“Yeeehaaaw! Git ’im!”
I stumbled back barely in time to avoid being trampled as a horse galloped past, hooves muffled by the soft ground. The rider let out another whoop as the dog shook the zhurn like a terrier with a rat then flung it aside. The horse reared and came down hard with both hooves on the mangled zhurn. As the demon discorporeated, the horse sidled away, snorting as if satisfied.
Another half dozen horses and riders cantered to a stop in the parking lot, Boudreaux in the lead.
“You made it,” I said stupidly, grinning like an idiot.
“Fuck if I’ll let you have all the fun,” Boudreaux said. His eyes widened as he saw Ashava and Jill scrambling to their feet. “Why is there a kid here?”
“Mascot.”
“Real funny, I—” Boudreaux’s face went sheet-white. “Oh fuck. Fuck! No! Kid, stop! You can’t pet that dog! He’ll bite . . .” He trailed off, staring in shock as the bear-sized demon-killing Caucasian Shepherd wiggled and bounced like a puppy around a delighted Ashava.
“Okay, she’s a bit more than a mascot,” I said.
Ashava sucked in a sharp breath and called glorious violet potency to her free hand. In the next heartbeat, Rhyzkahl and a syraza appeared not ten feet away from us. Immediately, the demon released Rhyzkahl’s shoulder and vanished.
“Hold your fire!” I shouted as the horsemen brought their weapons to bear on the intruder.
Boudreaux lifted a hand. “Horsemen, stand down,” he said, eyes on the demonic lord. “It’s cool.” He licked dry lips, then he dragged his gaze away and closed his hand into a fist. “Move out northeast to support Bravo Squad.” With a nudge of his knees, he turned his horse and took off down the street, with his unit right behind him.
Boudreaux’s reaction struck me as odd, but I had bigger worries.
Potency rippled around Rhyzkahl like the distortion waves of a mirage. “Peace, young one,” he said to Ashava, keeping his hands open and at his sides. “I bring no enmity.”
“Why are you here?” I demanded. “We’re a little busy at the moment.”
“The situation is dire and affects us all.”
My eyes narrowed to slits. “Thanks but no thanks. We don’t need the distraction of worrying that you’ll stab us in the back the instant we take our eyes off you.”
“In this matter, we are allied, Kara Gillian.” He paused. “And I will give you the eighth ring of the shikvihr.”
“Wait, what?” I stared at him in utter disbelief. “Are you insane? It doesn’t work like that.”
My surprise doubled as Ashava released the readied potency strike and inclined her head to Rhyzkahl. “Dak lahn,” she said then gave her mother’s hand a tug and started toward the valve-rift. Jill shot a hard look at Rhyzkahl but went with her daughter, apparently trusting that Ashava wouldn’t leave me if there was any real danger.
Great. Now I was alone with a nonsense-spouting lord.
Rhyzkahl’s gaze locked on me with unnerving intensity. “Each ring of the shikvihr conveys an exponential increase in focus, power, and ability. You need every possible advantage if Xharbek is to be thwarted.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I said, voice acid. “But I haven’t learned the sigils or had any training for the eighth.”
“There is no need. The sigils are merely the components.” He lowered his head, eyes on me. “When you summoned Dekkak, you held the entirety of the ritual within you. You understood the whole of it.”
“Only because I had the nexus and your power,” I retorted. “I’m back to being an ordinary summoner now.”
“Never ordinary,” he said, amusement flashing through his eyes before he grew serious again. “Your prolonged work with my power through the nexus has attuned you to a new arcane frequency. The ability to comprehend the omneity remains with you, though perhaps not as readily accessed. You know the purpose and meaning of the eighth ring. We have but to culminate it.”
His words reverberated with truth that my own essence echoed. I did know and understand the ring. Not only had I watched him a million times, but I’d danced it with Paul in the demon realm. More importantly, I felt it hovering on the edge of my awareness, fully formed and waiting to be taken. I’d never experienced that with any other ring.
Rhyzkahl had absolutely zero reason to lead me astray in this moment—not with the fate of both worlds in the balance.
“You’re right,” I said with a firm nod. “Okay. Eighth ring. Let’s do it.” A lord’s intervention was required to complete mastery of each ring of the shikvihr. Regret lanced through me that it wouldn’t be Mzatal this time, but necessity trumped sentiment.
“Dance, Kara Gillian,” he said.
Determined, I stepped a few feet away, pygahed for focus, and traced the first sigil of the first ring. Except I didn’t. Where the glowing sigil should have been, there was only empty air. Realization hit me like a punch to the gut. “This isn’t going to work,” I said, voice quavering with disappointment despite every effort to control it. “Without the nexus, I can’t do floating sigils on Earth until I have all eleven rings of the shikvihr.”
“Then I have wasted my time.”
Words leaped to my tongue to tell him where he could shove his sick, end-of-the-world petty revenge games, but I reined them back. Rhyzkahl hadn’t agreed with me. He’d simply commented on my own assertions. My own beliefs. My momentary can’t do attitude.
Besides, it was downright stupid to think that he’d come to this godawful spot just to fuck with me. Nor would he purposefully waste his time. With all that in mind, I settled in again and sought the resources that must be there.
And I found them via his aura. It provided the eerie reminder of the Rhyzkahl-powered nexus and, through it, the resonance of the super-shikvihr.
Once again, I traced the initial sigil, unsurprised as it hung in the air with a perfect golden glow. With methodical precision, I danced the first three rings of sigils, but by the fourth, method melted into pure flow. The whole of the shikvihr, all eleven rings, shimmered in my essence like a waiting blueprint.
Beeeeee the shikvihr.
I ignited the seventh ring and flowed right into the eighth. My mind no longer thought in terms of individual sigils, but of shaping potency to match the resonance of the internal blueprint. My arms curved through the air with my hands leading them in perfect trajectories, graceful and free as I circled and created. I felt every shift and nuance and flow with effortless perfection. For the first time ever, I truly danced the shikvihr.
With a flourish, I added the last loop to the final sigil of the eighth ring, then reluctantly disengaged from the process. Seven rings glowed brightly around me. The eighth was dim in comparison, still unignited. Hot damn.
I faced Rhyzkahl. “Okee dokee. I’m ready for the lordy mojo.”
Without a word, Rhyzkahl eased through the sigil rings to stand behind me. As he wove the rings together, I absorbed every subtlety of my creation. My awareness of the shikvihr grew until a sudden mental flashpoint of knowing it to be simply an extension and amplification of me. That was why each person had to dance their own shikvihr, and why only a handful of summoners had ever mastered all eleven rings. To have even a chance, you had to not only recognize your own potential, but accept and embrace it as well.
Rhyzkahl didn’t need to tell me when he was finished. I felt it in every cell of my body, then ignited the eighth ring in a flash of cerulean blue. The power infused me like a caffeine overdose without any of the jitters, and I did a fist pump of victory. It would have been easy to tell myself that the eighth ring was Rhyzkahl’s way of offering an apology for his various sins against me, but I knew it wasn’t. Nor did it need to be. We’d united against a common threat, and the rest didn’t matter.
“Dak’nikahl lahn,” I said. Thank you very much.
To my surprise he replied with, “Tahnk
si-a kahlzeb.” It was my honor, instead of the expected sihn for You’re welcome.
A pressure wave hit like a fist, sending us staggering and causing my ears to pop painfully. Less than a heartbeat later, the ground heaved, flinging us off our feet.
When the world stopped bucking, I struggled up to my hands and knees. Through the ringing in my ears, I dimly heard shouts of alarm along with the chatter of automatic weapons. I blinked to clear my eyes, only to see rakkuhr blasting from the rift like ash from an erupting volcano.
Rhyzkahl hauled me to my feet. “Xharbek has blown the valve rift wide open,” he said eyes blazing with fury—and a barely perceptible touch of fear. An angry scrape covered one side of his face from cheek to chin. He started toward the rift, support-dragging me along.
The crew working at the rift had been knocked to the ground and now clambered to their feet. Ashava was the first up and darted toward the spewing rift with a cry of dismay.
“Rhyzkahl!” she shouted, child-voice at odds with the power it held. “Help me seal the rift!” Sealing was like placing a patch. It wasn’t the same as permanently closing, but it would drastically slow the erupting of rakkuhr.
He released me and strode forward. “We cannot seal it until we ease the flow.”
Ashava narrowed her eyes. “We’ll form a shield to block the potency. The others can hold it in place while you and I create the patch seal.”
He swept an assessing gaze over the assembly as if checking his available tools then nodded. “It will require supreme effort from all to accomplish this. Let us begin.”
Ashava and Rhyzkahl took up positions on opposite sides of the rift, and the rest of us arranged ourselves to fill in the gaps—Idris and Pellini beside Rhyzkahl, and Elinor and me by Ashava. Yet worry dug at me like a tag on a new shirt. There was a flaw to the plan, or something we’d failed to consider, though I couldn’t pin it down.
The two lord-types wasted no time in weaving a tight mesh of potency that stretched at chest level across the rift. This would be the arcane shield to block the rakkuhr while they worked on the patch seal. The non-lords took hold of the shield’s potency strands, like holding the four corners of a blanket, then nearly lost control of it when Ashava and Rhyzkahl released their grip.
“We got this!” I yelled in hopes of rallying our little team. “Let’s take this sucker down.”
It was like trying to hold back the water blast of a broken fire hydrant with a baby’s blanket, but millimeter by millimeter we forced it downward until it was about hip height, low enough for the lords to work.
Rhyzkahl and Ashava began to create the patch seal out of layers of intricately interlocking potency. The rest of us hung on grimly to the shield strands, counting the seconds until we could release it. Supreme effort, indeed, but we were doing it. We were sealing off Xharbek’s big bomb.
The flaw lit up like neon.
“We’re forgetting the second bomb!” I blurted. Rhyzkahl and Ashava looked at me with confusion, but Bryce and Jill stiffened as comprehension hit.
“Son of a bitch,” Pellini breathed.
“What second bomb?” Idris demanded.
“It’s a classic terrorist move,” I said in a rush, already scanning the area. “Set a bomb, wait for people to come in and help the injured, then detonate the second and take out a bunch more people. All Xharbek had to do was wait until we’re all occupied and then do something bad—oh, fuck, that’s it right there.”
A half dozen yards away, red glowed from a rift barely a foot long. Tiny, but with unspeakable potential for havoc.
Rhyzkahl cursed in demon. “When it lengthens, it will bisect this one and destroy all hope of containment. Even now it destabilizes our efforts.”
“Why did Xharbek make the second rift so small?” I asked but immediately realized the answer. “Because he blew his wad on this big one.” We were in the middle of a sea of rakkuhr, the bane of the demahnk. That tiny rift was all he could manage after the energy drain of making the first—which was why he hadn’t made a dozen more.
Not to mention, the rakkuhr fountaining up from it would do the job for him. In barely half a minute, the new rift had already lengthened several inches—a rate that would only increase. How long did we have? Ten minutes?
Another six inches of asphalt split. Five minutes. If we were lucky.
I tore my gaze away, stomach churning. The shield strands nearly ripped from my grasp as the rakkuhr from our rift roared with augmented vigor. Ashava and Rhyzkahl would never be able to seal this in time. Xharbek would win, and Earth would be destroyed—for humans, demons, and demahnk. Insane.
But maybe I could buy our team the time they needed. I wasn’t a lord and thus couldn’t seal a rift on my own, but I had plenty of practice locking Jontari rifts to keep them from expanding. On the other hand, the mini-rift was demahnk-crafted, meaning I’d not only have to work at mega-record speed, but also adapt my techniques. Plus, I’d be a sitting duck for Xharbek and his various minions.
No doubt about it. If I attempted this, he’d squish me, constraints be damned. However, if I could manage to lock that rift before he turned me into Kara-flavored mincemeat, it would all be worth it.
Hell, at least I could put “Saved the world” on my heavenly resume.
A calm certainty filled me. “I’m going to go lock the little rift,” I stated. “Can y’all hold the shield without me?”
“We can hold it,” Idris said with grim determination, echoed by similar avowals from Elinor and Pellini. I hurried to distribute my shield strands to them then stepped back.
“Xharbek will not abide your interference,” Rhyzkahl said.
“I’m well aware of that,” I replied. As long as I could get the thing locked, he could not abide all he wanted.
Pellini suddenly jerked and let out a sharp cry as if stung. “Oh shit. Shit!” Wide-eyed, he shoved his strands at Idris, grabbed at his chest, then staggered back from the valve. “Kara! I’m—” He vanished.
Kadir just called in Pellini’s debt. Fuck!
Idris clung to the shield strands, white-faced with the effort of holding them. Heart pounding, I dove to seize mine back from Elinor before the force of the potency ripped both the shield and the patch seal away. That was some seriously shitty timing on Kadir’s part. I could only hope the weird lord was doing his own thing to save the worlds and not purposefully screwing us.
Except that it wouldn’t matter. With Pellini gone, I’d lost the chance to go lock the mini-rift. No way could Elinor and Idris hold this on their own.
“Give them to me, Kara,” Bryce said from beside me, holding a hand out.
“The hell?” I gave him a baffled look then saw a gold disk shining like a sun in his other hand.
Bryce offered me a Seretis smile. “Give me the strands. I will hold the shield secure while you attend the other rift.”
Bryce was channeling Seretis. Holy shit. I passed him the strands, easing as the non-arcane Bryce handled the arcane power with deft ease.
“Kara Gillian.” Rhyzkahl’s eyes met mine. “Pay close heed to your purpose.”
At least he wasn’t trying to talk me out of it. I gave him a sober nod then raced to the smaller rift, now nearly five feet long.
Rakkuhr swirled around me as I crouched beside the rift. Well, the purpose of rift-locking was simple enough: Lock the damn thing and keep it from fucking up the efforts of my team. Easy. I readied the potency then froze at the sight of a rakkuhr-free, two-foot circle of ground barely ten feet away. Crimson coils eddied around it, as if something within repelled the rakkuhr.
Or was shielded against it. Like, say, a certain invisible asshole demahnk.
My purpose abruptly crystallized. It wasn’t to lock the rift or save my friends or go out with a blaze of glory in heroic sacrifice. Those were merely components, sigils in a ring. No matter what else happen
ed, my purpose was to kick some motherfucking Xharbek ass.
Straightening, I lifted my hands out to either side in a fuck-yeah dramatic pose. Thanks to Xharbek, I was surrounded by a shitload of the very component I needed to make that ass-kicking a reality. I’d never learned how to handle the rakkuhr potency, but then again I’d never learned the sigils for the eighth ring or the ritual for summoning an imperator.
Beeeeeee the rakkuhr, I thought with a snicker as I brought it to me. It raced eagerly into my control, spilled over my hands and danced at my feet to wreathe me in crimson and night. With a whisper of will, I locked the rift and halted its growth. A second nudge sent the rakkuhr coursing toward the main rift to form a shield around everyone there, and another around Turek and Szerain. My rakkuhr shields weren’t as cool or pretty or sturdy as Szerain’s lace-spheres, but they’d keep Xharbek the hell away. After all, that was their purpose.
Xharbek had dropped the invisibility—or maybe had simply recovered enough to take on a corporeal form—and now the face of Carl the morgue tech seethed with anger before me.
“This is not over,” he snarled.
“Oh, but it will be soon,” I said cheerfully and wrapped his shielded bubble in a sexy little rakkuhr tornado. The height of fashion for scheming demahnk this season. I couldn’t hope to scatter him on my own, but I didn’t have to. I’d contain him until the others finished with the rift, then they would be more than happy to do the honor.
I continued to feed rakkuhr into the cyclone, swirling it tight and fast in the hopes that it would not only prevent him from teleporting out, but also start to wear away at his shields, like water eroding rock. Xharbek was a mountain, but I had a river of the potency streaming from the rift.
Triumph swelled as the rakkuhr-free zone began to narrow. Even better, he was starting to look a little transparent.
His fury abruptly vanished to be replaced by a truly nasty Fuck You smile. Shit. I’d missed something, but whatever it was, I’d deal with it. No way was I going to let this sonofabitch slip away again.