Splintered gates, p.29
Splintered Gates, page 29
“They’re alive,” Lang said, and for the first time, I heard something like triumph in his voice. “That’s enough.”
“No, it’s not.” I forced myself to meet his burning silver eyes. “You’re gambling everyone else’s life on a maybe. You’re making a deal with demons.”
Behind Lang, the young woman boundary walker began to scream.
The sound cut through dimensions and echoed in frequencies that human ears weren’t meant to hear. It was the sound of something being unmade—not killed, but erased. Her silver eyes went wide as her body began to dissolve. She had time to look at me one more time. Time for her mouth to form that single word again.
Please.
Then she was gone. Just threads. Just power. Just fuel for Lang’s desperate bargain.
“It’s a magical bargain,” Lang said, his voice carrying over the dimensional static. “Bound by oath and ritual. It can be trusted.”
“There’s no such thing.” I stepped closer despite the energy that was now actively trying to tear me apart. “There’s no trust in devils, only cost. What did you give them, Lang? What’s the price?”
His smile was the most terrible thing I’d ever seen. “I gave them what they wanted. The boundary walkers. Three of their kind in exchange for my son.”
The second boundary walker began to scream. Then the third. The sound was unbearable, grief and agony compressed into frequencies that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
I watched them unravel. Watched their forms dissolve into silver threads that poured into the widening tear in reality. I watched centuries of existence get converted into fuel for a father’s desperate love.
Three lives. Gone. For one boy who might not even be recognizable anymore.
“You think it stops there?” I demanded. “You think they’ll just hand him over and close the door?”
“It’s a binding agreement,” Lang said, but something flickered across his face. Doubt? Regret? Gone too quickly to tell. “They get the walkers. I get James.”
“And what happens to the doorway? What happens when it stays open?”
For the first time, his confidence wavered. “It... it will close. Once the exchange is complete.”
“Will it? Or did you just give them exactly what they needed to keep it open permanently?”
At that moment, the air above the circle began to tear.
It didn’t explode. Didn’t crack.
It just... split.
Like peeling open a zipper in reality.
Light poured out. Red, violet light, with a seething darkness underneath that hurt to look at directly. And from beyond it, the suggestion of shapes too large and too alien for human comprehension.
Frost formed on the grass. On the ground. On my skin. The very atoms seemed to slow down, reality growing sluggish around the expanding tear.
Behind me, I heard shouting. I heard Agency trucks and Mercer’s voice, sharp and slicing through the night.
“Containment perimeter! All units maintain distance!”
“Sir, the energy readings are off the charts! Whatever he’s doing, it’s destabilizing local reality!”
But none of it mattered. The door was opening, and something was waiting on the other side.
Through the gateway, I saw the demonic realm that held James and Elena. It had red skies and twisted spires of black stone. And in the distance were shapes, sentient shapes moving with purpose toward the new doorway.
They weren’t walking; they were running.
They were hungry. My morph senses could feel their hunger.
Lang stood transfixed, his eyes reflecting the otherworldly light in that odd silver color they’d turned. His confident posture had shifted. There was tension in his shoulders now and uncertainty in the set of his jaw.
Whatever was coming through wasn’t what he’d expected.
Nadia grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into my jacket. “Cal, we have to get out of here. Now.”
“The gateway’s not stable,” I said. “He’s losing control of it.”
I pulled out the containment device of my mother’s. Would it work?
Could it?
The dimensional rift continued to widen, reality stretching like taffy around its edges. Through the opening, I could see the sentient shapes more clearly now. They were getting closer, and there were at least dozens of them, closer to hundreds.
They weren’t bringing James. They were bringing an army.
Lang’s triumphant expression shattered. I watched him understand—watched nine years of planning collapse into horror as he realized what he’d actually done. He hadn’t made a trade. He’d opened a door.
And he’d given the demons exactly what they needed to keep it open forever.
Lang’s knees buckled and he fell. The ritual continued without him. It had reached the point of being self-sustaining and beyond anyone’s control.
Except maybe mine.
“James,” he whispered. Just that. Just his son’s name. The word of a man who’d finally realized the full weight of what he’d done.
I should have felt satisfaction or vindication. Something. But all I felt was cold.
This wasn’t a rescue mission anymore. It never truly had been. But, as we’d known all along, it was the beginning of something far worse.
The first shape reached the gateway’s edge. It pressed against the barrier from the other side, testing it, finding it weak. The shape found it open.
And I was in its path.
CHAPTER 27
“Every deal with demons includes clauses written in invisible ink. The price you agreed to pay is never the price you end up paying.” —Elizabeth Drexler’s research journal
The first demon stepped through like it had all the time in the world.
It didn’t roar or shriek or perform the usual theatrics. No, it just... was, suddenly. Massive and sinuous and wrong, its form flickered between physical matter and something closer to idea or instinct. It moved like a nightmare remembered at the wrong angle, too smooth and too fluid, limbs reconfiguring themselves with each breath.
And the air? It shattered.
Every protective ward, every containment field the Agency had dropped into place, snapped like overburdened tripwire. I felt the ripples through the morph space inside me, fragile lines of order shredded by a single, deliberate presence.
The demon’s head swiveled toward the nearest cluster of agents, fifty meters away. It crossed the distance in two strides that covered ground like reality was folding beneath its feet.
An agent fired. The bullet passed through the demon’s torso and emerged trailing wisps of shadow. The demon didn’t slow. It reached down with one elongated arm and—
I looked away. The sound was enough.
Behind me, Mercer’s voice cut through the chaos. “All units fall back to secondary positions!”
The demon blazed with strange energy, moving toward an agent. There was heat, a strange stench, and then another agent was gone. The demon moved through their ranks like a scythe through wheat, and every death made it more solid, more real, more here.
Lang just stood there, eyes wide, mouth slack. Like he’d been punched in the soul.
The demon that had emerged wasn’t just large, it was presence given form. Black antlers curved from an elongated skull. Its eyes were molten wounds leaking darkness. And when it walked, the grass beneath its feet didn’t just die. It screamed. I could hear it, like thousands of tiny voices crying out as they were unmade.
The demon paused over a fallen agent. It bent down and did something with its hands that I couldn’t see and didn’t want to, but when it straightened, it was six inches taller.
The worst part was that it wasn’t alone.
The gateway was widening. Through the tear, I could see more shapes moving in the red darkness beyond. Dozens of them were pressing against the barrier between our worlds.
“You made a deal,” I said quietly, stepping toward Lang. “But they made a plan.”
Lang’s gaze found mine. “I didn’t know,” he whispered. “I thought—”
“Later.” I grabbed his arm. “Now we have to deal with what you’ve done.”
The lead demon turned toward us. Its head rotated a full one-eighty on its neck, the rest of its body still facing the Agency lines. When it spoke, its voice made my eardrums bleed.
“The father-seeker,” it said to Lang. “We thank you for the gift.”
“Gift?” Lang’s voice cracked. “You were supposed to return my son!”
The demon’s laugh shattered three trees. Literally. They exploded into splinters that hung suspended in the air, frozen in time, before slowly beginning to fall. Around us, Agency agents ran from falling debris.
“Your offspring serves our purposes well. Your desperation opened the path. Your ignorance ensures we need not honor promises.”
Behind the lead demon, another entity pushed through. This one was smaller, faster, with too many joints. It immediately broke toward the tree line where agents were regrouping.
I heard Alison scream a warning, then an explosion, followed by more screaming.
I studied the energies. I could feel the different pulsations.
And the only way I could think of this working was to morph the power here and turn the energy inward, forcing them back rather than letting them through.
But to do that...
I’d have to be in the center.
Another demon emerged. This one was all mouths.
Not metaphorically. Its entire body was a writhing mass of mouths—human mouths, animal mouths, mouths that belonged to nothing I could name. They opened and closed in waves, each one whispering different words in different languages, creating a cacophony that made thought nearly impossible.
It moved like liquid, flowing across the ground toward a cluster of agents who were trying to establish a defensive line. I watched them raise their weapons, saw the determination in their stances.
It wasn't enough.
The demon reached them, and the mouths began to sing. Not words—pure sound, a frequency that made reality itself vibrate. The agents' defensive wards shattered like glass. One agent managed to fire three rounds before the demon enveloped him. The mouths closed over his body, and when they opened again, he was gone. Not dead. Gone. Erased so completely that even the memory of him felt slippery, hard to hold onto.
"Cal!" Alison's voice cut through the chaos. She was fifty meters away, her silver bracelet blazing as she channeled everything into a barrier protecting three downed agents. "Whatever you're going to do, do it now!"
The lead demon turned its attention from the carnage, those molten eyes fixing on me with terrible intelligence. It had been testing us, I realized. Measuring our capabilities. Deciding whether we were threat or prey.
It had made its decision.
"Move," I said to Lang, already knowing we were out of time.
Crossing the circle’s threshold was like stepping through hot oil and dry ice at the same time. The moment I passed the outer ring, my skin lit up with pain; every scar, every healed break reignited like someone was retyping damage across my body in electric fire.
I didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Behind me, I heard the all-mouths demon find someone.
The sound it made was worse than the first one.
Lang moved beside me, slow and deliberate. Together, we reached the central ring where the boundary walkers had been suspended. Now there was only smoke and silver residue.
“The structure is destabilizing,” Lang said, kneeling beside an anchor point. “Without the boundary walkers, the gateway is drawing power directly from dimensional fabric.”
“Skip the lecture. What do I do?”
“Channel the energy backward. Use your morphing to convert their power into a containment force.”
The lead demon turned away from the carnage and began stalking toward the circle. Each step covered twenty feet. It would be on us in seconds.
“Gateway-makers,” it said. “Do you seek to undo your gift?”
I pressed my palm against the central anchor point.
The circle’s energy pattern flooded through me like touching a live wire connected to a thunderstorm. My morph senses exploded with information: frequencies, harmonics, the mathematical architecture of dimensional stability. I could feel the structure. Feel where it was broken. Feel what it needed.
“Now would be good,” Lang said, his voice tight.
The demon was ten feet away. Five.
I opened my morph ability wide.
The demon power slammed into me—not gradually, not carefully, but all at once. Sweet and seductive on the surface, but corruption underneath that made my soul recoil. It wanted to work through me. It wanted to occupy, remake, infect me.
I pulled it in anyway.
But as the energy flooded through my morphic field, I felt something I'd never encountered before—a thread of awareness woven through the power. Not just intent, but attention. As if something on the other side of the gateway had noticed me. Had recognized what I was.
No time to examine it. I engaged my mother's filtration technique, separating the predatory corruption from the raw power, and forced the sensation away.
My scream nearly tore my throat raw. The demon’s essence poured through my morph space like acid through a sieve, and I had to convert every drop before it could change me. Energy in, energy transformed, energy redirected. Faster than thought. Faster than pain.
The demon lunged. Its claws passed through the space where my head had been; I’d moved without knowing I was moving, my body operating on instinct while my mind processed impossible amounts of power.
Lang’s chanting rose in volume. His hands moved in precise gestures, sealing perimeter loops, building the prison.
The demon struck again. This time, I didn’t dodge. I absorbed.
Its claw met my raised palm, and the energy transfer was instantaneous. The demon’s attack became fuel. Its rage became containment force. I felt its essence flow through me, stripped of malevolence, converted into pure structural power that I fed directly into Lang’s ritual matrix.
The demon recoiled. For the first time, something like surprise crossed its alien features.
“What are you?”
“The variable,” I said and reached for more.
The circle flared around me, burning brighter than the sun as I fed the demons’ own power back into the ritual structure. Every fiber of my being wanted to reject the alien energy. I forced myself to hold on.
Around us, smaller demons were still emerging and still killing. I could hear the Agency's battle growing desperate—explosions, screaming, the distinctive crack of Alison's defensive barriers shattering and reforming.
Through the chaos, I caught a glimpse of her—silver bracelet blazing as she channeled everything she had into a barrier protecting three downed agents. A demon lunged at her flank and she spun, meeting it with a blast of pure force that sent it tumbling backward. But I could see the strain in her shoulders, the tremor in her hands. She was burning through reserves she couldn't afford to lose.
Our eyes met across the battlefield. In that moment, there were no secrets between us—no Agency protocols, no careful professional distance. Just two people who'd chosen to stand in the path of something terrible, hoping the other would survive.
She nodded once—a gesture that carried everything: I see you. I trust you. Finish this. I turned back to Lang and the demon. She'd bought me time. I couldn't waste it.
The lead demon attacked again, using both arms this time, a sweeping strike meant to bisect me. I dropped beneath it, pressed both palms to the ground, and pulled.
Everything the demon had poured into our reality. Every death it had caused, every life force it had stolen, I claimed it. I ripped it out of the demon’s form and channeled it into the containment matrix. The demon shrank. Literally diminished as I stripped away the substance it had gathered.
As the stolen power flowed through me, I felt that awareness again—stronger now, more defined. It wasn't fighting the filtration. It was observing it, studying how my morphic field separated corruption from energy. Learning.
A chill ran through me that had nothing to do with the demon's cold. Something was paying attention to my techniques. Something that found them... interesting.
I pushed the sensation aside. Worry about it later. Survive now.
It howled. The sound cracked the sky.
“Now,” Lang said, his voice tight with strain. “Invert the flow.”
I reached deeper into my morph ability than I'd ever gone before. Down to the fundamental place where essence touched the boundary between order and chaos. And there, at the very core of what I was, I felt something that hadn't been there before the City Plaza incident—a warmth that didn't belong to me, a stabilizing presence woven into my own power. Lysienne. The part of her that had stayed with me when she sacrificed herself to seal the Courts' gateway. I'd never fully understood what she'd given me, but now, when I needed it most, I felt her energy rising to meet the demand—bridging the gap between what I could do alone and what this moment required.
The moment I reversed the energy flow, the ritual resisted. Not like fighting a machine, but like wrestling something that desperately wanted to live. The pattern writhed against my touch.
Then the feedback hit.
Power that had been flowing outward suddenly reversed direction, slamming back through the dimensional pathways. The ritual circle convulsed, stone cracking, sigils flaring white-hot.
My morph ability was caught in the middle, converting demonic power into containment force faster than my body could process. My vision went white, then black, then white again.
I held on.
Through the pain, through the chaos, I felt the smaller demons get caught in the backwash. Their connection to our reality snapped taut, then they were yanked toward the gateway. I watched one—the fast one with too many joints—get pulled past us. Its burning-coal eyes met mine for just an instant before it came apart entirely, reduced to wisps of shadow sucked into the contracting tear.
