you were holding up.”
I help him to his feet. He gulps when he looks at the Shadow, but advances to try again.
“What can I do?” I shout at Beranabus.
“Get out,” he roars. “You’re the one it’s after.”
“But I can’t—”
Cursing, I turn and run. Before I’m even halfway to the door, I feel a whoosh of hot air on my back. Glancing over my shoulder, I see the Shadow directly behind me. It’s swept past Beranabus and his Disciples, barrelling them aside. They lie sprawled on the invisible floor. They’re picking themselves up, turning to help me —but too late.
The Shadow seizes me with several tentacles and lifts me high into the air. I scream, pain filling all parts of my body at once. It’s like being on fire, except the agony cuts deeper than any natural flame, burning through flesh and bone, turning my blood to vapour.
I somehow hold myself together. It takes every last bit of magic that I possess, but I fight the terrible, fiery clutch of the Shadow and wildly restore blood, bones and flesh as it grips me tighter and tries to fry me again. I’m absorbing memories from the beast, mostly garbled, but what I comprehend is more terrifying than I would have considered possible.
The Shadow’s surprised I’m still alive. It meant to slaughter me and absorb the freed piece of the Kah- Gash. But it’s not dismayed by my resistance. The beast is much stronger than me and knows it simply has to keep applying pressure. I can last a matter of seconds, no more. Then…
Beranabus is suddenly beside me, bellowing like a madman. He slashes at the tentacles, slicing through them as easily as Dervish did. The Shadow is more of a menace than any demon I’ve ever faced, but it’s insubstantial. It’s not by nature a physical creature. It can easily and quickly replace what we destroy, but it can’t harden itself against our blows.
I fall free and Beranabus drags me away. Sharmila and Dervish dart into the gap we’ve left and attack the Shadow with bolts of energy and fire. It makes a squealing noise and lashes at them with its tentacles. They duck and dodge the blows, punching and kicking at the tendrils.
“Go!” Beranabus gasps and tries to throw me ahead of him.
“Wait,” I cry, holding on. “I know what it is.”
“Tell me later,” he roars. “There’s no time now.”
He’s right. I won’t have the chance to explain, not with words. But I have to let him know. He thinks he can defeat this beast, that if they keep working on the tendrils, they’ll eventually chop their way through to the body. He believes they can kill it, like any other demon.
He’s wrong.
I clutch his small, clean hands and use the same spell he used earlier to bypass the need for words. He gasps as I force-feed him the information. Then his eyes widen and a look of shocked desperation crosses his face.
“How?” he croaks.
“I don’t know,” I sob.
Sharmila screams. The Shadow has ripped one of her legs loose. It rains to the floor in a shower of bones and flesh. A few of the zombies fall on the remains with vicious delight.
Beranabus is thinking hard and fast, trying to turn this in our favour. He’s always been able to outwit demons who were certain they’d got the better of him.
Even in recent years, ancient, battered, befuddled, his cunning gave him a crucial advantage. He can’t believe it will fail him now, but he’s never had to deal with anything like the Shadow.
The lines of his face go smooth. He half-nods and his lips twitch at the corners. My heart leaps with hope. He’s seen something. He has a plan!
“Tell Kernel,” he wheezes, standing straight and scattering a horde of zombies as if swatting flies. “Tell him to find me.”
“You want me to send Kernel down?” I frown. “But he’s not a fighter. He—”
“Just tell him to find me,” Beranabus sighs, then bends and kisses my forehead. “I loved you as a child, Bec, and I love you still. I always will.”
Through the brief contact, I catch a glimpse of what he’s planning. It’s perilous. He probably won’t make it out alive. But it’s the only way. Our only hope.
“Don’t watch,” he says, and his voice is guttural, unnatural, as his vocal cords begin to thicken and change. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”
He whirls away and bellows at the Shadow, an inhuman challenge. Dervish and Sharmila glance back, astonished by the ferocity of the roar. Their faces crumple when they see what Beranabus is becoming.
I back away slowly, but I can’t obey Beranabus’s final command. I have to look. Besides, he thought my feelings would alter if I saw him in his other form, but they won’t. If you truly love someone, you don’t care what they look like.
Beranabus is transforming. He outgrows his suit, which falls away from him like a banana peel. His skin splits and unravels. Bones snap out of his head, then lengthen, fresh flesh forming around them. Muscles bulge on his arms and legs, like pustulent sores. They burst, then reform, even larger than before. Tough, dark skin replaces his natural covering. Only it’s not really skin—more like scales.
A tail forces its way out through the small of Beranabus’s back. It grows to two metres… three… four. Spikes poke out of it, as well as several mouths full of sharp teeth and forked tongues.
I catch sight of his face. Purplish, scaly skin. Dark grey eyes, round like a fly’s, utterly demonic. His mouth is three times the size of my head, filled with fangs that look more like stalactites and stalagmites than teeth. Yellowish blood streams from his nose but he takes no notice. Raising his massive arms, he pushes through the undulating nest of tentacles and hammers a fist at the Shadow, driving it back.
“What the hell is that?” Dervish croaks, backing up beside me, helping the one-legged Sharmila along.
“Beranabus,” I answer quietly. “The Bran we never saw. The demon side that he kept shackled. This is what he would have looked like if he’d let his father’s genes run free, if he’d chosen the way of the Demonata.”
Beranabus lashes the Shadow with his tail. The spikes rip through the shadowy wisps of its body, the teeth snapping at it, tearing open holes. The Shadow shrieks angrily but the holes quickly close and the beast fights without pause, smothering Beranabus with its tentacles.
Dervish, Sharmila and I are by the doorway. We should take advantage of the situation and race up the stairs. But we’re mesmerised. We can’t flee without knowing the outcome. Sharmila clears the stairs of zombies, to keep the route out of the hold open, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the battling pair.
“Can he control himself like that?” she asks quietly as the behemoths wrestle.
“Not for long,” I whisper. “This is the first time he’s completely unchained his beastly half. If he maintains that shape and lets the monster run free too long, it will take over.”
“How much time does he have?” Dervish asks.
“He doesn’t know. He’s not even sure he
Dervish and Sharmila stare at me as if I’m the one who’s changed shape.
“Why would he take such a risk?” Sharmila gasps.
“He had to. I’ll explain later. If we survive.”
The beast that was Beranabus shrugs free of the Shadow’s tentacles and staggers away. For an awful moment I think that he’s about to attack us. But then he bellows at the Shadow and darts past it, making for the lodestone.
“Ah!” Sharmila exclaims with sudden hope. “If he breaks the stone…”
“…the Shadow will be sucked back to its own universe,” I finish.
“We hope,” Dervish adds gloomily.
Finding its path to me unexpectedly clear, the Shadow lunges forward, eager to finish me off. Then it pauses. It doesn’t glance back—as I noted earlier, it doesn’t have a face—but it’s somehow analysing Beranabus.
