20

THE DARKEST SKY

At the mention of the Harbingers, there was a moment of shocked silence inside Hellbringer broken only by the constant rumble of the demon car’s powerful engine. Dru stared wide-eyed through the windshield, into the distance, not really seeing the asphalt rippling beneath their headlight beams. The same thought kept echoing around and around inside her brain.

These wraiths are the Harbingers.

Then everyone started talking at once. Feral was trying to explain how he used to know Lucretia, but had severed ties with her once he realized she was up to no good. In the background, Opal worked herself into hysterics about how they were all going to die. Or possibly have their souls devoured first, and then get reduced to mindless, gibbering victims of the undead creatures. And then die.

Rane started to say how she was going to kick somebody’s ass, and Greyson held up his hand, saying that everyone should give Dru a chance to talk.

But the loudest of all, by far, was Salem, whose voice rang out with enough ferocity to make any ordinary mortal run for cover and cower in fear.

“Who the hell is Feral?”

After that, everyone fell silent. Salem’s words virtually sizzled in the dark confines of the car, electrifying the air with a dangerous spark. Ever so slowly, Dru turned her head and looked back over her shoulder, risking a peek at Salem’s wide-eyed fury. But he was glaring at Rane, which filled Dru with a relief that was admittedly tinged with guilt.

Rane, pretending she hadn’t heard the white-hot anger in his voice, chewed on her lip and looked past Dru, as if she saw something incredibly interesting in the far distance ahead. Salem seethed, facial muscles twitching rapidly, as Rane turned slightly toward him.

With exaggerated nonchalance, she raised her palms. “We work out together. No big.”

One of Salem’s eyes twitched dangerously. “What does that mean, exactly?”

A cough came out of the phone, which Dru now held out at arm’s length, as if it was a venomous serpent that she wished she could fling away. Through the phone, Feral’s deep voice said, “Look, man—”

Dru’s thumb, with absolutely zero conscious volition on her part, mashed down on the red button with nearly enough force to crack the screen.

“Oh, look at that,” she said quietly. “We lost him.” Sensing what was coming next, Dru unbuckled her seatbelt and turned around to face Salem. The last thing she needed right at this moment, while they were fleeing certain death, was any of his dramatics amplified by magic, in a tight, confined space. At sixty miles an hour.

Time to change the subject.

“Before Lucretia escaped into the netherworld, she said that her friends were waiting for her there. After her earthquake failed to destroy the world, could she have somehow sent the other Harbingers back here from the netherworld to get the scroll?”

He gave her a half-crazy stare, made even bolder by the black eyeliner around his eyes. The anger burning in his gaze made her want to shrink away, but she stayed put, staring right back at him.

After a tense moment, he ignored her and turned to Rane. Her gaze went steely, and her jaw sat in a hard line. Even in her condition, she was clearly anticipating a fight.

Dru nearly climbed over the seat in an effort to keep her face in front of Salem’s. She held up a finger to silence Rane before she said anything else, praying that, for once, Rane would keep quiet.

To Salem, Dru said, “Nobody has studied the Harbingers as diligently as you have. Except maybe me. But you have the advantage. You’ve studied not only your own source materials, but also the ones you stole from me, so you’ve seen probably twice as much as I have. And you’re the only other person I know who is willing to lock themselves up in a room for days on end studying the twisted ravings of lunatics bent on destroying the world. In other words, the entire universe of Harbingers geeks consists of pretty much just you and me. And I’m fresh out of ideas. So I need your expertise.”

He studied her with an oddly apprehensive fascination, as if she were some brightly colored but gigantic insect poised to crawl up his leg. “You are so awful at flattery.”

She adjusted her glasses. “It’s more flattery than you deserve, so you’d better take it. Listen, if these wraiths really are the Harbingers, who is their leader? What are they thinking right now? Do they even think, or are they mindlessly pursuing us? Or do they have some kind of plan? Will they try to outmaneuver us, the way they surrounded us and cut off the power in the shop?”

She barraged him with questions, partly to distract him from an increasingly baffled-looking Rane, partly because she desperately needed the answers.

“Could Lucretia be one of those wraiths?” Dru said. “After all, she did head into the netherworld.”

That question finally caught Salem’s attention. He chewed on the inside of his narrow cheeks for a little while, and finally shook his head. “You’ve been in the netherworld before.” His voice was sharp with envy. “You didn’t turn into a wraith.” From the sound of it, he kind of wished she had.

“But I also don’t habitually go around breaking apocalypse seals or dispossessing undead spirits. Or casting dark magic spells, unlike some of us.” Dru pointedly looked down at his greasy-looking arm, seared by dark magic, and wished she hadn’t. Her stomach turned over at the sight of it. “Ugh. Does that hurt?”

A twisted smile quirked up the corner of Salem’s mouth, revealing teeth. “No. It tickles.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get you all fixed up.” Her anger at him evaporated. The poor guy was obviously in an enormous amount of pain. Not that it wasn’t entirely self-inflicted, but still. “Where was it that Lucretia said she was headed? The gleaming city? The shimmering city?”

“The Shining City,” Salem said with just a tinge of yearning. “It’s a mythical place supposedly overflowing with ancient mysteries and the answers to all secrets. The problem is that no one knows where it is. No one except the Harbingers.”

From the driver’s seat, Greyson spoke up. “We’ve seen it.” Suddenly, he was the center of everyone’s attention. He glanced at Dru. “From the causeway. Way back.”

Slowly, she nodded. It seemed like so long ago that they had entered the netherworld and crossed a boundless ocean of flickering mist on a black stone causeway that stretched between portals. The netherworld sky was a nightmare of fire and shifting lights, and in the distance, a dark city skyline of glittering towers had stretched skyward.

Dru had seen the Shining City firsthand. At the time, she hadn’t known what it was. Had the wraiths of the Harbingers been waiting among those shimmering towers all along?

“So glad we didn’t go there then,” Dru said with a shudder. “Can you imagine? What if we had taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Shining City? We would’ve been completely unprepared for a threat of that magnitude.”

Rane let out a low whistle. “Dude, that’s messed up. We would’ve been hosed.” She reached across and poked Salem. “You should’ve been there, too. It was rockin’. Then you could be part of the whole been-to-netherworld club, like the rest of us cool kids. But no. Not you.”

He glared at her with smoldering intensity. Mostly anger. But there was just a hint of satisfaction, too, as if he somehow enjoyed Rane’s needling.

Rane met his forceful gaze with feigned indifference. After a long moment, she whispered, “Staring at me like that won’t make me go away.”

Dru’s phone rang in her hand, making her jump. It was Opal again.

Hopefully it was Opal, she thought, and not Feral again. Emotions were already running high enough inside this car. She didn’t need to throw any more sparks into this particular powder keg. So this time, she pointedly did not put the call on speaker. She answered carefully. “Hell…ooo?”

“Honey.” Definitely Opal. And definitely perturbed. “Where are you right now?”

“Heading to Salem’s place.” Dru looked out the window at an unfamiliar row of buildings, some of them boarded up, streaking past in the darkness. “And we’re taking the scenic route?” She looked to Greyson for confirmation.

He nodded, glancing up at the rearview mirror, clearly watching for signs of pursuit.

“I don’t know if you know what the shop looks like,” Opal said, sounding both angry and shocked, as if someone had just spilled wine down the front of her dress, “but it looks like I’m about to go file for unemployment. You know, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. There are plenty of other jobs in this world where all I have to do is show up and look good. There’s no monsters. No getting blown up. You just punch out at five o’clock, collect your paycheck, and go home. Speaking of which, is my paycheck still on your desk?”

Fear surged inside Dru. “No, do not go inside! There could be another wraith lurking in there, or something even nastier. We can’t risk it.”

“There’s cops, is what there are. So many police cars out front, I can’t even count. And fire trucks left and right. So many big hunky firefighters, you wouldn’t even believe. Make you go cross-eyed just trying to look at them all.”

“Is anything on fire?”

“No. But they are definitely checking the place out.” From the sound of it, Opal was doing her own checking out, too. “Ladders and lights flashing and everything. Whole street is lit up like Times Square.” Official-sounding radios squawked in the background, and a heavy truck beeped as it backed up. “You remember how I was always telling you how we need more publicity for the shop? How we need to get on the news or whatever? Well, now’s our chance. ‘Local New Age shop explodes. Film at 11.’”

Dru took her glasses off and rubbed her tired eyes. “Not exactly the kind of publicity I was hoping for.”

“Oh, it’s not?” Opal said with false sweetness. “Tell me about it. All I did was go to the store, and I had to come back to this.”

In the back seat, Rane and Salem were already discussing anti-wraith tactics.

“Let’s try to trap those bad boys again,” Rane said.

“Let’s not,” Salem said. “Obviously, the wraiths have figured out how to avoid the traps, for the most part. Even if they haven’t, those circles are of questionable value. Much better to divide and conquer. I can take them one-on-one easily.”

“Easily?” Rane’s skepticism was obvious. “I’m already going to start calling you Lefty.”

Dru put her glasses back on and hunched down low, cupping her hand around the phone. She spoke softly. “Listen, this is serious. Salem’s injured pretty badly.”

Opal’s breath drew in sharply. “What happened?”

“He cast some kind of dark magic spell I’ve never seen before. The backlash burned his arm pretty good. He’s in a lot of pain.”

Opal made a disapproving sound that was about ten percent sympathy and ninety percent that’s-what-you-get-for-playing-with-fire. “Do you know how to help him?”

“Not yet. Not until he comes clean with me about his spell. It’s Rane I’m really worried about. A wraith almost drained her. She’s alive, but she’s pretty out of it.”

“Good thing she regenerates so fast,” Opal said.

Dru hesitated. “Actually, that’s what worries me. Her psyche could be completely out of alignment, and if she heals that way, it could leave her permanently damaged. We have to set her right, or her powers could suffer.”

“That poor girl.” Opal sniffed. “Of course, me, I’ve never had powers, so now we can commiserate. What do you need to heal her?”

Dru blew out a long breath, thinking things through. “I’ll need a good solid hematite crystal, for starters. Make that red hematite, to help cleanse her blood. Probably help to bolster that with heliotrope, too.” Heliotrope was just a fancy name for bloodstone, which was a combination of red hematite and green jasper. Rane clearly needed all the healing stones she could get. “Also plenty of sulfur to absorb any negative potential left behind by the wraith. Some fossilized wood would be good. And green agate to make sure we don’t miss any hidden problems.”

“Sounds a little bit like I should be making a list,” Opal said dryly. “You do realize that all of those crystals are inside the shop, where you just explicitly said I should never go.”

“Well, I didn’t say never, exactly. After all, if there are already firefighters in there . . .”

“Uh huh. Why do I get the feeling I’m going to spend the rest of the night answering all kinds of uncomfortable questions?”

“At least they’ll be asked by a hunky firefighter. Right?”

“Mmm. There is that.” Opal sounded unsure.

“Please. We got hit really hard. We used up all of our moon dust, and now we don’t have any way to physically fight those things. Rane is down and out. Salem is barely holding on. All we can do is try to outrun the wraiths until we figure out a plan.”

Opal didn’t say anything for a long moment. A siren whooped and blipped somewhere behind her. Dru recognized the deserted warehouses marching past Hellbringer’s windows and realized with a start that they were almost to Salem’s place. Greyson turned off the cracked road, and their headlights swept across the graffiti-covered building with its smashed-out windows.

“We’re here,” Dru said apprehensively. “I’m going to grab whatever I can, as fast as I can, and then we’ll get back on the road. We have to keep moving, so those things don’t catch up.”

“All right,” Opal said softly. “Red hematite, bloodstone, all the rest. I’ll find it. Don’t know how I’ll get it to you, but . . .”

Dru’s heart swelled. She knew Opal would never let her down. “We’ll figure it out. Just stay safe.”

“It’s you I’m worried about, honey.”

Dru hung up, trying not to dwell on the fact that Opal was right to worry. Even more danger could be waiting just around the corner.