Page 7

~Ariana~

I forced my eyes open, discomfort and exhaustion warring in every blink.

An awful weakness permeated every part of me.

What was happening?

That shouldn’t be possible even at the worst of times, let alone when I’d just taken my full power back.

While I struggled to ascertain my surroundings through my blurry, compromised vision, a nasty sensation rolled through me.

I couldn’t quite place it.

Something sinister.

Something rooted in the depths of darkness.

It tasted like… evil.

Was that it?

I’d never felt anything like it before.

I smelled ash everywhere.

There was a chill in the air.

After a few moments, my vision finally started to clear, and I saw that I was actually outside.

Well, that explained the chill.

A distinct breeze was whipping through the air like it had on that mountaintop.

Mountaintop?

My men! They’d been attacked! They’d been hurt!

The culprit had been the same psychopath who’d kidnapped me.

It all came slamming back to me, and panic took root.

That was majorly exacerbated when I went to bolt forward only to find that I couldn’t.

I looked down to see that I was bound to a shimmering golden chair, one clearly conjured by magic, and my hands were restrained behind my back in cuffs.

I strained to get a look at them, wondering what on earth could manage to hold the likes of me.

Then I was choking as I got my highly disturbing answer.

They weren’t of this earth at all.

Semi-transparent bands encircled my wrists, hovering just off my skin, not actually touching it, and possessing no visible lock to pick. Inside each band, Hellfire churned, swirling like a volatile storm trapped within.

That explained the weakness.

I was aware that Hellfire could bind the power of a Celestial being. If used in the right way.

And, as I tried to summon my wings, it was made clear that it could even prevent that.

It was a bitter pill to swallow seeing as though a single feather from the wings of an angel could extinguish Hellfire.

Son of a bitch.

Instinct, more than anything else, had me trying to break them, pulling and struggling to tear myself free, despite the fact that I knew victory was highly implausible.

It was the panic for my men, for this disturbing situation I found myself in.

I tried to calm myself, because reacting without rational thought definitely wouldn’t help the situation, or make anything better.

I looked out at my surroundings now that I could see properly again as I became fully cognizant.

Ruins surrounded me.

The chair I was bound to was situated in the heart of the awful devastation.

Stone walls were now nothing but crumbled, jagged heaps, fallen all around me, their shattered forms blackened with ash and marked in places with traces of magical fire.

Cracks ran through the marble beneath my feet.

Pillars jutted at awkward angles, some cleaved in half, others reduced to nothing but powder.

Above, the ceiling was predominantly gone, mostly just a vast opening now revealing the night sky above.

As I stared taking in all the staggering devastation, I choked as the familiarity of some of the trace magical marks left behind from what had obviously been a brutal battle became apparent to me.

The vibrant-green of Pops’ power.

Dad’s magic, although it seemed different in this place.

The same went for Mom’s.

The magic of Grandpa, Gramps, and Grandfather was also present in its residual form.

I could even feel Papa’s sun-walker pendant energy as well.

Just traces of all that magic couldn’t be used or extracted by anyone, but it was something that, with the familial connection, I was able to recognize and feel.

They’d been here.

All of them had been here engaged in a battle for the ages.

There was another power present and, as I zeroed in on it, I realized it was connected to the unsettling evil I’d sensed earlier.

It was his.

The Beast’s.

Draco’s.

This was the site of their battle with him!

I couldn’t believe it.

I knew they’d been responsible for defeating him, but they’d never allowed me to know the details. No one in the supernatural world knew the whole story either.

“Those cuffs can hold the might of True Celestials. We call them Celestial Suppression Manacles.”

I jerked at the voice, a wave of adrenaline rolling through me.

It went on, “Your confusion and surprise while studying this venue confirms that they kept you ignorant to what truly transpired here.”

White light sparked right in front of me a moment before someone materialized.

The same someone who I remembered snatching me, before they’d cold-cocked me with their power.

The hulking figure with long white-blond hair and clad in gold-plated armor, an ivory cape flapping behind him.

“You’re a True Celestial,” I breathed.

“You may call me Cassius.”

“You hurt people I love.” I pulled at my binds. “I need to find out if they’re okay. They might need me to heal them and—”

My words caught in my throat when he burst right into my personal space. “They are well. All three of them survived. Two are in Meforian Forest searching for a way to find you, while the demon spawn is recovering at Maven Academy.”

I stared up at him, and he registered my skepticism. With a grunt of aggravation, he pressed a single finger to my forehead, and then I was gasping as a flood of images slammed into my mind in a dizzying rush.

Nyx asleep in his dorm room.

Kai and Vorzyr trekking through Meforian Forest.

More than the images themselves was the sensation that proved what Cassius was showing me was real—a calming, reassuring feeling that blended with undeniable truth. They were okay.

As he pulled away, I sucked in a stuttering breath, emotion flaring at the sheer weight of the relief that was rolling through me knowing my men were well.

A tsking sound from Cassius had me looking to see him shaking his head at me with clear disappointment. “Your priorities are severely skewed. That is one of the things that my presence here will serve to rectify.”

What the—

“Why are you here?” I demanded. “Why did you kidnap me? And why bring me to this place?”

“So many questions, all of which you should already know the answers to. Alas, your family has foolishly shielded you from so much.”

I gritted my teeth at his words, unable to conceal my reaction, because that betrayal was still far too fresh. I hadn’t even really begun to process the weight of it yet.

“They tried to stop you from coming here, from interfering with me.”

“ Interfering with you . Yes, you are indeed clueless.”

Given the emotional state I was in after seeing my men attacked and hurt like that, combined with the awful way I felt thanks to the Hellfire restraining my power, especially while it was in a state of flux after the reunification, it was difficult not to bite back with an insolent comment, not to lash out.

But that was foolish.

Not only wouldn’t it solve anything, but it would likely exacerbate the situation.

No, I needed to keep a level head.

And while I was at a disadvantage bound to this fucking chair with a True Celestial standing before me, like an overwhelming force, I had to tread carefully.

Not to mention, my family had made it clear with keeping that secret from me that they thought I was unstable and dangerous. There was no way I was going to prove that right. I was better than that. I could handle it now. It was why I’d taken back my power; I’d finally acknowledged that.

“Then enlighten me.”

“I intend to do a great deal more than that. I was sent here to act as your Guide.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“Before we can focus on what needs to be done in the present, we need to attend to the past.” He gestured at the ruins. “Can you at least sense the presence of a battle that took place here? Your family’s magical essence?”

“Yes.”

“That’s something, I suppose,” he responded in a condescending tone that was beyond aggravating.

“These ruins mark the Covenant’s last stand against Draco.

It is where he fell. And it is also where your mother fell while imbued with Celestial power—what the uninitiated and uniformed often term angel magic. ”

“Where she fell?”

“She perished here.”

“That’s not… no. She didn’t die to defeat that monster.”

“She certainly did. It was her duty to do so, her fate. The bargain that was struck by Cornelius Martel with the Celestial Plane that allowed her to live, despite the grievous sin he committed by producing a child with a non-Celestial in the first place. Her existence was an affront to the Celestial Plane.”

Before I could even begin to process that, he stepped up to me again and pressed a hand to either side of my head. “See for yourself. Through the eyes of your mother. She was connected to us at that point it time, so we were able to see through her.”

His palms flamed with that white power, and in the next second, I was pulled from current reality and thrown into my mom’s stream of consciousness, taken back to twenty-odd years ago.

Hope rolled through me and my gold magic flamed, the telltale blinding white of the angel magic roaring with a powerful ferocity.

Draco bellowed as one of his streams sputtered out at my onslaught, overwhelming him.

He collapsed to one knee. “My kin,” he choked out desperately to Jaxon, his fear obvious.

I was close, so close.

And then I watched him flick his fingers that were slapped to the ground holding him up. He eyed Jaxon and whatever he’d just done had him stilling, his snarling escalating.

He was charging toward us in the next second.

Ryker stepped into the fray, summoning a shield.

Draco flicked his magic again and Jaxon ripped right through it, slashing Ryker across the torso.

He went down hard, slapping his hand to the deeply bleeding wound.

Jaxon went to swipe him again with his claws, but Lucian was there in the blink of an eye, snatching Ryker away just in time.