my chest; they wriggled deeper, searching my hollow insides for sensations of pain to cast and agony to release, but the delay served as a humble reminder that I wasn’t real. None of this was real.

I spit in his face, savoring his look of disgust as he wiped splattered blood and tar from his cheek. Whatever he intended, I wouldn’t offer him the satisfaction of my fear, my willingness to barter or beg. “Do your fucking worst.”

“If you resist me, I’ll have no choice but to leave the city, wait patiently. After all, what’s a few more decades in the grand scheme of things? But that magic you ran away with… I’ll shred it to pieces and send Dorian a message in the form of your demise. Let his paranoid mind stew and suffer, waiting and wondering which corner I’ll emerge from.”

“You think I’m afraid to die?”

“You’re petrified of it, puppet. Same as me. We both know the only thing awaiting us is oblivion. That’s what happens to the souls of those who die in worlds they never belonged in.”

Demons didn’t belong in this world; they had their own realms to wander, but hubris and avarice compelled them to break through the walls of reality and worm their way into our dimension, desperate and hungry for the magic of witches.

But I did belong to this world, right? I was a manifestation, sure, but I was real. Everything I felt was real. Still, I did fear the universe didn’t see me as anything other than a magical anomaly from some overpowered witch.

“Send me to oblivion. I don’t care.”

“So be it, but that’ll mean I’ll only have Finn to keep me company.”

I quivered, and for a second, just a second, the feeling of my heart breaking hit, and the chimera used that false feeling to pluck the still-beating organ from my chest, willing it into existence the way only telepaths could do inside the mind of others.

“I will kill you,” I said through gritted teeth.

The words echoed from every shadowed corner of his mind. Every dark crevice carried my twisting voice as I shouted again and again: I will kill you. Only, it wasn’t my voice. Not any longer. And it didn’t echo from within; it rattled and reverberated from outside the devil’s mind from the street of the neighborhood block the chimera currently walked down.

We rose to the peak of his surface thoughts, taking in the scene of the setting sun as Lena Novak flew directly at us.

“You hear me, Peter?” She punched Peter’s jaw so hard it cracked and broke. The recoil bloodied and bruised her knuckles as bubbles burst alongside the act of telekinesis. “I’m gonna fucking kill you.”

It didn’t take long for the entropy branch to steal nearby magic to mend the injury, something the chimera had to hold back his own demonic energy from doing. It’d reveal his status as a devil, and he couldn’t allow such a revelation to appear on Enchanter Evergreen’s radar, not when he’d worked so hard to copy my tactics and skirt Milo’s mind with added immunity demons held for branch magics.

“I know your branch, know what it can do, and how to exploit it.” Lena waved her hands, conjuring thousands of bubbles. They popped with an airy release; they burst with watery goop; they curdled inward; they expanded tenfold their size; each bubble held its own specific reaction when swarming Peter Graham.

The chimera pulled from my memories, which had melded and melted within the pits of tar and rot of his very being, stealing information I had on Lena Novak’s magic. But the countless barrage made it difficult to focus and made it impossible for Peter’s branch to absorb the shock of so many unique actions. Lena wielded her magic in ways I hadn’t observed, in ways Dorian hadn’t seen. Was she mixing and altering her frequency during casting blows?

“Like a demon, your branch wavers against the arcane, requiring time and understanding to drain the complexities in our branch.” Lena swept in close, punching Peter, the chimera, and me again and again, hitting with telekinesis the cellular absorption couldn’t keep up with. “Your branch isn’t infallible, and just like a demon—I’ll end you here and now!”

Lena’s surface thoughts revealed the research she’d done on Peter Graham, from his encounter with Milo so many years ago to his battle against her brother, Jamie, and Lena carried that understanding high in her mind alongside a plan to eviscerate the warlock who dared.

“Enough!” The chimera channeled telekinesis, pushing Lena away but gaining only a few seconds of peace before the bubble burst magic continued chasing him. “How the hell did you even find me?”

The chimera rooted through the goopy slosh of his shadows, searching for slipups, wondering where he’d wandered that allowed someone to spot the most wanted man in Chicago. Suddenly, a flurry of bubbles exploded—blinding his vision, our sight outside his mind.

“My branch has endless possibilities, so searching the city might’ve taken every ounce of magic to scour your location, but I found you.” Lena swooped in close, hitting the chimera with telekinetic strikes to further knock him off balance.

The tar in his mind boiled, enraged and incapable of gathering his thoughts. If he wanted, he could latch his telepathy to Lena, read her thoughts, and form a sight from her perspective. But he was arrogant, piecing together how such a simplistic branch caught him when he’d done so well to avoid the branch he feared most of all—Enchanter Evergreen’s clairvoyance.

“I can manipulate my bubbles with over a hundred individualized commands.” Lena’s barrage of blows was unyielding. “Smother magic, absorb it, shield against, heal, distort, disrupt, merge, amplify, summon elements, transport—my arcane branch will be your death!”

This wasn’t some arrogant boasting or a mistake in revealing her capabilities to offer a counter plan, but a powerful message meant to rattle the warlock Peter Graham, who believed his branch infallible. It worked, too, stunning the chimera as he attempted to think. He scrambled through the encyclopedic knowledge he held on branches, unable to think of one suitable to stop this arcane magic, furious he’d lost so many to begin with when he nearly died at the hands of Enchanter Evergreen, and now he found himself faltering against an acolyte of all fucking things. The insult.

Bubbles burst from every direction, even within, dropping his body to its knees. Tattered lungs seeped in black tar struggled to mend the damage that’d have surely killed Peter Graham if he weren’t housing a demon, if he hadn’t transcended to the state of a true devil.

“ His healing is holding out. ” Lena clenched her jaw. “ Good. Means I don’t have to hold back anymore! ”

Hold back? Christ. This was her trying not to kill the warlock?

Lena slammed her hands together. The loud clap triggered a thousand more to follow. Bubbles popped against Peter’s skin, scalding hot, searing cold, stabbing needles, sticky acid, and so many other sensations it made it impossible for the chimera to calculate the correct measures with his new entropy branch. Even his demonic energy couldn’t develop an immunity against the arcane branch, quite possibly the most versatile arcane magic I’d ever seen in action as it bombarded him with extravagant damage.

Bubbles burrowed into the pores of Peter’s skin. They traveled through blood vessels, exploding little landmines across his circulatory system. Cellular absorption continued stalling, struggling to gauge the frequency of Lena’s fluctuating casting, making Peter’s branch virtually useless to the chimera. Each burst shook the shadows that contained me here in the inner core. Tar swished through the host body, compensating for what should’ve been irreparable injuries.

“ Fucking arcane witch. ” The chimera seethed with rage, so lost in his distress that he didn’t notice my released grip.

My legs were still bound in darkness, but I had a range of motion in my body, in my magic.

“You think you can stop me,” the chimera shouted, his voice echoing with Peter’s.

“I’m just getting started.” Lena panted, her face coated in sweat as she channeled her magic. Despite the fury in her bones, the rage pumping through her blood, and the hate fanning her emotions, she’d pushed her casting to the brink of her limits.

If it were just Peter Graham, she’d have killed him a few dozen blows back, but the chimera could bide his time, conserve, and restore what had broken. The only true way Lena could remove the threat of the chimera was through banishment, but she leaned too heavily on her branch casting, and if she kept this up, she’d have nothing left to remove the devil who finally devoured the final round of bubbles in his body.

Reaching out with telepathy, I wanted to warn her, prepare her, help her end this fucking monstrosity.

“ Brilliant idea, puppet. ” The chimera turned his gaze back to me, clutching his fingers into a fist until shadows sprang forward and bound me once again. “ I’ve been playing defense when I should be targeting her weakest area—her mind. ”

The chimera quelled his body’s natural branch like flipping a switch. It didn’t come without a price. The sudden halt of one magic replaced entirely by a new one he’d wedged into a host body it didn’t belong to caused his organs to heat and burn. Unlike when he possessed Jamie Novak for months, he didn’t take care of Peter’s body or heed his casting flow to slow the rot of his demonic presence inside the mortal coil.

“ Killing Jamie Novak brought such joy. ” The chimera reached out to Lena with telepathy, clawing at the walls of her mind with words meant to evoke misery. Not words. Images!

Jamie’s gasping body, the resistance he put up, the struggle for escape, and the quick snap of his neck all rang through Lena’s thoughts. He plastered the images, the memories, onto her surface thoughts, rattling the young acolyte.

“No!” Lena trembled, failing to shake away the thoughts with a poorly cast wave of bubbles meant to disrupt the connection. “ How the hell is he doing this? What is this? ”

“ I’ve got quite a few branches, though, not as many as when I wore your baby brother’s face. ” The chimera cackled, thoughts turning the gears of Lena’s mind as he helped connect dots to his truth, a truth he’d hoped to hide but now knew would offer him release from this battle. “ My only regret in killing Jamie Novak was that I couldn’t savor his agony. ”

In a flash, he lunged ahead and jabbed Lena in the stomach with an open hand, fingers elongated and sharp due to the transformation of an augmentation branch the chimera still had access to.

“What’re you?” Lena struggled, unable to back away as the chimera’s clawed fingers curled into hooks meant to shred her insides to pieces.

“You know that answer.” He sent an onslaught of Jamie’s memories—no, his memories—which he’d saved and savored. They revealed atrocities to the torture and torment he caused while possessing the young witch. “ I’m the devil that took your brother’s hopes, tore them asunder, and smothered them. ”

“Bastard.” Lena squeezed his wrist, casting a pulse of banishment, but her body was too weak. The groggy side effects of banishment made her grip falter and her shoulders slump.

The chimera dug his hands deeper into her gut, laughing off the frantic frenzy of bubbles she summoned, each meant to simply assault him, so absorbing their damage proved easier than when she sent flurries with endless commands. “I’m going to take my time with your death, Lena. I’ll pluck out your insides one by one, relishing every squirming scream, every agonizing second. Maybe my farewell gift to Chicago will be eradicating the Novak line before I go. How sweet a goodbye that would be.”

“I’ll kill you.” Lena stifled a shout, still resisting, still fighting, still completely out of her league.

Her anger clung to me, empowering my own and giving me the strength to tear myself loose from the bonds of darkness.

“Lock!”

The chimera’s body froze; every muscle, every joint, every drop of blood stopped.

“Lock, lock, lock!” Ellie Reed flew behind us, waving her key. “I can see your branches, see the threads of each one, and they’ll do you no good here!”

Glitter formed in front of the chimera, scattering and carrying a telekinetic pulse in each shimmering speck. It burst wide, forcing his hand loose from Lena’s stomach. His hooked claws were mere bloody fingers thanks to Ellie’s warding branch.

The acolyte swooped past us, snatching her coven mate, and flew several yards away, where she immediately went to work locking Lena’s injuries. Not only on the surface. Ellie carefully locked the most microscopic internal injuries. Her thoughts surged with anxiety as she counted up the damage, but it didn’t derail her as she sealed tiny, fatal wounds with surgical precision. It motivated her to work faster, more precisely. She wouldn’t let the woman she loved to loathe die on her so easily.

“Wha…” Lena gurgled. “What’re you doing here?”

“You think we’d let you do this on your own?”

Lena tried to speak, her thoughts surging with a thousand warnings, but her throat constricted when she attempted to talk.

“You best believe I’m going to yell at you once we’re outta here, Lena.” Ellie smiled through her sadness, hoping her joy would wash away the terror-stricken expression consuming Lena.

“Get out of here, Finesse!” Hayden Russo appeared in the blink of an eye, then vanished just as abruptly.

“I can’t move Lena. Not yet.”

“Fine.” Hayden reappeared on our right, punching Peter’s jaw so hard it cracked. Not only the bones but the tar beneath holding this tattered body together started to crumble. The glimmer of glitter left the chimera’s vision in a starry daze.

His telekinetic strike hit harder with the chimera’s magics and demonic energy locked down by Acolyte Reed.

“How’d you find me?” Lena struggled to move, held down by Ellie, who tended to the injuries.

“You’re not the only one who can scout with your branch.” A wall of glitter obscured Hayden’s body, flickering in and out every time he teleported. “And we’d never let you face this warlock alone, Mercury Rising!”

“You don’t…you don’t…” Lena coughed, choking and dripping blood down her chin. “ He’s not a warlock. ”

“You think you can stop me!” The chimera lunged through thick swarms of floating glitter, silhouettes of Hayden Russo, which served as mere decoys as he continued rapidly teleporting, hitting his opponent from different angles and weak points each time.

“Don’t drag this out,” Ellie shouted. “He’s got more than one branch.”

Hayden flickered in front of the chimera, then clocked him in the back of the head having teleported behind us before his image fully faded amidst the glitter formed in front of us.

“He’s not the only one born multi-branched.” Hayden continued his taunting blows. “Besides, didn’t you lock down his casting?”

“Yeah, but his threads, they’re strange.” Ellie studied Peter Graham’s body, able to somehow see the branches the chimera had forced into his host body, but her warding sight didn’t extend to demonic energy. She could tell there was something eerie in the air, but she’d need her sensory root to identify it, something none of these acolytes bothered accessing during the heat of battle.

It’d be their undoing.

“It’ll be their deaths.” The chimera leapt away from the glitter swirling around him, taking a free breath in the open street. “You have no idea who you’re messing with, witch!”

Hayden flickered side-to-side, slowly approaching the chimera like a ghost as glitter shimmered all around us, revealing he’d laced the entire area with his magic from gravel at our feet, the air around us, to the cars and buildings nearby.

“No, you have no idea who you’re facing, warlock.” Hayden’s voice came from every direction. “I’m The Infinite Light!”

It was a name carrying weight that left the chimera petrified. His magics were still bound until his demonic energy ate away at the shackles Ellie had placed throughout his body, but when he stared at Hayden Russo, he saw why the witch chose his name. The light pierced the darkness of his mind and revealed Hayden’s infinite casting. A witch without limitations could surely banish a devil single-handedly.

Had Milo chosen this acolyte specifically for this reason? Was he aware of the looming threat that I’d kept alive in this world? Even without casting limits, Hayden couldn’t eradicate the chimera unless he knew which magic to use. He’d need his roots, not his branches.

I had to tell him, warn him, see whatever future Milo weaved through his acolytes played out accordingly.