Infernal Father of Mine (7 page)

"What the hell did I ever do to
you?"

She bared her teeth. "You were
born."

At that point, I decided there was no appealing
to Daelissa's humanity—Seraphinity—or whatever it was called. I
turned to David and whispered, "What are they planning to
do?"

He shrugged. "Sounds like enslavement in an
alternate realm if I had to guess."

The Exorcists in the circle began to chant,
softly at first, voices rising into a sonorous song. Any other time
I might have thought it sounded beautiful. Right then, it was just
creepy. Spiders seemed to crawl up my spine as the magic inside the
circle brushed against my skin. I closed my eyes and concentrated,
trying to channel the aether, but felt it slide through my grasp
like oily water. Their ritual was somehow preventing me from
casting spells.

Damn it, do something!

Manifesting into demon form would accomplish
nothing. David walked to the edge of the ring. He pressed a hand
against the air, and muttered something under his breath. A glow
spread from his hand, highlighting the curving outline of the
invisible barrier. The ground trembled.

Daelissa levitated into the air behind the
Exorcists. She smiled and waggled a finger. "Even you cannot escape
this, betrayer."

David's voice rose to a shout. The ground
buckled. Stone cracked beneath my feet, and a fissure raced toward
the silver circle. It hit the ring and stopped. The volume of his
voice grew louder until it rose above the chanting Exorcists. I
heard the groan of metal. Felt the air grow hot against my skin.
Saw the floor cracking and crumbling beneath our feet.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Montjoy slash
his hand as he shouted a word. The air within the gray arch cracked
like glass stressed to the breaking point. A spider web of fissures
laced the air. With a roar, the fabric of reality shattered. A gale
of wind tore at me and dragged me toward a ragged hole within the
arch. Beyond it laid a gray void. I suddenly knew without question
where they intended to banish us.

The Gloom.

I cried out as the wind dragged me toward
certain doom. Unleashing the demon within, I grew long black claws
and stabbed them into the stone floor. They screeched across the
hard surface as I vainly sought purchase. Muscles snaked around my
arms. A tail ruined the seat of my jeans, jabbing a hole through
them as it sprouted like a prehensile weed. David's legs flew out
beneath him, and his body sailed toward the portal. I wrapped my
tail around David's arm before he flew past. The extra weight
dragged us toward the hole. Sparks flew from my claws as they raked
the floor.

I looked back. "Don't give up!" I shouted above
the roaring wind.

My father gave me a calm, almost accepting look
and shook his head.

I felt my shoulder muscles bunch and strain as
I tried to stab one of my clawed hands into the stone. Rock chips
sprayed as I jabbed them over and over against the unyielding
surface. My claws couldn't take the pounding and snapped. Red-hot
pain lanced up my fingers. My other hand lost its grip, and the
wind seized us, hurling us into the jagged gray maw.

The last thing I saw before the gray swallowed
the portal was the smile on Daelissa's face. I slammed into
something hard, and everything went black.

I sit on a bench in a park on a
lovely spring day. Children nearby laugh and play. Dogs bark and
chase Frisbees. A young girl licks ice cream as her smiling parents
walk close behind, hand-in-hand. Something seems to move in my
grasp. I look down and see a book with a pale leather binding. A
title in gold letters, THE FINAL CHOICE, is the only thing on the
cover. I open the book. Inside, it says, "Dedicated to Justin
Slade." Unable to resist, I turn the page only to see a blank white
space.

The earth trembles. The laughter of
the children turns to cries of fear. I look up and see brilliant
balls of white light streaking across the sky like stars falling to
earth. In the distance, the city skyline crumbles to ash. People
scream and run in all directions. One of the balls of light lands,
leaving a blackened crater. Giant white wings unfurl and I look
into the face of—of myself. Brightling Justin stretches out his
hand. All the people nearby turn to face him, fingers reaching as
if to touch his while milky white light drains from their bodies.
Their bodies writhe with dark veins.

I try to scream, but cannot open my
mouth. As if of their own accord, my fingers turn the page. Again,
there are no words, only a dim ultraviolet glow.

I hear laughter and look up. The
park scene has reset. Everyone frolics as if the entire world
hadn't just been destroyed. I hear the sound of waves breaking and
look for the source. There are no oceans near Atlanta. A great
black tidal wave rises on the horizon, stretching from side to side
as far as I can see. It swallows the city within second. The ground
rumbles. Trees, houses, and bodies litter the wave like flotsam.
Flying before the water on wings of dark light, I see Darkling
Justin. As before, I can't scream or run, only watch as the dark
wave washes over the park. When it is gone, all that remains is an
empty world and a dark sky. As if watching a time-lapse video, I
see vegetation growing, and animals emerging. The world seems to be
starting over anew.

With a trembling hand, I turn the
page and find gray.

The people walk with stiff gaits
from one point to another. They are like machines, driven to their
tasks. There is no laughter, no joy, only endless repetition.
Nothing changes on the outside, but I smell the stagnation, the
rot. I see an unmoving statue of myself standing in the center of
the park. When I look at it too long, the eyes blink. The happy
family from earlier passes me. They are no longer smiling, but
straight-faced and serious. They stop before my bench and turn to
face me. Half of their faces are nothing but skulls covered in
rotting flesh.

"This is perfection," they say in
unison. "Perfection, perfection, perfection—"

I jerked awake with a loud scream. David lay
face down next to me. He groaned and pushed himself into a sitting
position. Gray fog hung heavy as pea soup around us. Whether it was
real fog or something else entirely, I couldn't tell. The ground
felt stony beneath me. The air was neither humid nor dry, hot nor
cold, just a Goldilocks medium.

What kind of crazy dream was that?
It
had seemed so real. And yet, something like a sense of purpose
filled me despite the ache in my head.
I'm supposed to be
here.
Then again, I might have just hit my head really hard. I
looked frantically around me. "Daelissa is going after Mom and Ivy.
We've got to get out of here."

"This certainly puts a pinch in things," David
said, standing and brushing off his jeans.

I pushed myself up and faced him. "Amazing
assessment. Did you hear what I said about Mom and Ivy? Do you even
care?"

He folded his arms. "Of course I care, but
panicking won't solve anything."

I wanted to grab him by the front of the shirt
and shake him, but he was right. Escape from the Gloom was our
priority, and I had absolutely no clue how to do that. As deep
breaths calmed me somewhat, a stinging pain in my fingertips drew
my attention. Blood caked my fingers where my demon claws had torn
off. It looked like I'd ripped open a pregnant yak with my bare
hands. I winced, and realized with a shock I was back in human form
already. I usually had to beat back my demon side until it
retreated inside its kennel. The raw, jagged remains of my
fingernails stung. I sucked on my index finger to soothe
it.

"My hand isn't healing," I said.

"I noticed." David knelt and inspected the
floor. "I've never actually been in the Gloom. Not much to
see."

"There must be a way out," I said, resisting
the urge to run aimlessly through the thick haze around us. "Didn't
Daelissa say someone would be here to enslave us? Do you see
anyone?"

David held up a hand, and listened. "I don't
hear a thing. Before we go running willy-nilly, I suggest we take
stock of our surroundings."

Despite the moderate climate, the inability to
see further than a few feet in any direction was absolutely
suffocating. My feet scuffed against the hard floor. I knelt. The
surface looked like stone. In fact, it looked a lot like the floor
of the church. "Where did Montjoy get a gray and a sapphire
arch?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. I don't
remember seeing anything like them."

"Obviously the gray arch goes to the Gloom." I
followed David as he moved through the fog. "He tried to exorcise
you through the blue one. I assume it goes to the demon
realm."

"Fair assumption." He put his hands out, as if
feeling his way.

I kept following him through the thick fog. "Do
demons need portals to possess people?"

He shook his head. "We have our own ways of
crossing the veil between realms."

"Like demon-summoning runes?" My friends and I
had been attacked by monstrous demons not so long ago thanks to a
group of murderous battle mages called the Black Robe
Brotherhood.

"Summoning runes simply bring a demon spirit
into a temporary cage of flesh within the mortal realm. An actual
demon portal means someone bound by flesh could step into our
realm." He pursed his lips. "I'm curious what would
happen."

"I'm not," I lied as the image of tossing a cat
through the portal flashed through my mind.
Stacey would kick my
ass.

David knelt and tapped the ground with a
knuckle. He looked around and grunted. "The Exorcists must have
more than just the one demon portal. I can't imagine they ship all
the possessed to Atlanta for purging." He motioned me to follow,
and walked until he nearly stumbled over a wooden pew. "We're in
the church."

My brow pinched with confusion as I ran my hand
along the grained surface. "How is the church in the
Gloom?"

"The Gloom is supposedly a shadow realm of the
real world, or so I've heard."

"What's the difference between a shadow realm
and the other realms?"

He shrugged. "Your mother might know." He
shoved at a pew and failed to budge it. "This isn't
good."

"What isn't?"

"Move the pew," he said.

I tried and barely managed to scoot the heavy
oak bench. "I'm not supernaturally strong."

"Yeah, or the bench got a lot
heavier."

Come to think of it, I felt punier than normal,
and my hand still wasn't healing. Something was way off about this
place. Before I could say anything, David started down the center
aisle, feeling his way like a blind man while I followed close
behind until we passed beyond the first row. He squatted and traced
the ground with his fingers, making a thoughtful noise when they
found the silver circle. We continued in a straight line until we
reached the center of the circle.

Both arches were there, though they looked
different. The demon arch glowed with a sullen red hue while the
Gloom arch looked more or less as gray as ever.

I felt a flare of optimism. "Maybe I can use
the arch to take us back through." I knelt, searching the floor
until I found the silver ring around the Gloom arch.

"Don't you have to sing to it?" David said with
an amused grin.

I shrugged. "No idea. I'm going to give this a
shot first." Jamming a thumb to the circle, I willed it to close.
At first, nothing happened. I closed my eyes and concentrated on
the circle, commanding it to close over and over again until
finally, I felt it snap shut.

"Doing okay?" David said. "You looked a little
constipated for a second."

"I'm fine," I growled. "Let me concentrate." I
willed the Gloom arch to open a portal back to the real world. Once
again, it felt as if it resisted my will. As before, I kept pushing
harder and harder until the center of the portal
flickered.

A black barrier greeted us. David grabbed a
chip of stone from the floor and tossed it at the darkness. It
swallowed the stone without a sound.

"They must have blocked it with a spell," he
said.

"Makes sense," I said. "Wouldn't be much of a
banishment if the banishees could just hop back through." The
foolish hope we might escape quickly died. My chest tightened as I
thought of Daelissa hunting down my family.

"You're worrying about Ivy and your mother
again," David said.

I felt my eyes flare. "Maybe you should try it
sometime. It's called caring."

"Justin, Daelissa is only one Seraphim. Do you
really think she'd try to take on your mother and Ivy?" His
eyebrows rose in challenge.

"She might lure Ivy to her, brainwash her, and
use her against Mom."

He crinkled his forehead. "No wonder you worry
so much with an imagination like that."

My knuckles cracked as I fought back the panic
and anger. "Just shut up and let me figure this out."