Chapter 31: Rage
SLENDER HANDS CURLED AROUND HER shoulders, pulling her into an embrace no one would've found comforting. She looked down and saw that the fingers were tipped with long silver nails, curving slightly down to scrape at the skin on her collarbones. When she blinked the hands flashed a beige the colour of flesh, and she felt a sense of déjà vu before shaking herself. The hands went back to the black coloured, silver tipped danger from before.
Tucking her elbows into her sides, she shot them backwards. But the thing behind her didn't budge, only tightened its hands around her till its fingers were wrapped around her throat. Somehow, she'd lost her whip. It had fallen and now she didn't know where it was. She clawed at the appendages, feeling the warmth of blood running down the length of her fingers, and reached for her Air magic. Her powers didn’t respond. They’d run out during the battle. It - she'd forgotten what Daniel had called it - could just kill her now, crush her throat, tear the flesh to shreds and be done with it. But no, it had to drag her back into the mon of Demons to get mauled by the rest, chittering and chattering in her ear. No quick death for her.
No. I just found myself, I can't die now. I just got rid of a Demon inside me, I can't get killed by them now. I need to get to Camp, find the others, make sure that there’s still three of us. Make sure that there are enough Emblems for the world to be saved. Leone trusts me. I can’t fail her, can’t let her down. She lashed out with her left hand in a wild, wide arc and it clanged past something, dug into cold, inky darkness and the things behind her screeched, disappeared, leaving flashes of pain in her shoulders. She looked down again, found that the Demon had dug its claws into her collarbones in its death throes. The others closed in, out of the corner of her eyes.
She touched the silver fingernails sticking out of her flesh, surrounding her neck like some perverted idea of necklace, and with the cool metal at her fingertips, felt something even colder rise up inside her. This feeling... Something familiar, though she hadn't felt it since the Demon went away. The urge to tear everything around her to pieces, get rid of threats, ensure survival. Aggression, fear. One always came with the other.
The Demons regarded her with their black and silver eyes, closing the circle around her, straining closer. She looked at all their faces, perversions of what nature made, and with a snarl tore the pieces of metal out of her shoulders and flung them at the horde. "Die! All of you!" For the first time since she woke up in the med bay she wanted something to just stop and go away and leave me alone!
Don't you want the Demon gone? The voice echoed in her head as she tore her way through the monsters with a dagger and her bare hand. Don't you want to stop hurting other people? Don’t you remember what you did to Emily?
There had been fear and pain and aggression and the sense that everything that made her her was at stake. Of course, yes, yes, yes. She'd agreed with them at first. They'd shown her Emily's face, her mauled body, the bits of flesh and blood and guts and she would’ve vomited if not for the straps tying her down.
Then why are you fighting us? Why are you fighting this? The voice she'd heard had been comforting, understanding, and the world had been fuzzy, everything muted and muffled, like how she'd felt when she woke up on the med bay bed, slow and sluggish and painfully unaware, without even the energy to fish herself out of the influence of some drug unknown to her.
I need to get out. I need to get away. As the words she remembered echoed over and over in her mind she fought the Demons down the corridor, freeing up space for brief seconds till they closed in again.
Why?
I need to find Vortex, raze it to the ground. She grunted, flinging out her arm and catching a massive humanoid in the torso, opening up a cut in its abdomen.
Why?
For my parents. For the things I never had. For the things Emily put me through. A kind smile flashed for a second and all she could remember was that she’d thought that that upturning of the lips was fake, useless, a mere façade. But the longer the image stayed in her brain the more she thought that it was geniune, that it offered help, haven, safety. All that doesn’t matter anymore, right? I need to stop focusing on the things that aren’t important. I’m just a little lost, but now I understand. I don’t have to be suspicious anymore. I just have to follow the right path. And the right path is the one that the Delegates tell me to take.
There’d been a great slamming noise in her head, like a door that had been swinging closed in slow motion had finally fell into place, its lock twisted firmly, and the last, little, niggling voice in her head – the one that said no, this is wrong, wrong, wrong. Bring it back, it’s part of me! – was shut behind it, silenced, docile, tamed.
That voice had raged and fought and screamed itself hoarse since before all this, before the Delegates, before Camp, before Daniel and Calida. It had been a fury that rampaged in her veins, a pounding of never give up, don’t let them see, this trust is a lie, don’t let them in don’t get hurt don’t hurt anyone else. And for that it had raged, it had still been shoved away, stuffed in a box, ignored, forgotten.
She couldn’t hear it now, couldn’t hear its roaring, couldn’t rouse up any kind of determination to live. But when she tried to call it up again – this was battle and fighting and she needed it – other words came in its place: she wouldn't have allowed me to carry her here, or curl up like a baby when things get tough. Stop acting like a helpless brat.
What the hell happened to me? Even her thoughts felt like the feral growls of a cornered animal. And just like one, she’d been backed into a wall, surrounded by threats, and was now plowing through them like a hot knife through butter, taking at least one down with every flick of her dagger.
You're not the Amber Starling I knew. Get up and fight. Get up. Fight. Rage.
Her right hand, with no weapon to hold, was streaked with blood, streaming down her skin the same way she’d imagined it before losing control with Emily. She ducked and weaved through the mob of Demons and screamed bloody murder at them when more replaced the ones she’d killed – death threats that she quickly followed up on.
And she screamed again when a mace-wielding humanoid picked her up like a ragdoll, tucking her knees over its arm, and then stabbed it in the chest with her dagger. Rage. I have to survive, live. Don't let them win. The shadows that made up the Demon dispersed, the heavy metal mace dropping to the ground with her along with it. But another one caught her in its arms, and a headless figure approached to grab hold of her hand and pry her last weapon from her weak fingers. It took it away, held it up to its torso as if examining it with the eyes on its chest, and dropped it onto the floor. “Bastard!” she snarled. I won’t be that weak again. I won’t be a helpless brat. I am not afraid. “Give me back my weapons! Give them back!” But she struggled in vain, beat her fists upon the chest of the Demon holding her captive, kicked out with her feet and caught one in the jaw, but her efforts were useless. She was out of stamina, out of power. The voice in her mind went quiet. Suddenly, now that she wasn’t screaming, she realised how silent everything was, just her panting and the faint clicking of metal.
The Demon holding her knelt down suddenly, bringing her level with the snakes and the dogs, and the horde pressed closer, almost touching her. Something to her right chittered loudly and she looked over. A Demon lady held out a clawed hand towards her, silver tipped fingers gleaming, but in her palm lay something white, out of place. Amber reached out and her fingertips brushed the cool skin of the Demon as she took her whip from it. Letting the coils of the weapon spill out of her hands, she regarded it, then the Demons around her. It occurred to her that she could just lash out once, in a circle, and everything within a metre of her would be reduced to shadows, but she didn’t do that, wouldn’t do that.
Something dropped onto her torso. She picked it up, stroked the silver metal of her dagger, looked up into the inky eyes of a three-headed dog. Give me back my weapons. She reached up and touched one of the dogs noses, not even thinking about the fact that it could bite her hand off with just one head. It was like touching a shadow – not really there, but somehow existing. Is this what you meant, Dax?
She considered the Demons surrounding her, watching how they all leaned in to stare at her with those unnerving, sightless gazes, and almost laughed. “I’m insane. This isn’t going to work,” she muttered.
But she was going to do it anyway.
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He paced around the office. "Shit shit shit shit..." The word had already become a mantra by the time the Daron twins arrived.
"What happened?" Christopher burst in, Kurt trailing at his heels.
He left the explaining of the Demon attack to Calida, trying to getting his heart rate down, despite the remaining adrenaline, before taking the seat next to Robert, in front of the Daron twins' desk. Only when the twins nodded and Calida sat on the arm of Robert's chair, did he speak up, "We need to go back."
"How?" Calida asked. Her hand rested on Robert's shoulder. It seemed that she'd gotten over that fact that he'd worked for the Delegates and lied to her. If only other relationships were as simple as that. "Robert can't teleport today. Anymore and there'll be permanent cellular damage. He might fall into a coma if he tries to do it again, much less dragging you along." Her hand lit on fire. Robert, letting the flames sink into his skin, leant back. His eyes were already half-closed. "He needs to rest."
All of them knew that Robert was the only way anyone could get back to the Athenaeum for now. There were no other teleporters in Camp and the rest were with the Delegates, whom Daniel had already tried to mind link, but came up with nothing. If they took physical transport, the Demons would've cleared out by the time they got to D.C. There has to be a way. "You don't get it," he insisted. "We need to rescue her."
Calida turned her gaze onto him. "Face it, Daniel. She's one person and that was a horde of Demons that probably took out the Delegates or forced them to run. She's dead, we've got no word from Nicholas. That essentially means that we're down to two Emblems. And we still haven't unlocked all our potential yet. The power stream is screwed." She took another look at him, probably saw how he was averting his eyes because she snapped, "Amber's dead and it's her own damn fault. Accept it and move on."
"It wasn't her fault!" He shot up without thinking. And it wasn't Calida's either. But he needed something to say.
"Oh yeah?" Calida said. "I find that hard to believe coming from the person that said she wasn't Amber Starling in the first place. Or have you forgotten?"
"Calida. That's enough," Christopher interjected.
No, he hadn't. Right now her face was as fresh in his mind as the day after his parents died. Both before and after she'd tried to run away. When she'd woken up in the med bay the first thing he'd noticed was how dead her eyes looked, how they had been reduced to a flat grey, like a concrete pavement. It's gone. The Demon is gone. And the same day she said that an army of Demons had attacked.
Lightning struck, a bolt of white in the darkness and Daniel blinked. "Oh. Oh. Shit."