The air was thick with something profane—a presence that was so vast it dwarfed the rest of the room and made the oxygen taste strange and sulfurous. My grip tightened on Ash’s hand, and almost like we were one we both took another step backwards.
“Scion of Daggett.” The fire shifted, sending a veil of sparks up the chute. “Know usssss.”
“No,” I replied.
“So ssseditious. Like your maker.”
“I’m nothing like my father,” I snapped. Ash’s grip tightened.
“Ssstanding there wearing his face,” a second voice—this one more feminine—said, sending up another shower of shimmering sparks. “Human irony.”
“Justin, we need to do something,” Ash whispered.
I nodded, but my focus was on the fire. They’d been summoned into the fire. Maybe there was something to that.
“You brought us here, didn’t you? You were the ones who wanted us to come here. Why?”
My words were all bravado, but I was hoping the things peering through the fire couldn’t know that.
In the aftermath of the fire’s touch, Luca had grown silent, glassy eyed and drooling.
Sleeping, just like the others, only his eyes weren’t closed.
“Yessss. Feel. Let it burn inssside you.”
“They want you angry?” Ash was talking, but it was half to herself. And then, more forcefully, “What do you want with him? With all of them?”
“Moonssset trespassed against us,” the female seethed. “You shall be the tithe that balances the scales.”
“You can’t have him!” Ash called out, extending her knife once again. She stepped forward, leaving me behind. She pointed her knife at Luca, but it was more than that. I recognized the quick flicks of her wrist, the way her hand looped around at the sides.
She was drawing something.
The fireplace erupted, just like it would have if someone had thrown a bucket of gasoline on it. Where there had been only a pair of voices before, suddenly there were dozens. Some seared with rage, others with lust, but most were impatient moans. “OURS!!!”
“I don’t think they liked that very much,” I said, edging forward.
“Their blood bindssss us,” came the voice from the flames. This one was different than the others. Dry. Cold-blooded. “Your blood releasesss.”
My blood? “I won’t free you,” I said.
“You will. So it will come to passsss. Hisss blood is not enough.”
I looked down at Luca, saw the cut down his arm. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. The cut was old, crusted and clotted, but it still looked serious. “Was Luca telling the truth? Was
Moonset innocent?”
Sparks surged upward, and for a moment they had a face. “Villainsss. Monsterssss.”
I wanted that sinking feeling in my stomach not to exist. I wouldn’t feel disappointment.
Moonset had made their beds a long time ago. There was no sense trying to change the sheets fifteen years later.
“Ssstriking down one of our own as they did,” the fire hissed. “Who were they to pronounce such a fate upon her?”
“Kore,” a second voice moaned. “Sister mine.”
Ash hesitated, looking at me over her shoulder. “I know that name. But Moonset didn’t kill her,” she said, her voice less certain. “Robert Cooper did.”
The fire voices had seemed to forget us. It shrank a little, now little more than three separate tongues each striving upwards in a different direction.
“So shall she be avenged,” the female said.
“And she shall walk into the world, fettered and forgotten, her blood shall sow seeds of vexation,” recited the dry one.
“Kore,” again moaned the third.
Ash was shaking now. I moved to her, the two of us now standing in a line with the benches.
If I reached to my left, I could tuck back a stray lock of Bailey’s hair. Just sleeping. All of them looking so peaceful.
“The female works against ussss.”
Just like that, the fire erupted into motion. It became not just a fire, but also a creature with three fire-born tentacles. One moment we were standing there, the next one of those tentacle arms was flying towards us. “Aere dis, ” I shouted, using one of the spells from Sherrod’s book, but the wind it called didn’t slow the tentacles down. I did the only thing I could think of: I grabbed Ash and pulled the two of us down.
Quick, but not quick enough.
“Agh!”
I had smacked my shoulder against the side of the church bench, but when I looked up at
Ash’s cry, it was to see her hand almost in my face, and the blue-green tentacle wrapped around her wrist. Her athame clattered to the ground, and just as quickly as it had flown our way, the tentacle unwrapped itself and slithered back towards the fire.
I was grabbing her arm a moment later. “Are you okay?”
But a closer inspection revealed only a hint of redness on her skin. No burn.
“Cold,” she whispered through her teeth. “Numb.” One whole side of her face had gone slack, the skin sinking downwards like a stroke victim. “Have to get out of here … ”
I turned back towards the fireplace. “Why do all this? Why? Luca, and everything you put him through. My family. WHY?”
“Ripen and rot, Child of Moonset. Touchstone of all those bound to you.” The dry voice whispered, crackled really, like a viper. “Ripen and rot, for this night they have condemned you to us, a plague to send to the Abyss itself. Swear unto usss.”
“To usss.”
“We will bless you, vessels of our essence. Free usss, let usss in, and we will crush those who persssecute you. Our powers are legion. We can teach you to channel the Abyss. To live forever, with usss. In usss. As usss. Swear!”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“They will spill your blood where you ssstand,” the viper hissed. “Swear, and your hour of vengeance will be had. Sssuch power we will bestow upon you.”
I could feel it in the air, the symbol that Ash had been drawing. It hung there, half-finished and pulsing with magic that could quite possibly rip me to shreds. Rip any of us to shreds. I could feel it—this wasn’t just another spell, it was something more. It was almost finished—it was begging to be finished.
“Swear!” the viper demanded. The fire began to rage again, the three prongs losing cohesion as the fireplace was consumed in one giant ball of cold fire.
“Swear!” repeated the female.
“Swear,” moaned the other.
The knife was still in my back pocket. My hand slid around the pommel like the blade had been crafted just for me. It was hot against my skin, warmth the fire couldn’t provide.
They asked for it.
“Fuck you,” I snapped, bringing the knife down in a slash that ripped through and completed the symbol that Ash had started.
Aerous. The symbol glowed so bright that it dimmed the Abyssal fire. It was a familiar symbol, but still one that I had never quite seen before. But I knew what it was, now. Aerous.
The primal wind. A spellform. I didn’t have time to wonder how Ash had known a spellform, or how I’d known how to complete it.
A tornado exploded in front of me, throwing me backwards. For a moment, I sailed in the air, my eyes drawn to the sickly blue green of the fireplace. I saw the fire wrap itself around Luca like a cocoon; heard a dozen inhuman shrieks; and felt a whirlpool pulling us down, down, down into the darkness.
Then the roof collapsed.
Twenty-Nine
“When we found them, they had been lined up in a row of cribs. The twins were together in one, of course. It was almost a month before we found evidence that Baby