“Sabina,” Tristan called. He still lay on the ground. A grimace of pain contorted his face and his hand cupped his right ankle. For a moment, guilt cramped my stomach. Had I been too rough with my spell?
I shrugged off the guilt. He deserved it for the shit he’d pulled.
“What?” I called, my eyes on the zombies. Four feet now.
“You forgot to take control of them.”
“Oh shit,” I squeaked. In a flash, I whipped my powers back up and used them to surround the horde. I tried to recall the invocation I’d used the last time I’d summoned Revenants in the graveyard in New Orleans. “Sprits of the Loa, Hekate, Great Mother Lilith, I summon and invoke thee to send these restless spirits back to their graves!”
The air popped. Thoughts that were not my own flooded my brain—memories combined with outraged cries and pitiful whimpers. My head throbbed and I grabbed my temples to buffer against the cacophony. Bile rose in my throat. I breathed through my nose as I struggled to grab the tangled threads of control. I opened my eyes and froze.
Not two feet from me in a complete circle, eleven Revenants bowed at my feet. Relief flooded me, cooling the hot panic piercing my skull. My voice shook when I spoke. “Your work here is done. I release you. Rest in peace.”
As a group, the undead turned and shambled back to their graves. Their retreat was accompanied by the loud popping of joints and the papery crackle of decayed skin. Across the graveyard, Adam, Rhea, and Nyx watched in mute awe. Tristan had risen from the ground and was favoring his right leg. His expression was dark but unreadable as he watched, too.
My heart hadn’t stopped pounding since the skeleton hand had grabbed my ankle. And it didn’t calm until the last Revenant disappeared beneath the soil. Only when the mound had stilled did I release the powers. Normally I tried to expend the energy slowly, but this time I pushed them out as fast as I could. I felt hot and dirty and… disgusted. As rotted as the organs of those corpses.
The energy swirled into the soil like a vortex, like a spectral vacuum sucking the filth away. Once every drop of Chthonic energy was gone, I sagged into the headstone behind me.
A hush fell over the graveyard, but the echo of spent magic made the air throb.
Tristan spoke first. “Well,” he said, “normally I’d lecture you about being careless, but all things considered, the results were…” He paused as if searching for the right word. I held my breath. “Satisfactory.”
The air escaped me in a rush of bitter laughter. “Fuck you.”
He raised a brow. “It appears that in addition to working on your anger management issues, your cockiness, and your impatience, we’ll also need to address your total lack of respect.”
I started to tell him where he could put his respect, but then what he said hit me. “Wait, does that mean I passed the test?”
He executed a curt nod. “Yes. Now, come along. We have a lot to do and not much time to do it.”
He turned and started shouting orders at Nyx. The vampire scrambled over to help him limp back to the villa. I watched them go as warring emotions duked it out in my gut.
On one hand, I was psyched that we could finally get moving on our plans to stop Cain. But on the other, I was disappointed that he couldn’t spare more than a lukewarm compliment, which was quickly erased by his judgmental assessment of my many and varied character defects.
Footsteps approached and I looked up to see Rhea and Adam bearing down on me. The mancy arrived first, grabbing me in a hard hug. “No offense, but I really want to kick your father’s ass right now.”
I pulled back to reward him with a smile. “You and me both.”
“Now, now, children. Tristan’s methods might be a tad… unconventional, but they’re also very effective. Gods, Sabina! You were amazing.”
“I just wish I hadn’t screwed up on the last part.”
The silver-haired mage waved away my concern. “The true test was being able to break Tristan’s spell.”
“It was pretty breathtaking,” Adam said.
I shot him a you’re-just-saying-that look.
“Seriously. How did you know how to do that?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. Instinct, I guess.”
“Well, whatever it was, it worked. And now we can finally put the next phase of Operation Kill Cain in motion.”
I blew out a deep sigh. I knew I should be excited, but the truth was I had some doubts. When I’d thought about going to Irkalla, I’d figured I’d have to do some fighting. But Tristan’s little test had proven that when it came to battling spirits, I had no idea what I was doing. Give me a gun or a knife and I could kill a man seven ways to Sunday. But when it came to matters of the spirit, I was a total newb.
“What’s wrong?” Rhea said, shooting me that look that told me she already knew and had an answer ready.
I shook my head. I was in no mood for a rah-rah speech about how I could do this if I only believed in myself and trusted fate. Whatever Irkalla threw at me, I’d take it as it came. “I’m just hungry,” I said.
Two doubtful looks greeted this statement. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. All that magic had worked up a crazy appetite. “Hey, controlling a zombie horde is hard work. I’d punch a nun for a cheeseburger right about now.”
They both leveled me with arid glances. Finally, Adam put an arm around me and propelled me toward the gate. “You’ve been spending way too much time with Giguhl.”
Chapter 27
While I was raiding the fridge in the villa and filling Giguhl in on what had happened in the graveyard, Tristan had been busy. We found him in the meeting room with maps and old books spread out on the tabletop—all perfectly aligned, of course.
When we walked in, Tristan didn’t look up to acknowledge our arrival. Nyx and Valva stood next to him, discussing a map Nyx was holding.
“Hey, guys,” I said.
Nyx looked up and smiled. “You look better.”
I felt better, too. After I’d finished with the Revenants, I felt like I hadn’t slept in days. The food had helped, but I’d be needing some of Adam’s blood soon to recover completely. “Thanks.” I looked around. “Where’s everyone else?”
“They’re getting supplies ready,” Tristan said in a clipped tone.
I watched him spread a large piece of paper across his desk and wondered if he ever laughed. Then I immediately frowned. What did I care if he was ever happy?
“Sabina?”
Jolted out of my thoughts, I jumped to go around the desk to stand beside him. The paper he’d spread was a large map, which had been hand-drawn on thick vellum. Judging by the yellowed color and rough edges, it was quite old.
“What’s this?”
“This is Irkalla.” He waved a hand over the map.
I leaned down to get a better look. Unlike maps for most countries that showed the land from a bird’s-eye view, this one looked more like a cross section with several levels. At the top, someone had written in elaborate curling script, Irkalla, the Infernal Lands.
“Where did you get this?” Rhea asked, leaning in closer.
Nyx spoke up. “We found this in a collection owned by an eccentric billionaire mage in the Netherlands. He claimed a demon he’d summoned gave it to him in the eighteenth century.”
I looked up at Giguhl. “What do you think, Giguhl? Is it accurate?”
The demon leaned over the large vellum map. “For the most part.” He pointed a claw to a rendering of the Adamantine Gate near the top of the map. A snarling three-headed dog lay next to the black archway. “Except that bitch, Cerberus, is way uglier in person than this picture shows.”
“Irkalla is divided into regions for each of the dark races,” Nyx said. “Valva, do you want to explain?”
“After I show you the secret shortcut to Irkalla through the Liminal, the real tests will begin.” The golden demon sounded surprisingly businesslike.
“Hold on,” Adam interrupted. “Is there a reason why Sabina can’t just have Giguhl, or you, for that matter, flash her in and skip all the tests?”
“There are impenetrable wards set into the borders of the Infernal Lands. They’re there to keep the living out.”
“And the dead in?” I asked.
She nodded. “Anyway, pretty much the only way in—in the case of the living—or out—in the case of the dead—is through guarded access points. If I tried to take Sabina through with me, she’d hit the barriers and be locked out.”
“So why can demons move between realms?” I asked. “You guys are alive.”
“Because Irkalla is our home,” she said simply. “Plus most demons—except for the Lilitu, like me—can’t leave Irkalla without magical intervention.”
She was telling the truth. Only mages could summon demons from the underworld, and once they reached the mortal realm, they could only stay if they were under the control of that mage or if he or she transferred control to another mage. I guess it was some sort of preternatural checks and balances to ensure demons didn’t flood out of Irkalla and take over Earth.
“But Giguhl took Clovis to Irkalla,” Adam pointed out.
Giguhl spoke up. “Clovis is half demon, so he can pass through the wards, and Sabina—a mage—sent him there magically using me.”
“So the gates are something any alive being would have to go through to get to the palace, right?” Adam asked.
Nyx stepped up. “Yes and no. Because Sabina will be trying to prove that she’s the Chosen, the tests were specially devised by Lilith to help weed out pretenders. Only someone who could actually be the Chosen will pass through all the gates.”
“So, for example, if Tristan had managed to find the secret entrance all those years ago, he wouldn’t have faced the same tests to get through the gates?”
Valva nodded. “Right. He would have just had to pay special tolls in the forms of magical items, but that’s why we make the secret entrances so hard to find. Mom and Dad don’t want to be bothered by every yokel with a hard-on to prove himself with a quest to Irkalla.”