Chapter 13

THIRTEEN

Asha

In every direction in the mansion, the Blood Mages employ an arsenal of tricks to impress their supernatural guests. Fire leaps across rooms in various shapes: wolves, dragons, monsters of their own invention. They’ve eschewed traditional lights in favor of supernatural alternatives. To pair with the ballroom’s fiery ceiling, they’ve created sparkling displays where light rains like glitter over the enamored crowd.

It all makes me feel gross and angry. These mages have used this same magic to kill and hurt and maim. Now, they use it to entertain just as easily?

Monsters like them should be locked away in the darkest of prison cells, left forgotten for eternity. Or their lives should end. They shouldn’t be drinking, laughing, dancing, and playing, like everything they did to my people meant nothing to them.

I see their twisted souls. They can’t escape their fates.

It’s strange. My brother is coming here to kill them. Probably to kill everyone. And the mages deserve it. I almost want to let him finish with them, so I’ll only have him left to deal with, but I have a feeling things won’t be that easy.

This place is going to turn into a bloodbath before the night is done.

If I could warn the people here, I would, but I can’t. It may be yet another thing that haunts me, but I have to stay focused. This is our plan, and it’s the only one we’ve got.

Max and I move from the ballroom into the dining hall, where an enormous table has been converted into a self-serve bar. Luminescent concoctions spill thick fog from silver bowls. Empty chalices stack on both ends with a little sign suggesting guests take them home as souvenirs. I snatch one off the top of the pyramid and check its weight with a toss. “Heavy,” I comment. “These aren’t cheap!”

“I wonder where all their money comes from,” he says quietly.

Braxton answers back. “It’s blood money, that’s all I know.”

But Max is distracted by a commotion at the far end of the room. I follow his gaze to a cluster of guests tugging at a door that won’t budge.

One of them shouts, “The doors are locked!”

The woman’s words sweep through the crowd and smiles and laughter fade away as others take notice. People begin shuffling towards the nearest exit, probably hoping to prove the one locked door is just a mistake. Some kind of misstep made by the foolish servants.

“What’s going on?” Orson asks through the earpiece.

“Something bad, maybe,” I whisper back.

Or maybe it really is just one locked door.

We stand carefully by the bar, watching as a few drunken fools drink and laugh, while the others continue heading for the open doors. They do so slowly and carefully, like they’re not quite worried yet. Almost like they just decided to go into another room for no reason at all. Because if they listen to their instincts, they might panic, and then they’ll look like fools if everything’s okay.

But I don’t think it’s okay. My gut flips, and every muscle in my body stands tight as I let my senses watch over the room. Trouble has come, and not the cute dog.

One by one, in quick succession, every door into the dining room slams shut, seemingly of their own volition. Bang bang BANG BANG . And now we’re all locked in. The din of casual conversation twists into frightened murmurs and gasps.

Then the lights cut out and everybody screams.

Terror, pungent as a skunk, threads the crowd. In the dark, they fumble past one another in no particular direction. Behind my own alarm blaring at the forefront of my thoughts, I muse that movement creates the illusion of agency in situations like this. When there’s nothing you can do, nowhere you can go, at least you can move your own body. And that’s something, I guess.

Red balls of plasmatic magic rise up from the spastic crowd. Their light catches everyone at their most terrified and they pause suddenly, gripped by self-consciousness. Beneath each basketball-sized light rise the arms of a Blood Mage. When people make this connection, laughter chases away their fright, as though they’ve all just been made the butt of a joke they’ve chosen to be gracious about. They look around in anticipation of another Blood Mage magic show, but I know there’ll be no more benign entertainment tonight.

Because I see the looks on the faces of our hosts, terror-stricken and dazed. They know as much as the rest of them.

And I know more.

Even though he hasn’t revealed himself, I sense his presence.

Simon .

Or, rather, the thing that has consumed my brother.

“Do we…?” Max whispers beside me.

I shake my head. “Let’s see it play out.”

We can’t battle Simon and the Blood Mages. As much as I want to get in there before any innocents can get hurt, I remember what Max said. We need to live. We need to walk away from this. We need that house and that family. And letting them fight first is the best way to do that.

“Are y–ou ok-ay?” Braxton sounds off in my ear.

“We’re alright, but he might be here.” I don’t know if my words get through to them, but I do hope they stay away from this room. “Just keep looking for my people.”

A young Blood Mage dressed in a black suit with his blond hair slicked back and an overconfident air lifts out of the crowd like he’s attached to an invisible crane. He begins thrashing wildly, disabusing the attendees of the notion this is part of another neat trick. No, something is wrong, and now everyone knows it.

“Help me!” he shouts to the other Blood Mages.

Confidently, arrogantly even, they lift their free hands to him, but nothing happens but some seemingly useless sparks of light, and fear comes over their faces in an instant. That’s right, this is magic, magic more powerful than what you possess.

When the young mage screams, it cues the audience to scream in kind, a chorus of acute fear at intolerable volume. While his legs kick fruitlessly, as if in search of the ground they’ve been separated from, his hands reach for his throat, fingers clawing at his Adam's apple. He’s choking, face darkening from white to red to plum purple.

They say choking happens quickly. It doesn’t this time. It’s slow and horrible, made even worse by his desperate movements, and the way he shreds his throat. If this man wasn’t a Blood Mage, I might even feel sorry for him.

Then he stills, and the crowd grows silent.

Whatever puppeteering magic holds him aloft has swung him towards one of the light spheres so that we might all get a good look at his death face. The whites of his eyes have turned red, his tongue is distended and protruding out of his mouth, and his throat is scratched bloody to the point of exposing muscle.

He drops, and the crowd clears a space for his dead body to fall.

“Simon,” Max says, almost like a curse, which I confirm with the solemnity of my gaze.

As though summoned by the malediction of his name, the spindles of Simon’s pitch-like mass slither forth from the shadows. Before the crowd can react, the black tentacles penetrate the mass in a hunt for their next victim. They seize a second Blood Mage, a redheaded woman whose pitiful attempt at defense amounts to a half-charged blast of magic that misfires, ricochets off the ceiling, and zings back into the crowd, consuming an innocent warlock in a blaze of fire.

Simon’s tentacles pick the mage off her feet, indifferent to her protest. They ensnare her limbs and encircle her face, muffling her screams. With the sadism and ease of a child plucking the legs from a spider’s body, Simon tears each of her limbs off before crushing her skull. Blood showers over the table before the dismembered pieces of the Blood Mage’s body fall into the punch bowls.

A crush of bodies presses outward towards the walls in a bid to escape the hideous monster, but there’s no way out. I see his magic, like black curtains hanging before the doors. None are strong enough to peel it back, to wrest control from the unforgiving blob gurgling in the corner of the room, its many squid-like arms poised above their heads.

“Whats chrzzz going chrzzz ,” comes Braxton’s voice through my earpiece, but the signal is made fuzzy, probably by Simon’s magic enclosing the room.

Much clearer is the sonorous voice emitting from the monster. “What a splendid reunion! Your screams remind me of my own, and the terrified cries of my packmates. Oh, the nostalgia. Memories of that dark, dank dungeon. Let’s replicate it to the best of our abilities.”

Inky tentacles launch at each of the suspended orbs, piercing them like balloons and cloaking the room in darkness once again. I struggle to make sense of the movement, silhouettes of heads and limbs everywhere, like some nightmarish beast fusing a hundred human bodies into one. But I’m not as concerned with them as I am with making sure they don’t go anywhere near Max and I.

I have to be at the ready. At all times. The cost of doing otherwise would be too great.

And then, distinct against the crowd’s shape, those oily arms sharpen to lethal needles, scouring for Blood Mages.

Bright flashes banish the dark for mere seconds each time a Blood Mage launches a counterattack. Their magic fires like comets in the dark room, a bright ball trailing multicolor glitter that blinks quickly out of existence. None faze the monster. The tar swallows them like candy, extinguishing them on impact.

These harmless attacks make the task of selecting Simon’s targets easy, showing him exactly where to attack. The needles skewer the Blood Mages, lift and wave them in the air with a sickening relish until the skewers are dangling bodies, dripping with blood, over the crowd.

“Oh my god!” someone screams. Everyone screams. It’s a cacophony of terror in the dining room, but underneath, a reverberating bellow, the war cry of the monster.

For a moment, Max and I stand back, watching with shock and awe as Simon makes a meal of the Blood Mages. I don’t know whether to attack Simon or the Blood Mages, to end them when they’re at the lowest or to take him while he’s distracted. The former seems to have the latter covered, and yet I feel deep-seated hate for my tormentors, the perpetrators of genocide against my pack. No amount of pleading or vocalized anguish stopped their assault on my people, nor will it solicit my sympathies for them.

Fuck you. Die .

Is that a voice from within, or Simon speaking to the Blood Mages?

Before I have a chance to make that determination, I notice magic raining from above, the desperate misfires of skewered Blood Mages. It burns like acid on the flesh of their guests. I have to do something .

Raising my arms, I summon a shield of silver magic. It spreads like a protective force field over the guests, blocking the shots of Blood Mage magic.

Silver glows all around us, seeming to quiet the screams of the Blood Mages until they quiet, their magic stops, and they still above us. The people within the shield have grown quiet, cowering on the ground, but I know it’s not over. It’s just begun.

The Blood Mages are dead. Simon flings their bodies from his tentacles, hurling them against the walls like ragdolls. I meet his green eyes — but not his green eyes. They’re the irradiated eyes of the monster, glowing, furious, directing their hate at me.

“Shit.”

In his deep, gurgling voice, he says, “ Weak .”

Anticipating what comes next, I dissolve the shield, bring my palms together, and channel all my energy into a beam of silver light. It burrows into the mire and the many tentacles shrink back into the main body.

But it doesn’t peel away from the body hidden inside. My brother is still held in the center of the muck, serving as its heart. Instead, it retaliates. Green magic meets my silver and presses back against it, almost like a fountain spraying horizontally.

And it’s gaining.

I’m going to lose.

Unless…

Unless I succumb to the voice of dark magic.

Max says my name from somewhere beside me. I continue channeling my silver magic, even while it shrinks further back inside me, and the green magic advances. My teeth clench together. The room sways ever so slightly.

What do I do? If I use the dark magic, can I come back from it?

And do I even have a choice?