But one of them pulled a glass orb from inside her robes, throwing it at her feet. Thin wisps of pale smoke rose from its broken fragments. Her body – and the bodies of the other cultists – began to fade from the feet up.
A teleportation bauble. I cursed, hurling a last ball of flame, but too late. The members of the Society of Robes had escaped.
Well – all except for one.
Chapter 34
Bloodied and pinned to the ground under the weight of a snarling, extremely angry werewolf, the last cultist lay frozen in the grass, eyes huge, shivering with fear.
“Steady,” I murmured, unsure of how to deal with Gil in his transformation. “Easy, boy.”
Gil’s head snapped towards me, his eyes red with rage, slaver dripping from the edges of his teeth. He continued to stare at me as, for a second time, I watched him revert to human form. I held my breath as he screamed, as the sprouted fur forced its way back under his skin, as his bones and his skull cracked and reshaped back into the guise of a man.
“Dios mio,” Gil growled, shuddering, his entire body drenched in sweat. “It never gets easier.” Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head towards the terrified cultist, then grasped him by the throat. “Why are you here? Why did you come here? What were you degenerates after this time?”
Luella Brandt stepped closer, her hair only slightly mussed from battle. She watched the man out of one eye with palpable disdain, a drink already in her hand. “Whatever the hell you came for had better be so fucking important, because I’m down three windows, part of a wall, and half a lawn.”
“D-Delilah,” the cultist stammered. “We knew she was awake, and something in her m-mind told us to come. To attack. Because this was where the Confluence was meant to happen.”
I stood very still, my hands curling into fists. I didn’t like the way the man said the word Confluence, with its big, ominous capital letter.
Gil shook him, pulling their faces closer. Herald, Bastion, and all the rest had gathered around us, watching, listening with burning interest.
“What. Is. The Confluence?”
The man looked around him, eyes flitting to each of our faces with mounting terror at the realization that only life in the Prism awaited him – or worse. “It was what our masters told us, in our dreams, in our ravings. The Old Ones commanded the worthy among us to come on this day, at this hour, to unleash as much magic as we could afford.”
The stammer, I noticed, had worked its way out of the man’s voice. I didn’t like that at all. He was starting to smile, too.
“The Old Ones, they knew, that right on this very point on this very earth, there would be a meeting of magics. A nexus. The Society’s wands, the Lorica’s magery, and more. Much more. The power of the old gods would be released here as well.”
Chernobog? The Eldest knew that much?
The man grinned, his eyes staring maniacally into the sky. “And not only the old gods. The Eldest, they said that the fires of hell would burn on earth, this very day, this very hour.”
And Mammon, too. Luella eyed her burnt lawn again, but this time with more worry than annoyance.
“That even the forces of divinity, the light of heaven would shine on this very same spot,” the cultist sang, his voice quivering with excitement, with delight. Mason shifted uncomfortably, his eyes glancing towards me, then quickly away. “And lastly, and most crucial of all, the masters said that their own power, that the madness of dark and void would emerge from a chamber hidden within the shadow man’s heart.”
The cultist’s eyes swiveled towards me, his lips drawn so far back, so unnaturally in a horrible rictus grin. “The Confluence,” the man said. “A meeting of the greatest powers that walk the known planet, a crossfire and conflux of the earthly, otherworldly, demonic, and divine. We sensed the dog’s energies, how it was god-touched – thought that we could use it for the ritual. But this? This was better. We should have trusted the Old Ones. They know. They always know.” He licked his lips, still watching me intently. “And now, she awakens.”
“You keep saying that,” I said. “Delilah has been awake for hours.”
The man laughed. “Not Delilah, but the trophy of the Old Ones. Their champion. The lioness.”
Luella gasped, just as a hideous boom cracked across the mansion grounds. As one we whirled towards the mansion, and my heart leapt up my throat as a cloud of dust settled over a demolished section of wall. A figure moved through the dust – no, flew through it. Luella cried out in anguish.
“No,” she said. “Mother?”
It was Agatha Black made whole, her limbs unfused and freed from their former torture, the warped, melted wax of her features restored to their handsome, piercing glory. She watched us with eyes flecked with steel, an empress high above the masses, imperious, powerful. Her silver hair was swept into a mane at the back of her head. Agatha looked exactly as she did in her pictures on the Brandts’ mantle, a legend brought horribly back to life. In the light of the setting sun, her hair burned like fire. Not a candle spent, but an inferno reborn.
The lioness, the cultist said. It lies sleeping. Not truly dead and gone. It waits.
And now, the lioness has awakened.
“Grandmother,” Bastion breathed. “It’s you. But how?”
“Sebastion,” Luella said, running to his side. “It’s not her. It can’t be.”