34
Somebody grabbed my arm. “Get away from the windows,” Charles screamed. He all but tossed me against the staircase. I collided with Cassie. When I’d first met her, she was so painfully shy she would hardly look at me. Now she righted me and then disappeared in the crowd of younger students, barking orders at them.
She hustled them into the common room farther out the back. The supports there had been reinforced to withstand an earthquake. Great. I was being ordered around by the kids. All of the fourth-year students and some of the third-years would be out there fighting.
I didn’t spot Isla in the room. Trey, Sasha, and a group of boys from our year were the only ones Charles hadn’t tried to wrangle away. I might have thought he was relying on them to protect us if I hadn’t heard him calling them demon fodder as he whipped past with the little fox in his arms.
Somebody tugged on my jeans. Billy stood next to me. He was completely nude and holding what appeared to be a pet rock. It had two googly eyes glued on the top corner and a big, fat red line for a mouth. His skin had turned a speckled grey-green. Some of the para-humans were polymorphic. They could change the colour of their skin for camouflage.
I wasn’t sure what Billy thought he was imitating. His slitted nostrils flared. He swiped a tear away. I picked him up and held him close as I disregarded Charles’s order. Sophie was also at the window again. Diana had never left.
The ground shuddered over and over. I became dizzy trying to keep my focus on the portal. Nobody uttered a word as we watched helplessly. While I’d been away, the demon had completed its slow trespass out of the Hell dimension. It was at least a head taller than the top spiral of Pantheon Academy. Its limbs, all eight of them, were long and wiry.
It crawled on its legs, dragging a long body made mostly of ribs draped in folded bits of skin. The contents of its belly were openly dripping into the building below. Where the black tarred blood hit the stone walls of Nightblood, it ate away at the building. The demon had no face to speak of. Just a mishmash of features without a nose or chin. Sunken into the demon’s head were two bright orbs of red for eyes. Its mouth opened into a cavernous gape with twisted white spines for teeth. And as a double-feature, some of its buddies were coming through the portal behind it.
Misshapen creatures shot through the portal around the huge demon’s feet. The only way to describe it was a horde. They slashed and shoved their way through the portal and onto the grounds of Nightblood. There they were met with the forces of the Nephilim and the other guards. We were too far away to see the details of the fighting, but any idiot could tell we were outnumbered. I bit my lips and tried to watch out for the familiar glow of green. It was nowhere to be found.
Billy whimpered in my arms.
“Go with the others,” I told him. When I tried to set him down, he latched on to me with such suction I thought my spine was going to snap. I skidded at the same time the earth groaned again.
“Shit!” Diana said. I followed the direction of her gaze. A speck of light rose up and levitated mid-air. The flapping of a cloak made me squint.
“Is that Professor Flint?” Sophie asked. She had her face pressed up so close to the glass it fogged up.
A heavy, sinking feeling materialised in my gut. First Professor Mortimer, and now Professor Flint. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Mages didn’t have a penchant for flying. Sometimes they levitated when they were spellcasting but to remain in the air for so long spoke of something unnatural.
Professor Flint went higher and higher until he floated level with the head of the enormous demon. If he weren’t possessed, it was at this point when I would have expected the demon to open up its gaping maw and swallow the professor whole. Instead, the professor lifted his palms to the sky. Silvery-grey light ignited within them.
Sophie hissed.
Multi-coloured lights bloomed around him. Three Nephilim and two Fae guards with their swords drawn appeared. My focus became fixed on the burst of green. Kai’s blade shimmered with a blaze of angelfire. They all hung in suspended animation.
“What’s happening?” I heard Charles ask from behind me. Guess he wasn’t very good at taking his own orders.
“They’re trying to talk to him,” Sasha said.
“What’s he doing up there?”
By now Billy had pressed his head to my chest. The bumps on his forehead dug into my collarbone. I placed my hand over his ear as though it would do something to stifle his hearing. “He’s conjuring,” I told Charles.
“What the hell for?”
What else would a necromancer conjure for? The answer came in a shattering groan of the ground beneath our very feet. Where the earlier pressure had been from the influence of demonic bulk, this pressure came from the earth itself. The trees around us let out a wail that my hedge magic picked up as distress. Clawed fingers and decayed teeth bit into them. The undead Professor Flint was trying to resurrect tore into their places of confinement. They scratched and gnashed, eating away at the roots and earth until the ground started to cave. I shuddered and shut my eyes, trying to keep my composure so I didn’t scare Billy further.
Sasha cursed. The guards converged on the spot around the perimeter ward where the earth was crumbling into a sinkhole. First it happened in one spot. And then another. The lawn around this side of the junior school looked like a pockmarked monstrosity. The first decayed hand
