Page 49 of The Rising Dark
Before Lavinia had a moment to think, another projectile moved at her at incredible speed.She only had just enough time to see it coming from the corner of her eye: a ball of flame, hurtling through the air.She dropped to the ground, rolled over her shoulder, and landed in a crouch.This time, she was prepared when another fireball grew and raced towards her.Its centre was a bright blue, with licks of orange on its surface.It blasted through the hole where the gate used to be.
“It’s coming from that sigil,” Octavia yelled behind her.Lavinia scanned the floor ahead.Rows of haphazardly stacked wooden pallets and mouldy cardboard boxes littered the floor.There.On one of the cardboard boxes, an angular design had been painted.A bloody handprint overlapped the design, the blood still fresh and gleaming.As she watched, another fireball formed in the air above the sigil, appearing as if from nowhere.
Before it could finish its growth, she dashed forward, lifting her sword.The fireball whirled around itself, the orange flames covering its surface, and was released.Training her eyes on her goal, she dodged out of its path, leapt and slashed through the cardboard, her sword cleanly tearing through the sigil.There was an audiblepopas the spell collapsed.
Lavinia took a second to survey the battlefield.The stench of magic suffused the air, mingled with the scent of the rogue’s blood.On the east side of the building, Vesta and Brigh were engaged with their own magical trap as thick, sinuous vines burst through the concrete to tear at them.Brigh was hacking at one of the vines with her battle axe, new tendrils appearing for every one that she destroyed.Vesta was slowly marching forward, pulling vines that had wrapped themselves around her from the ground as she strained to reach the sigil that was undoubtedly close.
The west side of the building was obscured by a hill of stone pebbles.From the noise cascading through the building, Quintia and Luce had been engaged as well.There was no sight of the rogue yet.Her nose couldn’t detect his location as his scent suffused every part of this building, nor could she hear his heartbeat through the noises of battle.She ran on, Octavia’s footsteps following closely behind.They jumped over a pile of debris and were stopped in their tracks when a shape appeared in front of them.For a moment she thought the demon, the tenebris, had come back, but that was impossible.Though the sun was low on the horizon, Lavinia could sense its presence in the sky, sapping her strength.Demons only walked after sundown.
A closer look revealed that the shape wasn’t a demon, at least not any kind that she had ever seen.It looked like a man, but as if seen through a grimy window.There was a blurriness to him, as if he wasn’t quite within this world.The man simply floated before them, immobile.His head tilted back, his mouth opening in a wordless scream.Agony crossed his face as if invisible irons tortured him.His mouth closed, and he aimed his absent gaze at Lavinia.
Without any further warning, he lurched forward, feet floating an inch above the concrete floor.Lavinia held her ground, planting her boots firmly on the floor in a defensive stance, sword raised.Still, he came at her, undeterred.As he came within range, she stepped aside, slicing through the figure’s waist.The shape muddled, disappeared for a blink of an eye, before reshaping behind her, tendrils of mist folding back together.Before it had had time to fully restitch itself, Octavia lunged, crossing her twin short blades and slashing through his neck, some of the mist wisping away.
The figure floated unmoving, slowly reassembling.
“Shit,” Octavia swore.
“We have to find the rogue,” Lavinia urged.Unless they stopped the source of the magic, they might never reach him.He might slip through their fingers, still.
“I’ll keep this one busy,” Octavia agreed.She hacked again, the figure blinking away and back again.Lavinia turned, coming face-to-face with another one of the strange ghosts, this time a woman, her arm outstretched, a face full of melancholy and regret mouthing at her in complete silence.
“Don’t let it touch you!”someone yelled behind Lavinia, and she didn’t need to be told twice.She ducked, the sudden movement jostling her hip painfully.She hacked at the woman’s legs, dangling above the concrete.Her blade didn’t connect, but it arrested her movement.
“What are they?”she shouted back, not taking her eyes off the woman, who was joined by yet another figure.She stabbed this one through the heart, another attack that merely seemed to slow them down rather than do any type of damage.
“Souls,” Arran answered, appearing beside Octavia.He carried no visible weapons but clearly needed none.His hands moved in fast, complicated shapes, which produced gusts of wind that tore at the figures, peeling shreds of mist from them.“They’re the souls of the victims that the warlock commanded the demons to tear from their flesh.”
Lavinia looked at the figures again.That man… Black hair, thinning along the crown.His brown eyes were mournful, pain distorting his features.A white line ran across the side of his neck, which Lavinia had assumed was a scar, but the flesh was still parted.It was the man she had found hidden underneath a pile of garbage in the alley, behind where Lavinia had fought that demon the night she’d saved Michelle.A moment of horror overtook her.This was asoul?Their being had somehow been detached from their bodies after a horrifying death, and now the rogue was using them like puppets, forcing them to do his bidding?
There was no time to dwell on the perversity of it.Victim after victim appeared before her, faces of agony and regret compelled by some invisible magic.She rolled out of the grasp of reaching hands, jumping back up to slash at them.One had crept up behind her, and she reacted instinctively.She dodged a hand, jumping onto her right leg, trusting it to bear her weight.The joint wobbled, then held, but the fraction of time it took to regain her balance, a woman Lavinia didn’t know—a victim they had never discovered, perhaps—grasped her shoulder, her face full of remorse.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
An agony like she had never felt before burned through her.Every nerve in her body screamed.It was a mindless, searing pain, unmooring Lavinia from reality.It was so intense that her consciousness tried to dissociate from it.Dark spots bloomed in her vision, a blackout beckoning.Without thinking—any rational thought was impossible—Lavinia scrambled backwards, finding herself on the concrete floor.The movement tore her from the woman’s grasp, and the sounds and smells around her burst back into her senses.Echoes of pain cascaded through her body still, but she was able to force herself to rise back to her feet and hold off the woman’s attempts to touch her again.
“They’ll tear out your soul if you let them,” Arran warned.Lavinia didn’t bother looking at him.Even just moving her eyes hurt.Her soul was staying put, if she had anything to say about it.
“How do we make them stop?”she shouted over the din of battle.Somewhere, a fire was blazing, throwing heat and soot into the air.She hoped that her Sisters were unharmed, whatever horrors they were facing.
“He must be here somewhere, controlling them.He can’t be far,” Arran grunted.Lavinia chanced a glance towards him.Many of the souls of the victims had surrounded Arran and Octavia.They stood back-to-back, Octavia dashing forwards and backwards, keeping the crowd at bay.Arran’s hands moved, whispered spells tumbling from his lips.In the half-light of the warehouse, she could see the ashen pallor of his skin.Whatever magic he was using, it was taking a toll.Octavia was breathing heavily, beads of sweat running down the side of her face.They were in a stalemate, and Lavinia didn’t want to bet on the warlock giving up before Arran or Octavia were depleted of their strength.Who knew the limits of a combined power of vampire and witch, of someone who had collected the power of a dozen souls to do his bidding?If they stayed in a defensive position, they would lose.There was only one way to end this.
Every muscle in her body ached as Lavinia slashed at the souls reaching for her, driving them back momentarily.She didn’t wait to see them regain their shape.She turned and ran, trusting that they would react too slowly to grab at her defenceless back.She dashed around the pile of gravel and found herself almost upon Brigh.The young warrior held her battle axe aloft before she brought it down with a splintering crash onto a wooden pallet bearing a large network of interconnected signs and smeared with the telltale bloody handprint of the rogue.Whatever spell the sigils had been driving collapsed.Lavinia didn’t stop to find out what it had been.The summoner had to be close.She kept her pace, reorienting herself towards the centre of the building.If none of the Sisters had smoked him out of hiding yet, he had to be somewhere along the north wall.
She launched herself over the top of a pile of leaking sandbags and crashed through a forest.She ignored the trees that sprang up around her, obscuring the cement with their gnarly roots.The smell was all wrong: not the green of sap and the edge of natural decay, but only magic, the scent of magic suffusing everything, lined with the bitter stench of the rogue.Her ears told her that her footsteps were muffled on the forest’s earthy floor, but she ignored this, trusting instead on her sense of smell and the reverberations underneath her boots that told her she was still in the London warehouse.
The rogue had employed some kind of magical illusion.Ignoring the intense feeling of wrongness, she barrelled through the forest, not bothering to go around the trees.No branches tore at her arms as she ran forwards blindly.Green flashed before her, and her momentum ground to an acute halt, shifting the earth beneath her feet.The forest had disappeared, and she lay on a pile of broken chairs.Her armour broke her fall, but still she experienced a moment of sharp pain where a nail had pierced the flesh of her palm.She tore it loose, ignoring the sting.The smell of fresh, bitter blood alerted her to another sigil nearby, painted on a piece of cardboard lying on the ground.She pushed herself back up to destroy it with her sword.If her Sisters followed, they wouldn’t be blinded by the illusion.
The smell of her blood mingled with the stench of magic thick in the air.A long strip of armour along her left arm had been torn away, the skin underneath scratched.She only briefly took stock of the injury, then dismissed it.It wouldn’t kill her.The only one that would die today was the rogue.Shaking off the pain and regaining her breath, she pressed on.She’d ferret the rogue out of whatever hole he’d hidden himself in.
* * *
Michelle tried to pass the time by watching some TV, but her mind kept wandering to Lavinia.Twenty minutes had passed since she’d sent her last text, letting Michelle know that they were going to raid the warehouse where they thought the rogue was hiding.It had been a quick, business-like text, and Michelle found herself reading it over and over, wishing for her phone to show a new message, anything to let her know Lavinia was okay.
No message appeared.On the TV, actors cracked jokes on a panel show.Michelle couldn’t stomach the laughter of the studio audience and turned the sound off.She glanced back onto the balcony, where Zachary was enjoying his fourth cigarette of the day.Perhaps if she’d picked up smoking, she’d at the very least have something to do with her hands.There wasn’t even anything to clean or tidy in this apartment, nothing that could give her the semblance of activity.All she had to do was wait.
Thoughts whirled through her mind, round and round.What if Lavinia got hurt?What if the rogue—this person who had decided to attempt to take Michelle’s life for reasons she didn’t understand—what if they were too strong?Vampires, witches, and demons were new to Michelle, but it hadn’t been difficult to understand the unease that the vampires had shown when they found out that the warlock and the rogue were the same person.Whatever rules there were in the supernatural world, this killer broke them.She trusted completely in Lavinia’s skill, her strength, and her speed—but what if there was something about this…abomination that would be too strong even for Lavinia and her Sisters?
There was no way for Michelle to know, and she realised this.Yet there was no stopping her thoughts, her anxious desire to hear something, anything.She was suspended in fear, the not knowing of whether Lavinia was kicking the rogue’s ass, or whether she was lying in a puddle of her own blood somewhere.Michelle squeezed her eyes shut, willing that image out of her mind.
