“I’m leaning more and more towards extermination,” Matilda added. She was playing with her knives again. She just kept throwing them in the air and catching them like it was nothing at all. Every time I waited for the pointed end to come down on her, but it never did.
Sighing, I made another suggestion. “If Kai somehow manages to break out of the soul gate before we can exorcise Apollyon, I might be able to contain him with Lex’s blood. From what I could tell, that’s how Apollyon is trapping him at the moment.”
“Do you know how to create blood chains?” Professor Mortimer asked. His lips were a thin line. Blood restraints were another big no-no in the supernatural community. Since blood transcended life, if somebody was shackled by blood and the magic user died, there was every possibility that the spell might never be broken.
I tried very hard not to glance at Basil when I said, “I have a little bit of experience.”
If Andrei had been here, he would have scoffed. Blood restraints were our primary method of questioning people once upon a time.
“We can also try a draining,” Professor Suleiman said. “It might hold him off long enough for us to make a decision about how to proceed.”
I picked at my nails. “What do we do if Apollyon just sics Kai on us?” I asked. “How do we fight Apollyon when he’s not in a corporeal body?”
“That’s up to the Nephilim to figure out,” Professor Mortimer said. “We must stick with our task or we’ll never be ready. I suggest we spend some time going over the various tactics and spells we’ll need to use. And those of you who aren’t well versed in Angelical symbols needs to do so immediately.”
By the time we broke for the evening, I was brain dead. I was following Basil’s lead back to the portals when the stunning galaxy of stars overhead began to shift in sickening swirls that made me dizzy.
Looking down at my feet, I tried to stop my head from spinning. I was staring at a speck of russet brown on the ground when the night began to seep into daylight, even though it wasn’t yet midnight. Forcing myself to look up, I saw the sun was a dirty red in a sky tinted light brown.
“What in the world?” Professor Mortimer said.
The sound of trumpets alarmed in the air as Nephilim guards teleported into place all around us. The ground rocked beneath our feet as a singular entity with silvery wings sailed into the air. He wore the golden armour of the Nephilim, but the way the guards reacted made me think this wasn’t part of their emergency drill procedure.
Nephilim guards teleported beside the being, their angel blades drawn. It wasn’t until the entity came to a screeching halt that a collective gasp went up in the air. Kai.
My heart stopped dead in my chest. The thing about best-laid plans was that they always seemed to go to shit where the Hell dimension was concerned. So much for bringing the fight to them. Kai was here and he was possessed, but not by Apollyon. I knew that when the first sweep of my magic touched him and came away brimming with condensed white light. Malachim.
The plan remained the same. Basil and Professor McKenna drew an enormous blood circle around us the size of a football field. It encompassed everything from the door of the ballroom to the small grassy landscaped area and the staircase beyond. Professors Mortimer and Suleiman sank down onto the ground and began to draw a summoning circle. I skirted around the edge of it and drew out the vial of Lex’s blood.
“Why is he looking this way?” Giselle hissed. The Nephilim were now a dense cloud around Kai, their weapons drawn but not advancing.
This was going to be a huge problem. Hurting Kai meant hurting themselves. He was the last of Raphael’s line. If they destroyed his body, Kai’s soul had nowhere to reside. “Just cut off his head already!” Giselle hissed.
“G!” Matilda shouted from where the Evil Three were beginning to construct a soul circle. How in the world we were going to get him inside it was another consideration. Giselle snapped her teeth once and turned her back to focus on the task at hand.
Done with the blood circle, Basil peered at the surrounding area, a frown etched over his features. “Why aren’t there more guards arriving?”
He waved his orange-bathed hands in an attempt to open a portal inside the circle. The curse word that he spat was laughably human. Professor Mortimer attempted the same thing just in case. He yielded the same result.
Hands shaking, I lay the vial of Lex’s blood on the ground for fear that I would crush it and lose our best resource.
Up in the air, Kai hung suspended, his white eyes serene as though there was nothing in the world that could touch him. The question was, if he was here, then where was Apollyon?
Over on the side of the circle closer to the field, Cordelia let out a sharp hiss. Sluggishly, I turned my head in time to see a cloaked figure appear in a puff of red smoke. Movement on my right revealed another figure. And another at our back. And another closer to the horde of Nephilim guards.
“What the hell?” Winnie gasped.
“The Four Horsemen,” Professor Mortimer said. “Lucifer’s most trusted acolytes.”
“Necromancers,” Eugenia spat. “This is not good.”
Every word of what they said made ice gather in my veins. Necromancers were adept blood-magic users. I thought of the blood wards that had been erected around Seraphina in order to protect them against the malachim.
The futility of it slugged me so hard, I almost toppled over. How in the world were we going to fight against beings who had once been celestial? They might be twisted by the Hell dimension now but that didn’t mean they were weakened. Their destruction no longer wrought the breaking
