Eva frowned and touched her chest. She stilled for a moment, then checked the lining of her suit and the contents of her backpack. She looked at me, one degree paler than usual. “I don’t have the Devil’s Weed on me anymore.”
“What?!” Amelia snapped and checked herself, as well. “Oh, crap, me neither.”
It soon dawned on us that all the Devil’s Weed we’d gathered had vanished somewhere between the pink water cave on Mortis and my family’s palace. How or why that had happened, we couldn’t tell… but it left us horribly vulnerable.
“The Hermessi are pummeling the palace,” Dad said, as sentry guards rushed into the room, ready to take the emperor and empress, my parents, to a safe place. “They know you’re here.”
Taeral cursed under his breath. “We need to go. Now.”
One of the ceiling lights came down, thirty yards to our left. It crashed onto the stone floor, drawing gasps and murmurs from the two dozen sentry guards that were nervously waiting for my parents to go with them.
We linked hands, but nothing happened. It prompted another string of R-rated words from Taeral. “They’re stopping me, somehow. I can’t teleport us!”
The horror unfolded before our very eyes, as solid chunks of the ceiling fell all around us. Pebbles and dust flew outward as Lumi cast out a protective shield that held us in one place, safe from the incoming rubble. The palace was close to collapsing, and I could hear the horrified screams of people outside the throne room, the rushed footsteps as they desperately tried to get away from the building before it came down. I feared some didn’t make it, as some of the voices were cut off too abruptly.
Riza stomped her foot. “Something’s different. We can’t leave!”
As soon as she said that, a curtain of fire spread across the throne room walls, consuming the paintings and the ornaments and the curtains hung by the windows. The wooden frames crackled, blackening as the flames obliterated them. In an instant, the throne room had turned into a furnace, the heat blazing inward and almost suffocating all of us. The guards formed a protective circle around us, but there wasn’t much else they could do. They cast barriers against the flames, but it didn’t do anything.
The only defense we had was Lumi’s magic, now reinforced by Acantha and Nethissis.
“They did this before, on Hellym. But they had a Reaper’s help back then,” Amelia murmured, her chest rising sharply with every tired breath. The fire was consuming all the oxygen in the throne room, making it harder for us to even breathe. “How can this be?”
“Their power,” Taeral said. “It’s gotten stronger.”
Fallon scowled at the burning walls. “There’s more than one Fire Hermessi in here. I can feel them.”
“That’s it!” Amelia gasped. “They’ve got power in numbers, this time. The greater their influence on the affected fae, the stronger they get.”
I didn’t like this one bit. It left everything to the whims of change. If, until now, we’d relied on one tool or ability to escape, it no longer mattered. The Hermessi’s power was evolving and adapting, proving increasingly difficult to resist or evade. Whatever we threw at them, they eventually found a way around it.
We were pretty much screwed, bombarded from all sides by multiple Hermessi. We couldn’t teleport or even head back to the pink water cave to get more Devil’s Weed. We couldn’t leave the throne room, for that matter, as fire had taken it over completely. I didn’t see a way out of this.
Fallon collapsed. I wanted to get to him, but Eva held me back. “Wait,” she whispered. “Look.”
His skin had a peculiar green sheen, which amplified with every grueling moment. A Hermessi had possessed him, and I couldn’t help but scoff.
“Pretty much the last thing we needed right now,” I mumbled.
We’d promised Fallon we’d protect him, yet here we were, again, helplessly watching as another Hermessi wormed its way into his body, smack in the middle of this fiery mess. And all I could think of was that this might be the unexpected end of us, and that I may not ever get to hold Eva or my parents or my sister in my arms ever again.
Eva
There was a sense of dread settling over us. I could see it on our faces. I could hear it in our ragged breaths and frantic heartbeats. And I would’ve easily succumbed to this as well, had I not been pestered by this nagging feeling that I’d seen that green shimmer on Fallon before.
“Ugh,” Fallon grunted, raising his head. His eyes burned like emeralds. “This is uncomfortable.”
“What the—” Varga started, but I cut him off.
“Kabbah!”
It was him! I recognized him in Fallon’s eyes. As the vampire-fae pulled himself back into a standing position, I knew, for a fact, that we were speaking to Kabbah, Brendel’s eldest foe. The realization came with a feeble sense of hope. Kabbah had been an ally to us back in the Volcrum Caves, though he’d made it seem like a territorial dispute between him and the other Hermessi.
He’d destroyed the Shills that had come down to kill us, back then. Only, this time, we weren’t dealing with those abominations. We were hounded directly by their makers.
“I didn’t want to have to do this, to be honest,” Kabbah said through Fallon’s gruff voice.
The fires on the walls and the ceiling burned brighter, more violent than before. Fallon-Kabbah put his hands out, just as the bloodcurdling shrieks of Shills began to ravage the palace. Spoke too soon, I thought. Of course they’d bring in their flesh-eating monsters. Why the hell wouldn’t they?
Bright green bolts of lightning exploded from Fallon-Kabbah’s hands. They hit the walls in multiple spots—wherever they made contact, the flames flickered and vanished, forcing the rest of the blaze to shrink away until all that was left were the blackened stone walls and broken windows. Kabbah roared as his emerald energy continued to come out, the vibrant tendrils stretching past the doors, through every nook and cranny, until they reached every other room in the palace.
I heard the Shills scream as they scrambled back out, their claws scratching against the stone floor. I heard the winds howling outside, as the earth finally stopped shaking. With one last grunt from Fallon-Kabbah, a powerful pulse was released. It traveled out of the palace and seemed to purge everything evil in its path, because silence quickly settled afterward.
It all came to a sudden halt, as Fallon-Kabbah breathed out, wearing a satisfied grin. “I must say, there’s nothing more insulting than a foreign Earth Hermessi trotting into my world like he owns it.”
“Holy crap,” Varga gasped, still holding me close.
“That was quite a pulse,” Lumi complimented Kabbah, genuinely astonished. “I could feel it rippling across time and space.”
I didn’t need anyone to tell me that. I’d felt it. It had sent a powerful message to the elementals who had come after us just now. Kabbah had stopped everything, and, judging by his heavy breathing, it had taken quite an effort to pull it off.
“Meh, they’ll be back at some point,” Fallon-Kabbah replied and looked at me. “I wanted to thank you, little Lamia hybrid.”
“What? Me? Why?” I blurted, uncomfortable at having his full attention.
“Your harsh words back in the Volcrum Caves,” he said, smiling still. “They hit the right spot.”
“I’m confused,” Nethissis murmured, watching me with sisterly concern.
