Oblivion Heart (Darkling Mage 4)

“Dust. We’ve got a problem.”

I looked around us, my hand tightening around the cold hilt of Vanitas’s blade, and I groaned. Remember when I mentioned that the red sector had guards come around every hour? Well. Guess what time it was?

Add to that the fact that Royce had summoned his own batch of Hands to respond to my presence. Oh, and there was also the possibility of him surviving the red sector. At any minute he could come bursting out of the Prism to punch me right in the back of the head. We were cornered. How’s that expression go again? Out of the frying pan, and into the churning, shrieking pit of hell itself?

I counted some seven or so Hands who at least looked fully prepared – probably the guards scheduled to patrol each of the Prism’s sectors. A couple of more sloppily dressed ones lingered among them, their hair sticking up in odd places, jackets thrown hastily over bed clothes.

“So,” I whispered back. “This might not be a good time to use your songs.”

Nor was it a good time for me to conjure the Dark Room, or to even throw fireballs, for that matter. Mona’s fracturing of the red Prism was bad enough. I didn’t want to think of the suffering Royce had to go through with its prisoners, or – oh, shit. Its prisoners. They were going to come out from behind us, too, out of the crystal.

But if we so much as attempted anything destructive, there was no telling of the apocalyptic chain reaction we could set off from just damaging the Gallery’s artifacts. I looked around wildly, studying the nearby display cases. A surgical strike, then. I could release one of the sentient artifacts, and –

“Don’t even think about it,” called out one of the Hands. Her eyes seemed to glow blue from where she stood, her hair in tight, beaded braids, the tips of her fingers crackling with white lightning. “You’ll be dead before you can break open even one of these cases.”

“Hah,” I scoffed, with way more courage than was even left in my body. “Fat chance. You guys need her alive, and you need me alive, too.”

They were bluffing. They had to be. If they so much as used an offensive spell, the entire Gallery would go up in an arcane inferno, like that massive nuke that Carver had triggered in our last battle against Thea. Just one stray spell would be like lobbing a grenade into a gas station.

I studied their shadows. With some effort I could call blades to burst out of the Dark, to skewer them if not scare them off. But where would that leave us? We’d still have to run clear through the entire building, then somehow find the time to deactivate the wards from the inside before we burst back out through the front door.

“Funny,” another Hand said, bouncing an orb of fire in his palm. “Our orders were to take her alive. No one said anything about you, Graves.”

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Fuck.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Mona squealed when I tugged on her, my arm locking around her neck. It was like my body was moving of its own volition. My other hand snapped into place, pressing Vanitas’s edge lightly against her throat. Her body went limp against mine.

“Don’t do it,” one of the Hands screamed. The whole bunch of them tensed, and I didn’t miss how a couple were muttering under their breaths, eyes huge and glaring, lips moving rapidly. If one of them hit me with a sleep spell, that was it.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered again, but Mona said nothing. I held perfectly still, my mind scrambling for a solution, wishing that Vanitas was active. At least then I could have the option of consulting him for something to do. A tactic. He used to be a soldier, didn’t he? I would have tried anything. But maybe, once again, this all boiled down to escape. After all: he who lives to run away –

“Dust,” Mona cried, her head craning back. A net woven out of criss-crossed filaments of mystical energy had appeared above us, and it was dropping fast.

All I had to do was protect her. But what chance did I truly stand against a dozen Hands? Game over, man.

Or maybe – maybe not. Once, Hecate, the goddess of magic, had helped me unleash the true potential of the Dark Room with the simplest of instructions. Instead of letting its denizens run wild in our reality, creating horrible meadows of ebony glass to cut and to kill, I learned how to concentrate its dark forces into sharp, strategically-placed blades. What I truly needed to succeed, she’d said, was to hone my mind to a point, to find my objective. Back then it was to kill Thea.

Here, in the Gallery, it was to protect Mona. To save her. And you and I both know that there was only way out of there, and it wasn’t through the front door. I knocked on the Dark Room, gripping Mona tight, pulling the door open.

“What’s happening?” Mona gasped, staring at the floor, eyes wide at how her feet were sinking into a pit of absolute nothing.

“Trust me,” I said, loosing my hold around her, allowing us both to melt into the gloom of the Dark Room. I raised my head, praying for us to fall into the darkness faster as the net dropped ever closer. As we entered the Dark, the enraged shouts of the Hands faded first, followed by the light of Lorica headquarters. And last of all was the warmth.

We’d made it. We were in the Dark Room.

I tucked Vanitas into my backpack, gently letting go of Mona’s shoulders, raising my hand. “I’m sorry about that.”

She shook her head. “I knew you weren’t going to hurt me,” she said, her voice coming out dull, hanging like lead in the thin, unfamiliar air of the Dark Room. Her eyes searched the gloom with uncertainty. “But now I’m not so sure.”

“This was how I got into the Lorica in the first place,” I said. “It’s how I get around. I go through this chamber. I call it the Dark Room for – well, for pretty obvious reasons.”

Mona gulped, the fear slowly leaving her eyes, but her fingers clenched tighter around the sleeve of my jacket. “Is this the same place where those swords came from? The black knives you summoned against that Royce guy. Is that how you do it?”

I nodded, and the hesitation began to build in her eyes again, her brows screwing up. But her mouth tightened, and she nodded back, determined.