34

ALL THAT’S LEFT IS YOU

Severin’s shimmering fingers tightened around Dru’s throat, wintry and sharp. As his cold touch drained away the essence of her spirit, she felt like she’d been plunged headfirst into a mountain river. The burning pain of his grip made the blood roar in her ears. Each heartbeat thudded and slowed until her hands and feet felt frostbitten.

Dru gasped. Her knees finally gave out, and she sagged to the ground. As Severin reached for the scroll with his other hand, she deliberately fell face-down on top of it, covering it with her body so that he couldn’t reach it.

Severin hovered over her back, still gripping her neck tight. “You know this is futile,” he hissed in her ear. “You will only delay the inevitable. For fifty years, I have waited for this moment. Stalling me another minute won’t change anything.”

With her free hand, she swiped uselessly at him. Her fingers went right through his incorporeal form as if he wasn’t there.

Darkness pounded at the edges of Dru’s vision, but she refused to give up the scroll. Shaking, she wondered if this was exactly how Rane had felt right before she lost consciousness. The pain was so intense that it robbed her of her breath. It stole almost every rational thought.

She knew there had to be some way out of this, if she could only clear her mind and think it through. But there was no time. And her strength was fading too fast.

She had to get moving. If she stayed put, Severin would drain everything away from her. And when she was finally dead, he would get the scroll anyway. Obviously, he had reached the same conclusion, because he leaned over her, waiting for her to die.

His grip on her throat made it nearly impossible to think, though she had to try. There had to be a way. But what chance did she have, without even a single crystal to use? She was helpless, unable to use the only magical power she had. She was as good as dead.

Even Rane hadn’t been able to stand against an onslaught like this. And Rane was the toughest fighter Dru had ever met.

But somewhere in the midst of her tortured thoughts, Dru realized a crucial difference between her and her friend. All of Rane’s magical power was directed outward: fighting, running, crushing her opponents with sheer physical power. In contrast, Dru’s power was all directed inward. She had spent her entire life trying to channel her own inner magic into crystals. Her strength came from controlling her energy in the midst of the strange and sometimes unstable vibrations of crystals.

The wraith’s grip on her was far more painful than the drain of any crystal she had ever touched. But aside from the order of magnitude, it wasn’t fundamentally all that different. Her only chance to fight him off depended entirely on the same skills she’d honed with her crystal magic.

Before she could give in to the terror that threatened to paralyze her, she gathered every last shred of inner strength. With as much bravery as she could muster, she mentally pushed back against the icy cold fingers. They tightened their grip, making it impossible to breathe. Her pulse thundered in her ears. The black spots pounding at the edges of her vision grew into a dark tunnel, robbing the desolate wasteland in front of her of what little color it had.

Steeling her nerve, she reached down into her very core and brought up her last reserves of magic. She put it all on the line, knowing that Severin’s icy fingers were draining it away as fast as she summoned it up. In a minute, at the most, she would be dead.

But she had no choice. There was no Plan B. It was all or nothing.

With a groan of pure animal pain, Dru reached forward with her free hand and dragged herself a few inches closer to the edge of the crater. Then a little more. It wasn’t much, but all the same, a renewed flicker of hope burned inside her. If she could just reach the edge before it was too late . . .

“Think of the world you’re trying to save.” Severin’s echoing voice slithered through her tears, filling her with dread. “Rife with disease, starvation, open warfare. Is that what you want, for eternity? Nothing has changed since my time. Nothing will change in yours.”

Dru tried not to listen. Tried to block him out. She knew the world itself was depending on her. But it was difficult to visualize what that really meant. She tried to picture the world, and came up with only hazy images of the planet as it was visible from space. Sweeping vistas of foreign lands she’d seen only on a screen. Anonymous crowds of people. None of that fired her up enough to overcome the pain of having her soul drained out of her body, bit by painful bit.

As the wraiths circled around her like crows around a dying animal, she wondered what had happened to Rane and Salem. Were they still alive? Had the wraiths merely slipped past them to come here? Or had her friends’ bodies been left lying behind in the long, dark tunnel down to Tartarus?

And what about Greyson? Had he somehow escaped from this abyss, despite Hellbringer’s betrayal? Or had he been overwhelmed by a ravenous horde of demons, each one eager to devour his soul?

Would she ever see any of them again? Or were they all gone now? Had they sacrificed themselves to give her this moment, this one single chance? Had they bought her enough time?

That thought finally pushed her onward. She couldn’t let their sacrifices be in vain. She had to honor what they had done. She had to take this one chance they had bravely given her, and make them proud. She couldn’t let her friends down.

“The world is doomed. Let it go,” Severin whispered in her ear. “Nothing has changed. Nothing ever will.”

But Dru forced him out of her thoughts. She crawled on her belly, ignoring the rocks that jabbed at her, the fissures in the broken ground that clutched at her failing body. Despite the pain, she willed herself to keep going, even as Severin’s grip drained her, until almost nothing was left.

Inch by painful inch, she crawled onward toward the jagged edge of the crater. She refused to give up. Refused to stop.

Just when she felt she could go no further, she reached out one bleeding hand and found nothing but empty air in front of her. A whistling wind plucked at her hair, tingled her numb skin.

Trembling, she lifted up her head.

She had reached the lip of the crater. Below, the vast pit descended into darkness, a gaping hole with sheer sides and no visible bottom. Dru, unable to breathe, blinked at the golden sparks of light dancing in her vision, and realized that they weren’t just hallucinations. They were real. Somewhere far below, tiny motes of light blinked and winked back up at her.

As she faded away, she wondered what those strangely beautiful lights were. Could they be souls trapped in eternal torment? Or something else entirely? Even now, on the brink of death, her curiosity wouldn’t let go.

This was it, she realized. This was the moment. Her time was up.

She shifted the weight of her shivering body and slowly pulled out the length of the scroll. Its silver tips winked in the light of the fiery skies.

Looming over her back, Severin cackled in triumph and reached for the scroll.

She pushed out her last breath in a whisper: “This is…what’s…changed” And with her last bit of strength, she hurled the apocalypse scroll down into the abyss, back where it belonged.

It tumbled as it fell, end over end. The silver spikes at its tips glinted in the bloody light from above. As it shrank away into the darkness, the edge of the stained tan parchment flapped, held fast by the last of the seven red seals, the only one unbroken.

Severin’s gloating laugh turned into a deafening roar of rage. He released Dru and dove after the scroll, his ghostly body leaving behind a luminous trail. Shrieking in unison, the other wraiths streaked after him, spiraling down into the dark heart of the abyss toward the dwindling scroll.

The moment the bony fingers left her neck, Dru dragged in a ragged breath and coughed. Her entire body spasmed, starved of not only oxygen but also the vital essence of magic that made her who she was. Shaking and gasping, she rolled over onto her side, flooded with remorse.

She had brought the scroll back here to Tartarus, and cast it into the pit, but it wasn’t enough. Severin had almost reached it. His shadowy arms reached out toward it. The other wraiths were right behind him.

Clearly, they would catch the scroll before it hit the bottom. She had failed.

Then all at once, the tiny motes of light below flared brighter. No, not brighter, she realized. Closer.

They weren’t tiny at all. Just farther away than she had imagined. Each one was a flying demon, soaring upward from the depths on beating wings of fire. And there were hundreds of them. An unholy legion.

The tight knot of luminous wraiths split apart, each one streaking in a different direction, desperately trying to escape the demons. But there were too many of them. The dispossessed Harbingers weren’t human anymore, Dru realized, but they were still human souls. And the demons were ravenous.

One by one, the wraiths were caught and devoured by the demons, sometimes by two and three at a time. Their frozen souls disappeared into fiery jaws with pitiful shrieks that echoed up from the depths. Severin was the last to go, and his tortured bellow of rage pierced Dru’s ears. Then, in an instant, he was gone forever.

Meanwhile, the scroll continued its tumbling plunge until it was lost from sight, far below the carnage. Long moments later, a blinding light blossomed in the depths. It started as no more than a pinpoint and quickly grew into a swirling inferno.

Lava raged up from the depths, refilling the mountain Decimus had emptied out thousands of years before. A blast of foul, scorching heat shot up, blasting Dru back from the edge. She rolled away from the roaring fires, scrabbling to catch herself on trembling hands and knees.

It occurred to her that being here, at the top of an erupting volcano, was probably the worst possible place to be. She struggled to climb down though the rocks, but her legs failed her. She fell and tumbled painfully down the smooth slope below. The going was easier here, below the rocks, but she still had miles to go, and her strength was gone.

She lay on her back on the trembling ground, unable to move any further. The air grew hotter. Her breath burned in her lungs. The rumbling volcano was almost ready to burst.

She tried to take cold comfort from the fact that she had done the right thing. Two thousand years after the fact, the apocalypse scroll was finally back where it belonged. She had saved the world. Not bad for a day’s work.

But still, not dying here would make the day even better.

A thin, strange noise cut through the deafening rumble of the volcano. It was actually two steady high notes in one, and it droned on endlessly. If anything, it grew louder. Dru struggled to place the odd sound until she realized it was a car horn.

She took a ragged breath and managed to turn her pounding head. To her amazement, a red-orange plume of flame burned its way across the tortured landscape, like a land-bound meteor. It shot across the lava that cracked open the dark ground, shot past pools of magma that burst with incandescent gases, and streaked directly toward her. A black, angular shape burned at the head of the flames.

It was Hellbringer.

Raging fire roared off every inch of the demon car, flagging out behind it in long blazing tongues, spewing volumes of greasy black smoke. Red-hot plumes of churned-up lava shot out behind its tires as it cut a searing double-track across the scorched ground.

Tears spilled down Dru’s face, drying instantly in the hot wind as Hellbringer roared up the slope toward her. As it grew closer, she could make out the claw marks that savaged the car’s lean body from every angle, exposing shimmering ripples of raw metal.

Behind the cracked and blackened windshield was Greyson. She’d never been happier to see him.

She must have passed out for a moment, because the next thing she knew, she could sense Greyson leaning over her, calling her name. But she was too exhausted to open her eyes. She struggled even to breathe.

He leaned close and whispered in her ear. His words cut right through the rumble of the volcano and stirred her soul. “There was a time I was lost. I had become a monster. And you brought me back.”

She managed to open her eyes and look up into his stubbled, soot-streaked face.

“I love you,” he said.

She wanted to tell him that she loved him too, and that right then, he was the best thing she had ever seen. She didn’t have the strength to speak.

But she didn’t have to. Gently, Greyson kissed her cracked lips. At his touch, she felt his magical power flow back into her like a cool rain falling upon a thirsty desert. As an arcana rasa, Greyson’s magical potential had always been closely paired to hers. But where it had once sustained her spells, it now sustained her life.

As his energy flowed into her, her entire body tingled. The tiny spark of life inside her was rekindled before it could be snuffed out forever. Sensation came roaring back across her skin, too much to bear. She gasped, and it was as if she had relearned how to breathe. She couldn’t stop trembling, and despite the searing heat, she shivered.

Greyson gathered her up and carried her to Hellbringer. She was only barely aware of the door closing and him sitting in the creaking seat beside her. Everything shook as the mountain trembled, and then the volcano erupted in a blinding roar of fire and smoke.

Hellbringer charged down the mountainside at blistering speeds, as house-sized boulders hurtled down around them and tumbled across the blackened landscape. Demons fled before them in all directions, either panicked or exuberant, or both. The deafening eruption went on for an eternity. It was too much for Dru to take.

Darkness engulfed her. But it felt like only a moment later when she was jolted awake by the door opening again. Rane was shaking her awake.

“We did it, cowgirl!” Rane shouted excitedly. “We did it!” Behind her, even Salem looked impressed.

Then they were driving uphill again, as Salem pushed aside fallen rocks to make way. Dru slipped in and out of consciousness. She was vaguely aware of holding onto Greyson’s hand as he drove them out of Tartarus into the peaceful shimmering lights of the Shining City.

This alien place, which was once threatening and creepy, now shone down through the windshield with a glittering promise of so much more to come. For the first time, Dru felt like doomsday was finally over, and her whole life stretched out before her.

“We can’t stay here long,” she whispered, thinking of the ill-fated Harbingers gradually losing their bodies to the allure of this netherworld metropolis.

“We won’t,” Greyson promised, squeezing her hand. “We’re going home.”