The three of them shared leadership of the Brotherhood, a powerful organization of vampires, and though I hadn’t gotten the full story out of any of them yet, it was exciting that there was finally a female vampire.

  I’d mentioned to Franki that they might want to consider a new name, but she’d only laughed and said she was working on it.

  Either way, I was glad to have thousands of powerful vampires as allies, if it came to it. And I had no doubt that it would before this war was over.

  Rend, Franki, Silas, and a few of the vampires who had travelled with them all went up the stairs, choosing to travel through the Hall of Doorways to get back to Venom as quickly as possible.

  “Thanks to Magda and these maps, we’ve got some leads on where the citrine ring might be located,” Mary Anne said. “Essex and I are going to go back to the domed city and put together a crew to scout some locations. If Erick and Joost are in trouble, maybe we can shut down the rest of the gates before they get pulled through.”

  “Go,” I said. “But stay in touch. And if you have time, update Angela on where you’re going.”

  “What about you?” Mary Anne asked.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” I said. “I just have to get my things together and make sure all the triggers and surveillance cameras are online before we leave.”

  “Okay, we’ll see you soon,” she said.

  She and Essex chose to go home through the amethyst portal, as well. It was certainly faster than flying all the way back to Brighton Lake from here first.

  Of course, this was why we needed a better portal system of our own. We’d been relying on a structure built by the Order of Shadows, and that wasn’t always safe or wise.

  One thing at a time, though, I told myself. We were moving as fast as we could.

  By the time I said goodbye to everyone and gathered all of my things, Magda was nowhere to be found.

  I sighed. Now, where had she disappeared to?

  I shifted and flew throughout the house as quickly as I could, nervous all of a sudden that something might have happened to her.

  To my great relief, though, I finally found her sitting on the bed in what was obviously Gladys Black’s bedroom with its purple velvet comforter and gaudy amethyst curtains.

  I’d never seen a priestess so thoroughly committed to her color scheme.

  “Are you okay in here?” I asked. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  Magda sniffed and placed a hand on her heart. Had she been crying?

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just reminiscing, I suppose.”

  She had something clutched close to her chest, and as I approached, she handed it to me.

  “Who is this?” I asked, looking down at a black and white photograph, faded and worn at the edges.

  Five women in long, simple dresses sat around a table with a candle lit in the center between them. It was obvious who they were, despite the fact that this picture was likely taken over a hundred years ago.

  I practically threw it back at her, not wanting to hold a photo of those five women that close to me.

  “Oh, I know what you see when you look at this,” she said, staring with such affection, it nearly turned my stomach. “But we weren’t always such monsters.”

  I turned the yellowing paper over to see a year written in pen across the back.

  1895.

  “By then you were,” I said.

  This photograph was taken long after the first portals had been opened. It hadn’t been much longer after that when Aerden was taken and the Peachville gate was opened.

  The five women in that photograph may have been innocent once, but who someone used to be didn’t matter nearly as much as who they decided to become.

  “Do you mind if I take this with me?” she asked. “Or will it upset you to see it? I don’t think there are many photos of the five of us together anymore. And, of course, there never will be again.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t care, as long as you keep it out of my sight,” I said. “But we need to get going. Are your friends still here?”

  Magda shook her head and stood, giving the room one last longing glance.

  “No, I said goodbye and sent them on their way, back through the Hall of Doorways,” she said as we made our way through the hall and down the grand staircase. “Issa wanted me to come with her, but I told her it’s still not safe.”

  Magda wasn’t truly safe anywhere at this point.

  After she’d so openly betrayed her sisters and the High Priestess by ordering the ruby hunters to join our side in the fight, we’d been certain someone would come looking for her.

  The High Priestess had already made a direct attack against Magda right there in our dungeons once before. Our security there had meant nothing to someone so powerful, which meant that if she wanted, the High Priestess could probably get through the outer dome of our city, as well.

  Magda said there were limits to the High Priestess’s powers, but until we fully understood what they were, we needed to be careful with each step we took.

  “Harper,” she said as we made our way through the marble-tiled foyer and down toward the amethyst portal home, “there’s something I need to tell you about the onyx ritual room. We—”

  But before she could continue, the ruby bar in my pocket vibrated with an incoming call.

  “Hold on,” I told her, seeing that the ninth stone was lit up on the bar. “Cormac?”

  “Harper, tell me what’s happening there,” he shouted, frantic. “Are you okay?”

  I looked around, not seeing anything out of place.

  “Everything's fine here,” I said. “We were just heading home.”

  “You have to get out of there,” he said. “All of my cameras from Blackwood have just gone offline, Harper. I’m totally blind here.”

  “It must be a false alarm,” I said, grabbing Magda’s arm and hurrying toward the amethyst portal stone below. I didn’t want to stay here and find out.

  But as we descended, Cormac’s voice started to cut out, like a bad connection through the stones. I didn’t even know that was possible with these things.

  “Trip— Get out— “

  “Cormac?” I asked, shaking the bar, as if that would somehow help.

  I threw open the door to the ritual room and turned to Magda, hoping to get some kind of answer about why the stones would be acting up, but her face twisted in fear and she screamed.

  When I followed her gaze, the sound of my own horror joined with hers.

  There, in the center of the room, where the amethyst portal stone should have been, was a swirling storm of dark shadows.

  A Place Without Light

  Aerden

  “We’re going in,” Jackson shouted as the prow of the ship disappeared into the roiling darkness of the storm’s edge. “Where’s the soul stone? We have to get control of this, or we’ll be lost.”

  I attempted to shift and fly below to retrieve it, but my mind was racing too much, my center and focus so disrupted, I couldn’t seem to access my power.

  I pushed back the panic that threatened to consume me.

  I’d had trouble accessing my power in the days after I’d been freed from the sapphire demon gate in Peachville, but I thought I’d overcome that.

  I took a deep breath as I ran below, searching for the stone. This wasn’t the same thing. I hadn’t lost access to my power. I was just distracted. I needed to calm the racing of my heart and find my center.

  Now, where was that stone?

  Having a fully-charged soul stone was somewhat rare, because unlike the crystals that ran the main part of the ship, a soul stone could only be charged with the final gift of a demon’s life-force as they passed into the Afterworld.

  It was a special kind of power that could only be given by choice, the way Trention had gifted me with part of his own power when he died in my arms back in the arena.

  The soul stone we brought with us on the ship was a parting gift from Lea and the king. Often, when demons in the King’s City passed on to the Afterworld, they willingly offered a piece of their power back to the city, for the good of all. Those gifts were what powered the entire ecosystem in Leuxia. The lights. The power. Even the magic of the wall itself.

  Before we left the shore of the Black Cliffs, Lea had placed a dark green bag holding the soul stone in my hand.

  “It’s from the city reserves,” she’d said, her fingers curling around mine in a way that had made my heart ache with longing. “May it help bring you back to us safely.”

  The soul stone was much smaller than the crystals that ran the ship’s propeller, but in theory, even a small piece of a fully-charged soul stone should have been enough to recharge all our drained crystals many times over.

  If I could place it directly inside the crystal power bank, maybe I could get the propellers turning hard enough to fight against the pull of the storm.

  With trembling hands, I untied the bag and removed the stone.

  But the moment I touched it, all hope disappeared. It should have been lit from within, pulsing with power. Instead, it was dull and lifeless.

  This isn’t possible.

  How could everything on this ship be drained of power so quickly? We should have had enough to last us months.

  “Aerden, I need you.”

  Jackson shouted for me from above, and I raced up the steps. The ship tilted and keeled, slamming my body against the walls of the stairway and causing me to lose my footing several times on my way up.

  All light from the five suns had been blotted out by the swirling clouds and shadows that surrounded the ship. Huge waves tossed us from side to side like a violent rollercoaster, and I struggled just to make it across to where Jackson stood, attempting to steer us through the madness.

  “What do you see?” I shouted to him. “It’s too dark for me to make anything out but shadows.”

  “I can’t see anything,” Jackson said. “It’s like I’m blind out here. I’ve never seen such darkness in my life.”

  His words stopped me cold, my entire body suddenly numb with fear.

  “Jackson, can you shift?” I asked. “Can you use your power at all?”

  “I can’t,” he said, gripping my arm.

  I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear his panic.

  “What’s happening?”

  I prayed for light while the darkness consumed us, swirling so fast, the ship beneath our feet creaked and the boards separated. Rain lashed across my skin like painful whips, and as my power went dormant inside of me, I realized I knew this place.

  I had never been here before, but I recognized the feel of it.

  The hopelessness of it.

  I had lived in a place like this for over a hundred years, and while my prison had been much smaller and less turbulent, the suffering was the same.

  A place without light.

  Without power.

  “There are worlds of power inside of you.”

  Sabine’s voice came to me, then, and as one part of me was locked away, something else awakened.

  A powerful flash of light erupted from inside me just as the storm ripped the Wind Dancer apart. I threw my arms and the strength of my power around my brother as we were both thrown into the deep dark waters of the sea at the edge of the world.

  Lost To Us Now

  Harper

  My shoes slid across the slick floor of the amethyst ritual room as the swirling vortex sucked me in. Magda grabbed my arm and yanked me backward, hooking her body around the frame of the main door to keep from being pulled inside the room.

  “We have to go,” she said. “Do your shifty thing.”

  I shook my head, fear gathering inside me as dark as the shadows on the edge of that storm.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Two of my guards are in there.”

  I had to shield my eyes from the wind with the back of my hand and turn my head sideways just to see through the shadows and the rain now pouring onto the floor.

  What the hell was happening here?

  “You have to just let them go,” Magda said. “You’ll get us both killed if you go in there.”

  She obviously didn’t know me well enough if she thought I would just leave two of my people behind without at least trying to find a way to save them.

  “Stay here,” I shouted.

  I crouched low, thinking that if I could crawl along the floor, I could stay out of the worst part of the wind, but the moment my hand reached forward, I pulled it back, as if I’d been shocked with a jolt of electricity.

  It was more than that, though. It was as if, in that single instant, I could feel it trying to connect to the core of my power. Like the storm was trying to plug itself into me.

  I recoiled, pulling back in horror as Magda threw her arms around me and dragged me back toward the door.

  “Don’t touch it,” she shouted. “It’s like poison. Can’t you feel that? The raw power of it?”

  “I can’t leave them there,” I said, wrenching away from her and heading back to the edge of the storm.

  I couldn’t see them, but I could swear I heard someone screaming for help.

  Why was this happening?

  “It’s too late for them,” Magda said. “Look. It's spreading. We have to get out of here.”

  She pointed to the floor, where tendrils of grey mist crawled along the floor, expanding the reach of the storm’s energy.

  “What is this?” I asked. “How do we stop it?”

  “I don’t know how to stop it, Harper. It’s too powerful. Even I can feel that. We have to go, Harper, please,” Magda said, her voice pleading.

  But I couldn’t accept this. I was the one who had sent these guards in here to watch the portal. I couldn’t just abandon them without trying.

  I took a deep breath and connected to the part of myself that had some small control over the weather, leftover power from the Prima demon who had been bound to Eloise and the Cypress gates for so many years. Some of their power had been transferred to me when I’d tried to save Caroline from the black roses and the crows several years ago.

  Maybe I could do something with this.

  The storm inched closer, the wind whipping my hair across my face.

  I held my hands out, trying to create the opposite momentum with the wind. If I could slow it down, maybe I could create a doorway and my guards could step out of it.

  But the more I tried to control the wind, the more it pushed against me. The wilder it became.

  And if I tried to step closer, I got that same shocking feeling of it trying to pull me in and take me over.

  The strength of the wind was worsening by the second, though, and I could barely hold my body steady. I didn’t have much time.

  Trying a totally different idea, I turned my focus on a table in the corner that held some ritual items and books. I connected to it with my mind, using my energy to lift the table into the air toward the storm. I was hoping that I would be able to penetrate the wall of wind with the table. If it worked, I could use anything in the room to create a large enough opening in the structure of that storm for them to get out.

  But before the table even got close to the outer edge of the wind, it seemed to almost disintegrate, as if its wood were eaten by the toxic energy of the storm itself.

  My hands fell to my side as tears of panic clouded my vision.

  “What is this thing?” I shouted. “Is this Gladys? Can she do this?”

  Magda just shook her head. “This is not Gladys. Please, Harper. Nothing is going to help them now. We have to go.”

  “Go on without me,” I said. “Get to the Hall of Doorways and use the portal we used last time we came here. I’ll meet you back at the abandoned house as soon as I can. If I’m not there in half an hour, use your stones to call Rend and have him come get you there.”

  “I’m not leaving you here alone,” she said.

  “Then help me,” I screamed, trying to literally pull the storm apart with my powers of telekinesis.

  But nothing was working.

  No matter what I tried, the storm continued to grow until it was covering almost the entire room. I could no longer hear the guards who’d gotten trapped inside. I had no way of knowing if they were even still alive in there, or if this storm was also raging on the other side of the portal.

  Had Lea made it through okay? Was she home safely? Was Mary Anne?

  They had just used this portal. I needed to know if they were safe.

  But we were running out of time. In a minute or two, the entire room would be consumed. There was no way to know how far this would go or what it was capable of taking over.

  There was one thing I hadn’t tried yet, though.

  “Get back down the hallway,” I shouted to Magda, my voice nearly inaudible in the roar of the wind. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Magda nodded and ran back toward the gathering room and the stairs that led back up to the main part of the house.

  I took a deep breath and shifted into white smoke, hoping that somehow, being in demon form would help me to fly through the impassable storm ahead of me.

  But the moment my body shifted, I felt the greediness of that storm. The way it wanted to consume me and all of my power.

  If I got any closer, I knew my power would be gone.

  That was why the guards inside hadn’t shifted to demon form. They couldn’t.

  The storm that had now covered the entire ritual room in the basement at Blackwood had stolen their power in minutes.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, knowing they couldn’t hear me but needing to say it anyway.

  Magda was right. There was nothing I could do for them here.

  Not anymore.

  I flew down the hall and shifted back to my human form as I met up with Magda.

  “Let’s go,” I said, throwing one last look toward the ritual room and seeing, with horror, that the swirling shadows of the storm’s edge had expanded into the hallway.

  I reached for my ruby bar and touched the nine for Cormac.

  His voice came through in static again, and I prayed that he could hear me.