CHANCE
I stood in the middle of the crumbling courtyard, little better than a crow picking at the aftermath of a grisly battle. The charred concrete still radiated heat, the stench of iron and sulphur making my nostrils flare as I toed the rubble, finding little bits of blood and bone that hadn't been consumed by the flames. The place positively reeked of magic, but it was the gouges in the brick wall that truly rankled my nerves, for it attested to some kind of blast that could crumble stone like meringue.
It was a far cry from the warfare I'd grown up with, tethered to fang and claw and reflexes, anchored in the leather grip of a sword or gun. It was unnerving to think that I might come up against something like this soon; someone who could summon lightning and end my existence with a passing thought.
There had evidently been some kind of explosion, but who had been caught in the blast? I could make out the lingering scents of Ivy, Waters, Jerome and Ruben, all accounted for by the paramedic team and on their way to the Incantum's infirmary, but the other members of the task force were still unaccounted for. I supposed it was feasible that Holden, the vampire with wine-red hair, had gone back to the Irephang skyscraper with Daina. She was his superior, after all, the acting City Warden of Melbourne's vampires. He had no choice but to heel at her command, which was why I'd kept my cards close around him, reluctant to give away any information I wouldn't say directly to her face.
The same was true of Seth, the simpering womaniser who called himself a Light Witch but had yet to hint that there were any lights on upstairs. They were both sorely mistaken if they thought their secret rendezvous had gone unnoticed the past few weeks. I didn't know what they saw in each other, but I appreciated that it kept them distracted and away from me.
Muffled shouting and shattering glass alerted me to the commotion inside long before the back door burst open.
"Lady Nightshade? We have a situation."
The honorific title chafed. It was constantly pulling me in a million directions, spreading my attention thin, my influence even more so. Once I would have been at the heart of the battle, meeting the threat head on; now I was the person who cleaned up the aftermath, forced to rely on the snippets of evidence left behind to piece together some semblance of what happened for my daily reports. It was as if I'd been sidelined in my own story, even though I'd seized that power that should have put me at the heart of it.
Once, that would have made me angry. I would have taken destiny into my own hands, killing anyone who stood in my way.
Now I accepted the pull so that I did not have to push myself; so that I didn't have to find some intrinsic motivation to live, to eat and train and function. I did those things for my people now.
And yet, I resented them for it.
"What is it?" I asked, my tone devoid of inflection and warmth. I'd taken too long to respond; he'd started to sweat, the sour stench of it curling in my nostrils.
"It's the Southern Dark Witch," the paramedic said, holding open the door, as if he might need to leap back into the fray at any moment. "She's refusing to go to the infirmary without her daughter, but her injuries..."
"I'll handle it," I said automatically, shouldering him aside. He flinched from that cursory touch as if it scalded him, as everyone did these days. I had become the personification of fear the moment I sawed off my father's head with the shackles I'd worn on my wedding day, his blood splattering up the front of my mother's pristine wedding dress. I'd burned it along with his remains, but I still felt the pinch of that corset sometimes, as if someone was still lacing it up behind my back, choking a little more life from me with every passing day.
Seeing Jerome, my betrothed, had a similar effect. I'd promptly divorced him after our catastrophic wedding, but the expectant hope in his cerulean eyes drove me to the point of anger sometimes. Every word out of his mouth felt a noose he was trying to slip around my neck, and eventually my bitter, lashing retorts had driven him away.
Glass crunched beneath my leather boots as I stepped into the Pitstop Cafe, drawing my attention back to the present. It had been a derelict place to begin with, but the smashed-in windows, overturned tables and sticky pools of blood sealed the establishment's fate. Most of the corpses — or what remained of them, for the Lost were reportedly quite stubborn about clinging to life — had been taken to the Incantum's morgue, but someone would still have to come in and sweep up the stray fingers and heads that had been left behind.
A bottle of liquor shattered against the wall, yanking my attention to the fiery-haired sprite behind the counter. Laurel Walker was more animated than I'd ever seen her, blue eyes blazing beneath a mask of bruising, knuckles going white around the neck of a bottle she'd smashed against the wall. She jabbed the broken end at anyone who dared to go near her, apparently oblivious to the shard of bone jutting out from her thigh.
"Stay away from me with that thing," she snarled, her leg nearly buckled as she lunged. The paramedic jumped back, cursing, nearly sticking himself with the needle he carried.
I scowled at the cowardly method of subduing her, dismissing the paramedics with a curt wave of my hand. They fell back like wolves from a corpse, quietly seething with impotent rage as I stole the kill from right under their noses.
Laurel pointed the jagged bottle at me next, a shadow of fear flickering through her eyes at whatever she saw in my face.
"What happened?" I asked, making a point of looking her over. The Southern Dark Witch had been brought low this day. Laurel was usually the picture of perfect health with the distracted air of a well-off house-wife, utterly secure in the wealth of spell-casting energy at her disposal. That she couldn't even summon enough to heal her wounds was telling.
"Mischa happened," Laurel said curtly, pointing to the boot imprint on her face. "She ambushed us with a group of Lost soldiers. Nora and Ruben were able to fend them off, but she escaped through a portal to the Incantum."
I froze. That was where all of our injured were headed, to seek the care of the best healers in the world.
"Make the call," I barked over my shoulder, not caring which of them scrambled to comply.
Mischa was bad news, the product of a forbidden romance between the Northern Light and Dark Witches. She had allegedly eaten her twin in the womb, resulting in the power of two combined in one body, a dangerous concoction of light and dark magic that effectively doubled the source of her power. Mischa could feed on both positive and negative emotions without discrimination, and had even found a way to permanently deaden someone's ability to feel pain, resulting in the zombified Lost who indiscriminately carried out her orders.
Still it was not enough. I'd seen the reports of what she'd done to her family, and anyone else who competed for the psychic resources she felt entitled to. Mischa had systematically hunted down and killed all the parasite witches in the Northern hemisphere, and now she was doing the same with their equivalent in the south.
And now she was in the Incantum: the place that was prophesied to fall to her Legion of Lost soldiers, unless my task force could somehow find a way to stop them in time.
Pressure started building behind my eyes, a headache I was becoming all too familiar with. "You said you were looking for your daughter," I said. "Are you sure she didn't go with Ruben?"
I'd seen the way they looked at each other when they thought no-one else was watching. The quiet, star-crossed pining I myself had once fallen prey to.
"I know where she is," Laurel snapped. The bite of her tone was diminished by the way she swayed on her feet. "Daina took her in that damn helicopter. We need to find a pilot, send a rescue party to the Irephang skyscraper —"
"Why would we do that?" I asked, cocking a brow. "Daina is our ally."
"Is she, though?" Laurel asked. "Her aura has been changing over the last few weeks. I wanted to wait until I was sure to say anything, but I suspect she's been dabbling in magic of some kind. That she would do so behind our backs does not bode well."
"You're overthinking it," I said reflexively. "She was the first on the scene and made sure everyone received the medical attention they needed. And all lamia have a unique magical ability, for the record." Even the hybrids, born from a vampire sire and a werewolf mother, were partial to a niche magical gift. Ivy was one such remarkable individual, though I didn't envy how the silver-haired girl had come into her power.
"Why take only Nora?" Laurel asked, pressing the shards deeper into my chest. "She's the one who gave the command to send everyone else to the Incantum, but surely she knows where Mischa went. Why wouldn't she send any warning?"
I scowled. She was talking sense, and firmly believed in what she was saying, but I couldn't bear to contemplate the consequences of her theory. I'd trusted Daina with the only thing I cared about more than myself, handing over London's corpse in the childish hope that she would make him immortal.
"What does she have on you?" Laurel asked, pity softening her features.
It was like she'd seen right through me, gliding through my composure like a hot knife through butter, cutting to the heart of my grief. Some glimmer of her power remained, then.
"It doesn't matter," I said, pulling an amulet from under my shirt. The medallion had a web of lightning carved into the surface, an echo of the storms the pocket dimension was tucked within. "We have an apocalyptic threat loose in the Incantum. We have to focus our attentions there."
Laurel's eyes flashed, the jagged glass twisting in my leather breastplate. I almost wished I wasn't wearing it, so that I could feel something beyond the yawning chasm in the ribcage beneath it.
She sagged against the bench, the bottle slipping from her hand. Even if she defeated me, she couldn't outrun the paramedics and their anaesthetic. The crash was almost as piercing as the ringtone that sawed through the tension between us, binding us together through unflinching eye contact. I took the phone out of my pocket, eyes narrowing at the private number as I brought it to my ear.
"Hello?"