Page 25 of Risen (Love and Revenge #6)
Dusek
T he stairway to the second floor consisted of several small flights of stairs that led to broad landings before turning and ascending again, creating a twisting spiral of broad, flat planes.
The place had undoubtedly been altered over the years to fit the syndicate’s needs.
On the second floor, what had once been a half-wall separating the ballroom from the stairs with a series of open arches on top had been turned into a solid wall.
It closed off the space, and a massive set of double doors carved with intricate, ugly faces barred our way.
Beneath the mild wear it had gained over the decades, the whole place was decorated with a golden age whimsy that was jarring in the current situation, art deco mixing with an Aztec temple theme.
Blocks of stone were carved with Aztec art—depicting faces and creatures painted in bright colors that had barely faded over the century since they were created, thanks to the preservation spell on the place.
The building had been grand once. I could almost taste the ghosts of laughter and music, their joy mixing with the stale, dusty air of the present, tainted by the heaviness of being occupied by the syndicate.
Sanka and the curse breaker waited for us at the top of the stairs, where they both strained under the burden of combining their unique magics and holding onto the spell that blocked the emperor’s ability to portal out of here.
I could taste the acrid tang of the emperor’s power in the air—a foul sensation of wrongness that was probably caused by the stolen nature of the power he called his own.
He had stitched his barricades into the bones of the building, layer on layer, until the plaster itself shed a faint cloud of dust when Sanka poked at the doors with his magic.
The wards on the massive double doors shimmered faintly to my second sight, and I could feel them—pressure against my teeth, an itch in the back of my skull.
Defenses that wanted to crawl inside you and convince you to leave.
The emperor’s magic wanted to burrow inside us and make us feel small and powerless.
But this was one of the reasons the man standing beside Sanka took no name other than “curse breaker,” and why he was here with us tonight, his magic bolstering Sanka’s.
His kind prided themselves on not having an identity.
It wasn’t just an affectation, but a deep practice that affected their psyche and their magic—names had power, and so did egos and identities.
The emperor couldn’t fight back against the curse breaker as well as he might have with another magic user.
I could sense the curse breaker’s magic twisting in a taunting dance, deftly avoiding the teeth of the emperor’s wards and protections as he kept up the sabotage on the portal.
And combining his magic with Sanka’s made our sorcerer invulnerable as well.
I smiled as I shook off the cloying effects of the emperor’s magic myself. The stolen magic was nothing compared to the horrors inside me.
Martina crouched by the frame of the doors, grimacing.
She didn’t have the depth of magical perception that the casters among us had, but she had to be feeling the repulsive clamor of the wards just the same.
She pushed her beast back, and reverted to human form, holding a knife that she pressed flat against the glowing seam between the doors.
“They’re keyed to blood,” she muttered. “Not ours, thank fuck.”
“Not his either,” Sanka replied, scowling. “He’s pulling strength from the dead.” He held up a finger and let a drop of his own blood hiss against the tile. The ward flared, rejected it, then snarled with a renewed surge of angry energy. “See?”
Great. A dash of necromancy thrown in on top of all the other nasty shit the emperor was involved in.
As we all let that sink in, Josh shifted uneasily, moving closer to Sadavir. As if he expected one of us to suggest we use his blood. As if we might think being a vampire close enough to dead. As if we’d only see him as a tool to be used.
His hands twitched at his sides, and I frowned.
The beta was wrestling with so many demons.
But there wasn’t time to comfort him now.
Surely, he knew he was one of the court.
And we didn’t turn on our family. Sadavir stood solid behind him, a wall of silence, eyes fixed on the shimmer of the wards.
No, no one would be bleeding Josh today.
It seemed absurd that we had just engaged in that bloody battle below, had worked for so long to get to this moment, and had the emperor trapped here, only to be stymied by a wall and some wards.
Yukio paced, snowflakes shedding from his wings and the tiles beneath his feet icing over.
His breath clouded the air even though the room was warm.
Cicely leaned against a cracked pillar, head bowed, his calm spilling out like silk—quiet, steady, meant to keep the edges from fraying before this new fight even began.
Ruya stood with Robin near the doors. Robin’s aura blazed brighter than the wards, her fire pressing up against them, testing.
I felt it lick across my skin, even though I was several feet away.
Ruya lifted a hand and planted it on Robin’s low back, and I felt the magic she exuded, trying to bolster our alpha, to keep her together when this last obstacle might drive her mad.
“I think I’ve got it,” Sanka finally muttered as he traced his blunt fingers along the doorframe. “Just give me a sec and I’ll be through.” His magic flared, adding to the background hum of the spell he was already maintaining as he started to drill through the emperor’s ward.
I was poised, ready to spring into action, and I felt the others shift around me, tension ratcheting up as we waited for Sanka to work his magic.
The air shifted.
Not the wards. Not the emperor. This was something else. Some other sickly, warped magic that shouldn’t exist. My head snapped to the side, tracking a whisper of sound that didn’t belong. A murmur crawled through the walls, low and wrong. My shadows twitched, uncoiling under my skin.
“They’re here,” I hissed.
No one asked who. They felt it too, a second later—the sudden cold rush, the stench of rotted blood and sulfur, the scrape of chanting against the bones of the building. It was just like before, at The Fox. Witch magic, but corrupted and carrying a hint of demon.
The fucking cult.
The external wards flared, but they broke through. A heartbeat later, we were surrounded.
They poured from the mirrors lining the cracked plaster walls, from the glossy metal fixtures of the art deco wall sconces and the glittering chandelier, as if every shiny surface was a portal, hooded, chanting, their auras blackened with corruption.
Some wore masks shaped like crescents, or robes embroidered with the triple moon, but others had carved the symbol directly into their skin.
Their voices tangled into one ugly sound, sharp enough to splinter thought.
The naga warriors with us hissed, drawing their blades. The griffins spread their wings, feathers brushing the walls, talons gouging the tile.
Robin turned, her dragon eyes blazing as she pushed Ruya behind her. “Get—”
But the cultists were already among us.
A cultist emerged from the wall sconce behind Robin and lunged at Ruya, knife flashing. My shadow moved faster than thought, rising from the floor to catch his wrist and twist. The snap was music to my ears, but his scream was sweeter.
The rest surged, chanting louder. The wards above us pulsed in time with their voices, feeding them. Cicely’s calm cushioned us for one heartbeat longer. Then everything broke.
The fight was chaos in the tight space of the stairs and the corridor.
Naga blades cut bright arcs, blood spraying across the tiles.
Griffin claws raked across any vulnerable bit they could reach, leaving cultists shredded and screaming.
Sanka shouted spells as he and the curse breaker scrawled glowing symbols into the air, trying to stop the cult while still holding the emperor’s escape portal closed and keeping erecting their own wards to keep him from sneaking out in the chaos.
I dematerialized and moved through it all like water through cracks.
My shadow swelled, slick and black, covered now and then by bits of tatty robe, choking people, wrapping ankles and dragging cultists off their feet.
One tried to stab me. His blade passed through nothing, then I was behind him, whispering fear into his ear.
He dropped the knife and sobbed, eyes wide, before a griffin’s beak ended him.
But there were too many. For each cultist we dropped, two more seemed to crawl from the mirrors, chanting louder. The air grew thick with the reek of incense and old blood.
Then she was there. The Mother. The head of the coven, who had kidnapped Ruya as a child, blinded her, and kept her locked in a tower in a pocket world her whole life, using her healing powers for political gain, and selling pieces of our sweet omega on the black market…
The seething darkness in side me swelled, begging to be released.
“Ruya,” the woman snapped, her voice full of command, as if she actually expected everyone to just… obey. “Come here now, child, and I will spare your life. You can atone for your sins, be cleansed of the impurity you’ve subjected yourself to. You can stand beside us as we take over the city.”
My anger and darkness writhed inside me, trying to break free of my control.
How dare she even look at Ruya, let alone speak to her of rejoining their fucking cult.
The pained expression that crossed my trinket’s beautiful face made me want to unleash my true form then and there, damned the consequences.
Ruya’s shoulders hunched for a heartbeat, until she somehow found the strength to straighten them and glare toward where The Mother had spoken. “Never.”