Chapter Twenty-two
Eva moved through the endless halls of the mansion as if she were moving through a palace instead. A lost princess, wandering slowly. Or a ghost of a lost princess, maybe. Yes, she thought. That more accurately suited her current frame of mind.
She turned the knob of a room she hadn’t yet entered, and opened it to find herself staring into what could only have been the master suite. A four-poster king-sized bed complete with draperies and a canopy rested at the center of one wall of the room. Wardrobes, dressers, vanities, and plush seating lay about the room in strategic organization, all beautifully appointed. The ceiling here, as in the rest of the mansion, was very high, and it had been painted and decorated with a scene of the night sky.
Eva stepped past the threshold. At once, an inviting hearth at one end of the room burst to life with warm, welcoming flames. The crackling was comforting. But there was a wall of turmoil around her mind and her heart that no amount of pleasant ambience could penetrate.
She moved further into the room and caught sight of her reflection passing in a beautiful gold-framed mirror. She turned and approached the mirror. “You look like hell, Eva,” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse. There was a darkness under her eyes that she’d never seen before. She looked haunted.
“Wait until I’ve had my fun with you.”
A shadow passed over her reflection, making it appear as if the real world and the world beyond the mirror were separate, and night was falling in the latter one. Eva stepped back. She recognized the voice at once.
She’d had tons of food, most of it loaded with sugar. She had gobs of power waiting to be used. She could have used some sleep, yes. She absolutely could have used some peace of mind. But she was more than capable of putting up a fight if she needed to.
And it looked like she did.
The shadows in the mirror grew longer and darker, until they blotted out the scenery entirely, and Eva found herself staring into a pool of inky black. She moved further back – and further. Until she was standing across the room, her hands were aching with readied magic, and there was a glow around her of stored power waiting to be released like a bomb.
She waited, her heart hammering so hard it literally hurt, her head flushing with the swish-swish of blood moving through her eardrums. Finally, a boot appeared, then a leg, followed by an entire tall, strong body.
Arach stepped from the mirror into the room as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He wore all black and a fanged smile, his emerald eyes glittering with something Eva would akin to madness, though his composure was utterly and terrifyingly calm.
Don’t bother asking how, she told herself firmly. Just be strong.
“I’m in no mood, Arach,” Eva quipped shortly. And it was true. Right now, she felt like she could take the top off the planet, scoop out the magma inside, and drink it. She felt just numb enough that it might not hurt. And just numb enough that she didn’t really care either way.
Arach stopped once he was in the room, and looked around. “Trite,” he said simply. “I would have expected something more original from Calidum.” Then he turned back to Eva and fixed her with a knowing gaze. “Or should I say Korridum?”
“I don’t care what the fuck you call him, Arach. As long as you do it from another dimension. This one’s taken.” Her hands literally sparked, filling the room with the sound of zapping electricity. But the sparks were purple-black, like ultraviolet lightbulbs on the verge of exploding.
Arach’s smile turned lecherous. “Taken…” he said softly as he began to pace toward her. “Now, that is a beautiful word, isn’t it?”
Eva didn’t wait any longer. What was the point? She’d always hated those scenes in movies where the good guy tried to apprehend the bad guy rather than just blowing his brains out when he had the chance. So that was what she tried to do now.
With all of her intent and every amount of focus she could muster, she used her loathing and general bad mood as a bow string to sling-shot her power out of her body. It released with tremendous force. At once, the fire in the hearth exploded into purple flame and roared out of the fire place as if someone had poured water on a grease fire. It climbed so high, it looked like an upside-down waterfall of flames and reached the ceiling twenty feet above their heads. The draperies on the four-poster bed caught fire. The rug caught fire.
The mirror shattered.
Dark, swirling, and glittering magic formed between Eva and the Traitor, spinning majestically into a conical beam of deadly energy that arrowed its way across the room, directly aimed for Arach’s broad chest.
*****
You actually breached a dimensional barrier?
The question was coming from Damon Chroi, the Goblin King, and it was coming through a fuzzy, static-radio-like mental communication that was being forced across invisible walls the likes of which the living world had yet to even ponder. As the “banished” of the Tuath Fae due to his immense power, Calidum figured Chroi was perhaps the one king amongst the Thirteen who might actually receive the message Calidum was sending. He was right.
It wasn’t a perfect communication, but it would suffice.
Yes, Calidum responded. He then gave Chroi quick, succinct instructions, followed by the vital reminder that William Balthazar Solan was not the Traitor. Anything more convoluted would not only complicated matters, it would interrupt Calidum’s concentration, and right now he needed to focus. Crossing the dark, anti-matter void that existed between universes was not an easy feat. Few could accomplish it. He was barely one of them.
Damon Chroi seemed to intrinsically understand this, because he didn’t argue or question what Calidum was telling him. He simply said “Understood, and by the way Mimi’s doing fine. The triplets have taken a liking to her.” He then disconnected their communication.
Cal was relieved to hear Mimi was taking things in stride. But he was nearing the end of his dark, strange voyage and preparing to open a second portal into the more familiar dimension when the exit spell was cut off with a wave of evil. It washed over him like an actual tidal wave, but as bad as a tidal wave is, this wave wasn’t nearly as pleasant.
The sensation of evil is difficult to describe. He’d once heard it described as “dipping your body in a vat of mold and vomit, cold and clammy, that stunk of someone else’s mistakes.” It was about the closest Calidum had ever heard to someone putting it in accurate terms. Those had been Mimi’s words. She was an astute little dragon.
And that was what Cal felt right now. It was a succinctly nasty sensation, sticky and wrong, and it coated his spirit to the point that just for just a moment, he couldn’t breathe.
There was movement behind him. He could sense it just as easily as he sensed the evil. He spun, releasing a bolt of magic without thinking. There was no time to think. If there had been, he might not have done so, since using magic other than what it took to travel while in the void portal was risky.
But it didn’t matter. There was nothing there. The bolt of his magic was dark and smoky, and to any human looking on, it would have appeared that something suddenly exploded, coughing forth a cloud of death amidst a shower of shrapnel that they would have no idea consisted of pure, hardened magic. Even that fizzled and vanished in record time, leaving him once more alone in the dark portal.
Laughter, low and horrifying echoed through the air and rattled off the invisible walls of the tunnel that transported him through space that didn’t really exist. Suddenly, he felt he was losing his mind.
Eva.
He realized it like a kick in the nuts. Oh gods, he thought. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
At once, he was turning around in the portal and attempting to re-direct it. It was like trying to stop and re-direct a train. It wasn’t just the engine you had to stop, but the forward momentum of every attached car behind it. It was impossible in the real world. But this was magic. And he was strong.
And something had happened to Eva.
Calidum had just managed to gather the strength he would need to bring the directional force of the void portal to a halt and turn it around when, of all things, his phone chimed to let him know he’d received a text.
He blinked, surprised. Well and truly surprised. For one thing, there was no way in the nine hells he could get cell phone reception between dimensions. For another, he’d forgotten he even had the damn thing in the inside pocket of his leather jacket.
For some reason – for some insane, nonsensical, and asinine reason – he reached into his pocket and took out the phone. There was a message from “unknown.” It was a picture that needed to download.
The Dragon King stood in the dark void of the dimensional portal pulsing around him, ready to be turned around, and clicked on the download tab. It raced through the download process with lightning speed, and an image appeared on the screen.
It was an image of two faces. Arach’s and Eva’s. One of them was unconscious. The other was grinning an absolute evil, be-fanged smile, and waving good-naturedly to Calidum.
The message attached to the picture was simply, Wish you were here.