Chapter 30:
– Amara –
I opened my eyes and found myself floating above Hell.
At least, that was my first thought.
A sea of fire stretched beneath me in every direction, endless and hungry, rolling in molten waves of red, orange, and black. The flames did not behave like normal fire. They moved like something alive. Like something breathing. Every surge carried faces inside it, screaming mouths and clawing hands that rose from the blaze before sinking back beneath the surface.
The sound hit me a second later.
Millions of voices screamed at once. Agony layered over agony, shrieking from below until the whole sky shook with it. Men, women, monsters, things that had never been human, all howling together in one endless chorus of suffering.
My stomach dropped.
A weak sound caught in my throat. "Ghhk." Not my proudest moment.
I floated naked above the burning ocean, arms slightly spread, hair drifting around me as if I were underwater instead of suspended in the air. Heat licked across my skin without burning me. Smoke curled around my legs. My bare feet hung above the flames, close enough that any sane part of me wanted to claw upward until I hit a ceiling that did not exist.
"What the fuck just happened?" I whispered. My voice sounded tiny here. That annoyed me almost as much as the terror did.
I swallowed hard and looked around. There were no walls. No horizon. No ground. Just fire below, darkness above, and screams all around me. For one awful second, my mind supplied the worst possible answer.
Had I been taken? Had I actually been dragged to Hell?
My black tail whipped behind me hard enough to snap through the smoky air. My wings flared from my lower back and beat once, twice, instinctively trying to steady me even though nothing here followed the normal rules of flight.
I looked down at myself and realized I was completely naked.
Of course I was.
Because apparently even cosmic horror had to take one look at my life and think, yes, but what if she faced divine terror with her tits out?
My breasts rose and fell with quick breaths. My stomach was tight. My thighs were bare, my skin glowing faintly in the hellish light. My tail lashed again, furious and nervous and absolutely not helping me project calm.
I did not have time to care about being naked. That was probably a bad sign, considering how often my body turned nudity into a whole distracting event.
Then my brain finally caught up.
I should be in the safehouse. I went to sleep last night next to Morgana after we caught up.
Lucifer Morningstar had been under the same roof. Mazikeen had been there too.
There was no fucking way Trigon had simply reached through reality, snatched me out of bed, and dragged me bodily to Hell without Morgana, Lucifer, Maze, Raven, Kara, Dick, and probably Batman's paranoia all noticing.
No.
This was a dream. A very elaborate, very loud, very on-brand nightmare, but still a dream.
Trigon had reached into my sleeping mind.
I stopped trembling. Mostly.
I curled my fingers, wishing my wand was in my hand. It was not. Dream logic, apparently. Or Trigon's logic. Either way, rude.
I forced my spine straight, spread my wings, and lifted my chin. "Come out, Trigon!" I shouted.
The screaming sea below me seemed to flinch.
Good. My voice came back stronger the second time. "Is this the best you can do? Drag me into a nightmare and pretend you actually managed to take me? Seriously? I've had better intimidation attempts from Gotham alley trash with switchblades!"
The fire churned beneath me. The screams continued, rising higher.
My wings gave one slow beat. Smoke crawled over my bare skin like fingers. My tail was still behind me.
Then four enormous red eyes opened in the air before me. There was no skull, no mouth, no body, no horns, no towering demonic silhouette. Just four burning eyes suspended in the darkness, each one larger than a house, each pupil blacker than the void between stars.
They stared at me. My breath caught. I hated that it did.
The eyes narrowed. Then a voice spoke. "I always hate when they figure it out too soon..."
My skin prickled.
The voice continued, dark amusement curling through every word. "I wished to have some fun with you first, little succubus. I wished to peel your mind open. To let you burn in your own fears. To make you scream until my daughter hears you from waking life." The eyes burned brighter. "You have been most troublesome."
I folded my arms beneath my breasts because if I was going to be naked in front of an interdimensional demon tyrant, I was at least going to do it with attitude. "That's me," I said. "Troublesome…" My tail began moving again, slower this time, curling in the air like a snake.
Trigon's voice deepened. "You led her astray! You tempted her. TAINTED HER! How dare you touch what is MINE!"
I glared at the floating eyes. "If you mean I fucked your adult daughter consensually and made her feel wanted, then sure. I tainted her all over and I will be doing it again and AGAIN many times in the future!"
The eyes flared. The sea of fire below me surged upward in a wave tall enough to swallow a castle.
It stopped a few feet beneath my dangling toes. I did not look down. I deserved an award for that.
"You are weak," Trigon said. "A half-blooded thing. A pleasure demon's diluted mistake wrapped in stolen magic and borrowed courage."
I smiled. It felt sharp. "Then why are you here?" The silence after that was delicious. I leaned forward slightly, letting my wings hold me steady. "You're Trigon. Destroyer of worlds. Father of monsters. Giant red nightmare with a conquering complex. And you're spending your night invading my dreams? If I'm so far beneath you, then why bother?"
His eyes narrowed to burning slits.
I pushed harder because apparently I had no survival instincts left. "You must be desperate."
The hellscape trembled.
I lifted my chin. "Are you scared, Trigon?"
His laugh exploded across the endless fire. The flames below flattened from the force of it, and smoke blasted past me hard enough to whip my hair around my face.
I clenched my fists and held my position. Barely.
When the laughter faded, the screams did not return. Trigon's voice rolled through the quiet. "I am incapable of fear."
I did not believe him. Powerful people always said that shit. Fear was never beneath anyone. "Sure," I said. "Very convincing."
"I know what you have done." The air turned colder. That was impressive, considering the fire ocean. "You have gathered enemies against me. The detective. The witch of Avalon. The Morningstar. My daughter. The female Kryptonian. The Amazon. The speedster."
My smugness faded a little. He knew? Of course he knew.
"Did you think I would not see the board shifting?" Trigon asked. "Did you think I would not feel my grip weakening? The Flash has been taken from me. The Amazon has been taken from me. Soon the rest will follow. Even the male Kryptonian will be torn free of my servant's grasp."
I kept my face still. Inside, my thoughts raced. "You know you've lost," I said.
The eyes burned brighter. "Mind your tongue."
"No, I don't think I will." I drifted a little closer, because my mouth had apparently declared independence from self-preservation. "You came into my dream to throw a tantrum because your big apocalypse plan is falling apart!" I smiled wider. "Is this your official surrender?"
Trigon snarled! The fire beneath me rose in spiraling columns, twisting around us like burning serpents. For a moment, the entire realm became motion and fury, flame and smoke and hatred given shape.
I held myself still. I was scared. Of course I was scared. I was not stupid. But fear had never stopped anyone from bleeding. And I had bled plenty.
"I do not surrender," Trigon said. Each word struck like a hammer. "I do not yield. I do not kneel. I do not bargain with insects!"
"Funny," I said. "Because this feels a lot like you came to bargain with an insect."
His eyes widened. For one second, I thought he might actually hurt me through the dream. Maybe he could. Maybe I had pushed too far.
Then his voice dropped into something quieter, and somehow that was worse. "My conquest of your world may be delayed. But vengeance," Trigon continued, "requires far less effort." The flames beneath me turned black. "You took something from me, succubus."
I did not blink. "If you mean Raven, she was never yours."
The four eyes shifted with focus. As if I had said something that mattered. Then Trigon laughed softly. "So fiercely protective. How touching. How pathetic."
The air thickened around me, pressure closing over my skin. Invisible fingers dragged down my spine. I felt the dream try to bend around my thoughts, trying to show me images I did not want.
Raven screaming.
Morgana dead.
Dick broken.
Kara's cape torn and soaked red.
Lois crying over Clark's body.
My coven burning.
I snarled and shoved back with everything I had. The images flickered but did not take hold.
Trigon's amusement faded. "You are stubborn."
Fuck yes I'm stubborn!
Then something grabbed me from behind. Wakefulness. It hooked into my spine and yanked.
I fell upward. "Haaah!" I bolted awake with a gasp so sharp it hurt my throat.
The world snapped into place around me. Dim bedroom. Salt air through a cracked window. The soft rush of waves beyond the safehouse. Tangled sheets. Warm lamplight. The faint scent of Morgana's perfume, Raven's incense, and my own panic sweat.
I was in bed. Not floating above fire. Not in Hell. My body jerked against the mattress, wings half-unfurled and tangled in the sheets, tail lashing so hard it knocked a pillow onto the floor. My skin was damp. My heart hammered like it was trying to punch through my ribs.
Morgana was on my left, one hand clamped around my wrist and the other pressed against my cheek. Her hair had come loose from its usual elegant perfection, tumbling around her face in wild black waves. Her green eyes were cold with murder and bright with fear.
Raven knelt on my right, one hand hovering over my forehead, the other gripping the Veil Chain on her wrist so tightly her knuckles had gone pale grey. Her cloak was gone. She wore a dark sleep shirt and leggings, her hair mussed, violet eyes wide and furious.
Both of them were talking at once.
"Amara!"
"Wake up!"
"Sweetheart, look at me!"
"Amara, breathe!"
I blinked at them. My mouth opened. Nothing came out except a strangled, "Nnngh."
Raven's eyes softened with relief.
Morgana's grip tightened.
I swallowed, then rasped, "Raven's dad is an ass..."
For half a second, nobody moved. Then Raven made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob.
Morgana closed her eyes, breathed in through her nose, and visibly fought the urge to teleport somewhere and commit interdimensional patricide.
"What happened?" Raven asked.
I pushed myself upright. The sheet slipped down my chest, and I grabbed it mostly out of habit rather than modesty. Being naked in front of these two was not exactly new territory, but my brain had just been used as Trigon's personal theater, so I was feeling slightly less exhibitionist than usual. Slightly. "He got into my dream," I said. "Made it look like Hell. Fire ocean, screaming souls, whole dramatic production. Very subtle. Very tasteful. Ten out of ten for atmosphere, zero out of ten for originality."
Raven's expression darkened.
Morgana's did something much worse. The shadows behind her moved. "He touched your mind?" Morgana asked. Each word was quiet. Too quiet.
I took her hand before she could do anything terrifying to the walls. "Dream only, I think. He couldn't take me. I knew he couldn't, because I went to sleep next to you and Lucifer is literally in the same building. If Trigon had actually dragged me away, one of you would've noticed."
Morgana's thumb brushed over my wrist, right where my pulse still raced. "I noticed you would not wake," she said. "That was quite enough."
Raven looked sick. "I felt his presence nearby," she whispered. "Not fully. I tried to reach you, but something kept pushing me out."
"That would be your father being a controlling piece of shit," I said. "But it's okay because I told him to fuck off and that you are MINE, not his…"
Raven's mouth twitched. Then she snorted. It was small, bitter, completely inappropriate, and beautiful.
By the time breakfast happened, I had told the story three times.
Once to Morgana and Raven in bed.
Once to Batman, who had appeared in the doorway without making a single fucking sound because apparently even safehouses were not safe from his flair for dramatic lurking.
And once to everyone else gathered around the long kitchen table while the sun crawled over the ocean outside and made the whole safehouse look much more peaceful than it had any right to.
I stabbed a forkful of scrambled eggs and shoved them into my mouth, chewing aggressively because talking about interdimensional demon lords before eight in the morning had left me starving.
The eggs were perfect. Fluffy, seasoned with something smoky and a little spicy, cooked with butter that had been browned just enough to add a nutty richness. The bacon beside them was thick-cut, crispy on the edges but still tender in the center, glistening with rendered fat that practically melted on my tongue.
"Mmmhh." The moan slipped out before I could catch it. Low, satisfied, and entirely too suggestive for a breakfast table surrounded by superheroes and the literal Prince of Darkness.
Mazikeen smirked at me from across the table. She was leaning back in her chair with her arms folded, watching me eat with a self-satisfied expression.
Dammit. Maze had made the food, hadn't she?
I took another bite of bacon and fought the urge to moan again. I liked girls who knew how to cook. I liked girls who spoiled me. And I especially liked girls who did both while looking like a six-foot sculpture carved from dark bronze and poured into leather pants.
Kara, seated to my left in a borrowed oversized sweater that made her look offensively adorable, shot Maze a pointed pout from behind her glass of orange juice.
Raven's pout was much more controlled, but somehow worse. Her eyes narrowed beneath the shadow of her hood, her mouth barely tightening at the corners, but I felt the possessive pulse of her irritation through the bond of memory between us. The Veil Chain around her wrist shimmered softly as it filtered the emotional soup around the table.
Maze noticed both pouts. She looked between them. Then she smiled like a demon who had just found a new knife. "Jealous that I can make her moan without even touching her?"
Kara's cheeks flushed.
I coughed into my fist.
Lucifer Morningstar lifted his glass of orange juice in a lazy toast from the far end of the table.
The Devil and the Dark Knight sat at the same breakfast table. There was a joke there somewhere. I was too tired to find it.
Lois stood near the counter with a cup of coffee clutched in both hands, watching the table like a journalist observing something that will never happen again. Diana sat with regal stiffness in a borrowed robe over fresh bandages, bruised but unbowed. Barry kept fidgeting with a protein bar, his eyes still shadowed after what Lust had done to him. Dick leaned against the wall behind me, arms folded, looking tired and gorgeous and deeply done with everyone's bullshit.
Kori hovered, literally hovered, near the far side of the kitchen, sitting cross-legged six inches above her chair while eating pancakes with open delight. She caught me watching and waved with syrup on her fingers.
Raven sat at my right. Morgana sat at my left. I was either very protected or very doomed. Possibly both.
Lucifer set down his glass and folded his hands. "Well," he said brightly, "I believe this confirms the obvious. Trigon knows he has lost."
Batman's eyes flicked to him. "That is an assumption."
"It is not an assumption. It is a conclusion reached through experience, charisma, and the fact that I am me."
Barry stared at him. "Does that kind of confidence usually work on people?"
Lucifer smiled. "Constantly."
Batman did not smile. "He confirmed he knows we have recovered Flash and Wonder Woman. He knows we intend to free Superman and the others. He knows Lucifer has joined the field. If he believes his original objective is no longer achievable, he will alter his strategy."
Lucifer sighed dramatically. "Must you make cosmic terror sound like a quarterly finance report?"
Batman's expression stayed flat. "Yes..."
"Of course you must. How tragically consistent."
Batman ignored him and looked at the rest of us. "Trigon's original plan was conquest through ritual manifestation. The five massacre sites created the structure. Raven was intended to function as the key. The possessed League members were force multipliers and interference suppression. With the League being recovered one by one and Lucifer now involved, Trigon has lost the initiative."
"That sounds good," Kara said carefully.
"It is," Batman replied. "But it also means his priorities have changed..." Batman looked at me.
I set down my fork.
Lucifer leaned back, his expression unusually serious. "If he believes his victory is no longer possible, he will try to extract satisfaction from the loss."
"By hurting Raven?" Kara asked, her voice dropping.
Raven's face gave away nothing, but the shadows under her chair thickened.
Lucifer's gaze shifted to me. "No," he said softly. "By hurting Amara. Who he believes stole Raven from him…"
"So he wants to go after me now," I said. Not a question.
Lucifer nodded once. "You disrupted his hold on Raven in a way force alone could not. You gave her something he cannot tolerate."
I tried for a joke because that was easier than letting the words land. "A really good orgasm?"
Kori beamed. "Several, from what Raven's sounds implied!"
Raven made a strangled noise. "KORI!"
Kara went red.
Dick pinched the bridge of his nose.
Diana blinked once, then very deliberately looked at her coffee.
The tension cracked, just a little.
Lucifer, naturally, looked delighted. "Well, yes, probably that as well. But I meant attachment."
My humor faltered.
Raven's fingers brushed mine beneath the table. I looked at Raven. She held my gaze.
Her expression was quiet, but something in her eyes burned. "He thinks he can punish me through you," she said.
Batman leaned forward. "That means the Nevada ritual site is likely a trap."
A soft rush of air stirred the room as Kori drifted closer. "My friend and lover Amara will not lose to Raven's evil father," Kori declared with absolute conviction. "If he attempts to harm her, I will strike him with the full fury of Tamaran, and also with both fists."
"Thank you, Kori," I said faintly.
She nodded, solemn and radiant. "You are most welcome. Also, if he has genitals, I shall target them first!"
I can respect that.
Barry choked on his protein bar.
Diana's lips twitched.
Maze looked impressed. "Good instinct."
Dick stepped away from the wall and came to stand behind my chair. His hand settled on my shoulder, thumb brushing once along my collarbone. "Trigon doesn't get you," he said. He made insane things sound possible just by saying them like they were.
Barry lifted one hand slightly. "For what it's worth, I owe you. A lot."
"You're welcome," I said.
Diana straightened in her chair. She looked like a woman who had been beaten half to death and still might challenge a mountain to single combat if it glanced at her wrong. "I owe you as well, Amara Black," she said. "I know that without you, Morgana would have descended into darkness these past months and surely killed me yesterday. That debt will not be forgotten."
Morgana scoffed next to me, but didn't correct Wonder Woman.
Lois took a sip of coffee, then pointed at me with the mug. "And for the record, if Trigon tries anything, I'll yell at him."
Everyone looked at her.
She lifted her chin. "What? It works more often than you'd think."
I should have said something. Something witty. Something dismissive. Something safely armored. Instead, I sat there with too many eyes on me and too much warmth pressing against places inside me that still did not know what to do with kindness. I had spent eighteen years unwanted. Then one year loved by Sirius before that was ripped away.
Now I sat at a breakfast table surrounded by people willing to fight an archdemon because he had threatened me.
My throat tightened. "Careful," I muttered. "Keep this up and I might start thinking you all like me."
Morgana leaned close, her lips brushing my ear. "Some of us are far past like, my darling."
A shiver went through me.
Batman stood. The chair scraped against the floor, and the room shifted with him. Conversation died instantly. It was annoying how good he was at doing that without raising his voice. "We move in twenty minutes."
Just like that, breakfast ended…
The original approach of engagement was dead. Trigon knew we were coming, knew our roster, knew our capabilities. Subtlety was off the table. This was going to be a brawl.
Morgana had not been pleased about the final arrangement. Specifically, she had not been pleased about leaving me in the company of Lucifer Morningstar and Mazikeen without her direct supervision.
"If either of them lets anything happen to you," she had whispered in my ear before the briefing ended, "I will make what I did to Penguin look like a gentle reprimand."
I believed her completely.
The main assault group was me, Lucifer, Mazikeen, Kori, Raven, Kara, and Dick. Seven of us against whatever Trigon had waiting in the Nevada desert.
Morgana's team consisted of herself, Batman, Flash, and Diana. Their objective was straightforward—engage and free every possessed Justice League member still under Trigon's influence. Barry had the kryptonite for Superman. Diana had the raw power and combat experience. Batman had the plans, the contingencies, and the contingencies for the contingencies. Morgana had everything else.
Batman's son and Superman's son were staying behind with Lois.
That had gone exactly as well as expected.
Damian had looked ready to declare war on the concept of adult supervision, and Jonathan had looked torn between terror for his father and terror of Lois Lane when she was in full mother mode.
Lois had ended the argument with one look and one sentence. "You boys are staying with me." I respected her more every time she breathed.
By the time we gathered on the private beach beneath the safehouse, the sky had turned pale gold. The ocean rolled in soft gray-blue waves behind us, completely indifferent to the fact that we were about to go pick a fight for the fate of the world.
Lucifer stood in front of us all, hands in his pockets, looking absurdly relaxed.
Morgana's group waited beside ours.
Then Lucifer snapped his fingers.
One second, I was standing on a beach with salt wind in my hair. The next, I was in the middle of the Nevada desert.
The horizon stretched wide and empty around us, broken only by distant mountains.
And the gate. A massive archway towered over the sand, at least a hundred feet high. It was covered in runes that all pulsed with dark magic so potent I could feel it even from this distance.
That's what Trigon would come out of if they had succeeded in capturing Raven…
Raven made a small sound beside me.
"How the fuck did someone build that without anyone noticing?" I asked.
Batman's voice came through the comm in my ear, flat and grim. "This region has restricted federal zones dating back decades. Nuclear testing…"
Fucking Americans… I grumbled in my own head.
"This is truly god's country," Lucifer said in a way I was pretty sure was ironic.
I barely heard him because of what was between us and the gate.
I had never looked at this many enemies in one place before. Maybe tens of thousands. The desert was carpeted with them all the way to the gate. Lesser demons in every shape that bad dreams had ever produced. Things with too many limbs. Things with no limbs at all, just dragging themselves forward on tongues and teeth. Things that walked upright in shapes mocking humanity, skin gray or red or charred black. Some had wings. Some had no eyes. Some had nothing but eyes. The smell rolled across the sand toward us, sulfur and rot.
And above the army, hovering in the desert air, was the rest of the problem.
Superman floated thirty feet up with his arms crossed and his red eyes burning. His cape moved in a wind that did not exist. Green Lantern hung beside him, ring glowing sick green, constructs already forming and dissolving at his fingertips. Hawkgirl drifted on slow wing beats with her mace resting on her shoulder, head tilted at an angle no normal neck made. Cyborg stood at the front of the demon ranks like a general, sonic cannon already humming with a low, ugly pitch.
There were others further back. Black Canary. Aquaman. Faces I half-recognized from news clips and [Cursed Knowledge] alike. Trigon had been busy.
Superman's gaze swept across us. It stopped on Raven. Then on me. The corner of his mouth lifted.
I hated that expression on Clark Kent's face.
"Attack." Superman's voice carried across the desert without him needing to raise it.
Then he blurred forward, a streak of red and blue cutting toward us so fast that the air screamed around him.
Diana met him in the middle of the desert.
She should not have been able to. She was still bandaged under the armor that Bruce had scraped together for her, still bruised from her fight with Morgana the day before, still moving like a woman who had not slept in three days. But she lowered her shoulder and slammed into Superman with a sound like two trucks colliding, and the shockwave kicked sand and grit back across us in a hot wave.
Superman and Wonder Woman tore across the sky, striking, blocking, crashing into each other with enough force to shatter stone. Diana caught his fist on her shield and spun, slamming her knee into his ribs. Superman barely moved. His eyes flashed, and heat vision carved across her shoulder, burning through cloth and skin. She gritted her teeth and headbutted him hard enough that I heard it from the ground.
"Diana, hold him!" Batman's voice through the comm in my ear. "Flash, go!"
Barry was already moving. A streak of red lightning peeled away from our group and tore across the desert toward the spot where Diana had Superman pinned by the wrists. I caught a glimpse of Barry's hand. Something green and glinting between his fingers. The kryptonite. He covered the distance in less than a second, faster than any eye should have been able to follow.
Then Cyborg's cannon opened up.
WHOOOM.
The sonic blast caught Barry in mid-sprint. The wave distorted the air, hit him from the side, and sent him tumbling across the desert like a thrown rag doll. Red lightning snapped wildly around him as he bounced once, twice, then slammed into a dune hard enough to send sand fountaining upward.
I stared blankly. Then I rolled my eyes. "What is it with speedsters and always getting caught off guard?"
Dick shot me a look. "You're asking that now?"
"What? It's true."
Barry groaned over the comm. "I heard that. And don't worry, that was just the warm up!"
The demon army screamed. Every single one of them charged.
The sound rolled over the desert like a living avalanche. Claws tore through sand. Wings beat. Hooves thundered. Thousands of monsters rushed forward, mouths open, weapons raised, all of them hungry for blood.
Kara lifted off the ground, eyes glowing red. "Kori, with me!"
"With joy!" Kori cried.
Supergirl shot forward like a blonde missile. She hit the first line of demons with her fists outstretched and punched through them in a straight line, bodies bursting apart from the sheer force of impact. Black blood sprayed across the sand. A horned brute swung an axe the size of a motorcycle at her head. Kara caught the blade barehanded, crushed it into scrap, then drove her fist through his chest.
Kori rose beside her with hair blazing like a living flame. Starbolts rained from her hands, emerald light smashing into demons and detonating them in sprays of burning flesh. She laughed as she fought, bright and fierce and terrible. "For Tamaran!" she shouted, then grabbed a winged demon by the throat and hurled it into three of its friends hard enough to break all of them.
Raven floated upward, shadows boiling around her. Four red eyes opened across her forehead, and the air around her turned cold.
"Azarath. Metrion. Zinthos." Her magic erupted. A wave of black energy rolled out from her body and swallowed the first fifty demons whole. For a moment, their silhouettes thrashed inside the darkness. Then the shadows clenched, and the demons were gone.
Dick stopped closer and he squeezed my hand.
I looked at him.
His mask was already on. He leaned in and kissed my cheek, quick and warm, and his lips dragged just slightly toward the corner of my mouth before he pulled back.
"Try not to die, beautiful," he said.
"You first, pretty boy."
He flashed me a grin, drew his escrima sticks, and launched himself off a chunk of rock straight into the fray. He hit the demon line in a tumbling roll, came up swinging, and the first thing his stick connected with caught a charge of stored electricity hard enough to drop the demon twitching in the sand.
That left me, Lucifer, and Maze.
Maze stepped past me with that loose-hipped walk she had. She raised both hands and her knives just appeared in them. I did not see her draw them. They were not in her grip, and then they were, curved and black and glinting like obsidian teeth.
"Let's see what you can do, Amara," she said over her shoulder.
Then she moved.
Calling Mazikeen a whirlwind of death felt too poetic and not nearly literal enough. She hit the demons like murder given legs. Her knives flashed faster than my eyes could track. Throats opened. Limbs came off. Bellies split. She ducked beneath a spear, carved through the wielder's hamstrings, then spun and drove both blades through the skull of another demon behind her.
One tried to bite her.
She headbutted it so hard its face caved inward.
"Fuck, Maze," I muttered.
She heard me somehow. Of course she did.
"Enjoying the view, little succubus?"
"A little."
"Good!" She kicked a demon in the chest, ripped her knife free from another's eye socket, and disappeared into the crush of bodies.
The pact bond between us pulled tight at the edges of my chest, warm and bright and aroused at the wrong fucking time.
I gripped my wand and glanced at Lucifer.
He had not moved.
Lucifer Morningstar stood in the desert with his hands in his pockets, expensive shirt immaculate, hair perfectly arranged despite the wind and sand and approaching apocalypse.
Then the air around him changed. Dark power gathered. Lucifer's power felt like the first sin ever committed had learned to smile.
My knees weakened before I could stop them. Heat bloomed low in my belly, sudden and humiliatingly intense. My thighs rubbed together on instinct.
Traitorous body!
Lucifer turned his head and caught me staring. He winked.
I glared at him, mostly because I was seconds away from making a sound that would embarrass me forever.
"It has been a while," he said lightly, "since I personally laid out punishment for arrogant little demons."
I pressed my legs together. Hard. My tail thrashed once and I forced it still.
Lucifer lifted one hand.
The world seemed to hold its breath.
Then a blur of gold and white slammed down from the sky!
The impact struck Lucifer square in the chest and carried him off his feet before he could release whatever nightmare he had been gathering. Wings flashed. White, enormous, blazing with holy light. Gold armor caught the sun. The air shrieked as the figure shot past us with Lucifer in its grip and hurled him toward the distant mountains.
For half a second, I just stared.
Then the mountains exploded with light.
Gold and black collided across the horizon. A shockwave rolled through the desert, warm and cold at once, holy fire and infernal shadow ripping over the sand like a storm front.
"What," I said carefully, "the actual fuck was that?"
Maze cursed. It was loud enough to cut through the sound of a thousand demons dying around us. She was still moving, still cutting, but there was no laughter in the cursing. "FUCK!" she shouted. She slashed open the throat of a demon as tall as she was without looking at it. "FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!"
"Maze, what was that?"
"RAPHAEL!" she snapped. She kicked a demon in the chest, spun, opened another one from groin to throat. "That was fucking Raphael! Lucifer's fucking brother! One of those self-righteous winged pricks!"
"An angel?" My voice cracked. "An archangel just attacked Lucifer?"
"Yes! Yes, exactly that, well done, keep up, little succubus!" She decapitated something with three heads and only got two of them. "Either Trigon tricked him," Maze went on, breath hard, "or Raphael is being his usual moronic self and decided that since there is a demon army on Earth, Lucifer must be responsible! He never could think past his own halo!"
I looked toward the mountains. "That sounds insane."
"That sounds like his dumb-ass family!"
Fuck. We had just lost our heaviest hitter…
A demon came at me.
I saw it out of the corner of my eye, a big mistake on its part, breaking off from the main charge and lunging for me with two sets of arms outstretched. Its mouth opened too wide, a black-tongued cave full of yellow teeth, and it screeched something I did not understand and did not want to.
I snapped my wand up. "Burn."
Black fire erupted from the tip of my wand in a torrent. It poured out of me in a coiling, hungry wave, hit the lunging demon in the chest, and the thing did not get to scream. It just stopped, mid-leap, and crumbled to ash that the desert wind took before its bones hit the sand.
The fire kept going. It washed over the row of demons behind it. They came apart the same way. Ash to ash. The flames spread along the front of the charging army in a black wave, and the demons in the second rank started screaming because they could see what their friends were turning into.
I bared my teeth!
Fine.
Fine, Trigon. You want me. You took my devil. Fine. Come and get me.
"Corruptio Viscera!"
The curse hit a demon that had been trying to climb over the dying first rank. Its bloated body rippled, swelled, and exploded outward in a spray of black ichor that splattered three of its neighbors. They started to scream and then the curse caught on them too. The chain effect tore a hole in the demon ranks the size of a small house.
"Sectumsempra!"
Lily Potter's spell, used now to open a demon shaped like a praying mantis from hip to throat. Its insides slid out of the cut in pieces that should not have fit inside it.
"Reducto!"
A demon's head ceased to be a head.
"Bombarda Maxima!"
A whole cluster of them ceased to be anything at all.
I kept moving. Kept casting. The wand felt good in my hand, alive, hungry, eager to be used. The Stick of Lust and Death, my System had called it after it had eaten the demon Lust on a Central City ice rink.
I had not had time to think about what that meant. I thought about it now, with every curse coming out faster and harder than it should have. My body grew more excited with every demon that died screaming to my magic.
A wave of demons broke around me and I called more fire, this time in a circle, a ring of black flame that swept outward from my feet and crisped everything inside thirty yards. The ash floated up like dirty snow.
Somewhere above me, Hawkgirl screamed and dropped from the sky with a mace coming down on Kori. Kori caught the mace in one hand. The shockwave threw sand in a hot ring around them.
Somewhere to my left, Dick was a blur of black and blue, sticks rising and falling, taking down things twice his size with the kind of footwork Bruce Wayne had been drilling into him since he was a kid.
Somewhere ahead, Raven was rising higher into the air, her four eyes already starting to bleed open at the edges of her hood, and I knew that look. I had seen it in the Failsafe base. She was getting close to letting go.
I beat my wings once and shoved off the sand.
I came up beside her and hovered.
She was almost beautiful in a way that made my chest hurt to look at. Almost. Because the four red eyes burning under her hood were not beautiful. They were the eyes of something Raven had spent her whole life trying to never become. Her hood had slipped back just enough for me to see the way her face had set into something blank and savage, lips peeled back from teeth that looked sharper than they had been at breakfast. Her hair whipped around her face in a wind that was not blowing on me at all, just on her, just for her.
She was screaming. And the shadows. Oh fuck, the shadows.
They poured out of her in sheets. The demons came apart and then they came apart further, and then there was nothing left of them at all, just absence in the shape of where a demon used to be.
She was killing them by the dozen. By the score. She was a goddess of the ending of things, hovering twenty feet above the sand with her cloak boiling around her, and I floated next to her and just watched for a second because I did not know what the right move was.
Calm her down? I should probably calm her down. That was the responsible witchy girlfriend thing to do.
Raven hated losing control. Raven had spent her whole life building a fortress against losing control.
But also.
Fuck.
She was kicking so much ass! I had a problem and I knew I had a problem and I was going to deal with that problem later, in a bed, with her, probably more than once. Right now I had to figure out if Raven needed me to pull her back or if Raven needed me to let her finish.
The Veil Chain made the choice for both of us. The bracelet on her wrist gave a soft, bright pulse.
Raven sucked in a breath. The screaming cut off. The shadows around her did not stop, but they stopped boiling. They settled into something controlled again, still deadly, still wiping demons out of existence in sweeping arcs, but moving like a tool now instead of a flood. Her four red eyes flickered, blinked, and went back to two. Violet. Hers.
She blinked at me. Then her face went a startling shade of purple under the hood. "I, ahh, sorry, sorry, I am so sorry," she stammered. "I did not, I did not mean to, I lost control again—"
"Raven."
"My father, I felt him watching, and I just—"
"Raven."
"I am so sorry you had to see—"
"Raven." I caught her hand. Squeezed it. Grinned at her with every tooth I had. "Don't you dare apologize for that. That was sexy as fuck."
The purple under her hood got worse.
"Look down," I said.
She looked down.
The demon army beneath us was no longer charging. Whole sections of it had turned around. Hundreds of them were running back toward the gate, away from us, climbing over each other in panic. I could hear them screaming now that Raven had stopped, and the screams had words in them.
"Trigon's daughter!"
"The daughter is too powerful, we cannot beat her, fall back, FALL BACK!"
"She will end us, she will end all of us!"
"RUN!"
I watched a thing shaped like a dog with three spines try to fight its way past a thing shaped like a man with no face, just to get further from Raven. The faceless one stabbed it and kept running.
"Yeah," I said. "You did that."
Raven made a small sound. Half laugh, half disbelief. She looked at her own hands like they belonged to someone else.
"Oh," she said.
"Yeah."
Her mouth twitched. The corner of it tugged up despite herself, and she pressed her free hand to her face like she could push the smile back inside.
I was about to lean over and kiss her stupid when something orange tore past us at speed.
"SORRY ABOUT THIS, HAWKWOMAN!" Kori's voice. Followed immediately by a sound like a wrecking ball hitting a wall.
I twisted in the air just in time to see Hawkgirl's body come flying past us, wings limp, mace gone, going the wrong way through the sky at the wrong speed. She tumbled past me close enough that I felt the wind off her feathers. Her body slammed into the desert floor a hundred yards away, kicked up a long brown crater, skidded, and stopped.
She twitched once. Then went still. A thin column of red mist crawled up out of her mouth. It hovered above her body for half a second, formless and angry, and then a starbolt the size of my head hit it from above and the mist came apart in a wail that faded fast.
Kori swept down out of the sky toward us. "AMARA!" she shouted. "RAVEN!" She did not slow down. She crashed into both of us mid-air, one arm around me and one around Raven, and crushed us against her chest at the same time. Kori's body radiated heat like a small sun. Her arms were absurdly strong. I could feel the soft give of her breasts on one side of my face and the solid muscle of her shoulder under my chin.
"Kori—" I wheezed.
"YOU ARE BOTH SO INCREDIBLE!" Kori announced into the top of my hair. "DO NOT LET UP! WE ARE SO CLOSE TO VICTORY, MY FRIENDS, MY LOVERS, MY BEAUTIFUL WARRIORS, WE WILL CRUSH THEM ALL!"
"Kori, ribs."
"OH, YES, SORRY!" She loosened her grip approximately five percent. "Raven, you were the magnificent," Kori said, still squeezing. "Did you see how they fled from you? Did you see them run? They knew! They knew you could end them and they ran like the cowards they are! I am so very proud of you!"
Raven made a strangled noise into Kori's shoulder.
"And you!" Kori said, leaning her head back to beam at me. "The black fire, the curses, the explosions, it was art, Amara, it was art, like the finest Tamaranean war ballet but with more screaming!"
"Thanks, Kori."
"I am going to kiss both of you so many times when this is over!"
"Looking forward to it."
The universe, apparently, had been listening to her morale speech and decided to put its weight behind her.
Something red and blue and very, very loud slammed into the demon army from the south.
The shockwave hit us a heartbeat after the impact did with a wall of displaced air that pushed Kori backward in the sky and made me beat my wings hard to stay level. Sand and ash blasted upward in a curtain a hundred feet wide. The sound of the impact rolled across the desert like a thunderclap that had decided to keep going.
When the dust cleared, Superman was standing in the middle of the demon army.
He was breathing hard. His suit was scorched along one side and torn open over his ribs, and right at the edge of the tear was a small, clean stab wound. Not deep. Not bleeding much anymore. But there, ugly and obvious, exactly where someone moving at Mach speeds with a kryptonite shard would have aimed it.
His eyes were blue again.
The frown on his face was the worst part for the demons. Because Clark Kent, freed from a god's grip on his soul, was very, very angry.
He punched the demon nearest him.
The demon ceased to be a demon. It became a stain in the sand and a fine red mist that did not fully reach the ground before Superman had already moved on to the next one. He was a blur of red and blue across the front line, and where he passed, demons stopped being. His heat vision lanced out in a sweep that took down a row of them in a single arc. He grabbed a winged thing out of the air, swung it like a club into another six, and dropped what was left of it without breaking stride.
I caught a flash of motion further back.
Morgana's group, in among the rest of the possessed League. I saw a glimpse of green and black where Diana had locked up with Green Lantern, her shield deflecting a construct that should have crushed her, her other arm cocked back for a strike. I saw a streak of red lightning that was Barry circling somebody I could not make out from this distance. I saw the brief, terrible silhouette of Morgana hovering above the chaos, hair loose, hands raised, with a wave of black lightning crawling down toward a possessed hero on the ground.
They were going through the list. One by one. Free the League.
"Welcome back, Big Blue," I murmured.
Maze appeared next to Superman like she had been there the whole time.
I saw her say something to him. I saw him nod, grim and businesslike, and the two of them moved together into the next pocket of demons with the easy efficiency of two people who absolutely should not have worked well together but did. Maze with her knives. Superman with his fists. The demons between them stopped existing in tidy alternating rhythm.
Kara dropped out of the sky beside her cousin a heartbeat later. She did not say anything to him. She just gave him a quick, fierce look, and he gave her one back, and then they were both fighting again, side by side, two streaks of red cape carving through the demon ranks.
The army was getting swept up fast.
Kori made a happy sound against my hair. "OH, GOOD, KAL IS FREE! HE IS SO MUCH MORE FUN WHEN HE IS NOT GLOWING RED IN THE EYES!"
"Most people are," I said.
"I MUST GO HELP THEM!" She turned her head, planted a fast, smacking kiss on my cheek, and beamed at Raven. "AND ALSO YOU, MY LOVELY ONE, I WILL KISS YOU AFTER!" She released both of us and shot toward the heart of the demon army like a comet with a grudge. She hit a knot of demons trying to flee and turned all of them inside out in one sweep of starbolts.
That left me. And Raven. Hovering above a battlefield that was suddenly, finally, swinging in our favor.
I turned to her.
She was already looking at me. Her hood had slipped back the rest of the way. Her hair was a mess. There was a streak of something dark across her cheekbone that might have been blood or might have been demon. Her violet eyes were quiet now, present, focused on me with a steadiness that made my stomach roll over.
I let my mouth tip into a slow, sharp smile. "Hey, gorgeous. You see that big ugly eyesore over there?" I jerked my chin toward the gate. The thing still loomed at the far end of the battlefield, runes pulsing in their slow sick rhythm, the reddish haze inside the arch still pregnant with the threat of becoming a door.
Raven's gaze followed mine. "Yes," she said carefully.
"You want to help me destroy it?"
She smiled in a way I had never seen her do before. I shivered, scared and aroused at the same time. I forgot how to breathe for a second.
"Amara," she said, and her voice was warm and steady and absolutely certain, "I would love to."
Raven and I flew toward the gate together.
The closer we got, the more wrong it felt. The runes carved into the black stone had been pulsing in slow, sick rhythm the whole battle, but as we approached, the pulse picked up. Faster. Harder. Like the gate had noticed us and decided we were worth waking up for.
The reddish haze inside the arch deepened, thickened, and then, just before we got within a hundred yards, a black film stretched across the inside of the arch like a membrane. Not a portal. Not yet.
Just enough of one to let something look through.
Four red eyes opened in the film.
I knew those eyes. I had floated in front of them in my own bed only a few hours ago, naked above a sea of screaming souls, while their owner tried to crawl into my skull through a dream. They were the same now as they had been then. Huge. Burning. Pupils black as the spaces between stars.
The whole battlefield seemed to go quieter for a second.
"My daughter," Trigon said. The voice rolled out of the gate and through the desert air. "My foolish little Raven."
"Don't," Raven said. Her voice was small and hard. "Do not call me that."
The gaze turned to me next. "...And the whore."
I rolled my eyes. Wow… He really is a petty giant asshole.
Raven snapped at her father, "You do not get to speak about her. You do not get to look at her. You do not even get to think her name. She is not yours to insult."
I bit the inside of my cheek so I would not smile. She was so cute when she was murderous.
The eyes in the gate narrowed. "Hold your tongue, child."
"No!"
"You shame yourself!"
"I shame you," Raven shot back. "You are what shames me. Every cell of you, Father!"
Trigon made a sound that was not laughter and was not a growl. Somewhere in between. The film inside the gate rippled. "I will offer you this one last time, my daughter," he said. The voice softened. Tried to. It was the worst thing I had heard him do. He was trying to sound paternal. "Channel your power into the gate. Open the way. Stand at my side as you were always meant to. Let me come through. I will forgive your indiscretions. I will forgive the half-breed who soiled you. I will be merciful, daughter. You need only obey."
Raven looked at the four eyes for a long moment. Then she smiled. It was not the bright, real smile she had given me when I asked her to help me destroy his gate. This smile was something else. Something colder. Something I made a mental note to never be on the receiving end of. "Fuck no, Father."
I bit harder on my cheek.
"I do not belong to you," Raven went on, voice steady, climbing in cold conviction. "I never did. You sired me. That is the only claim you have on me, and that claim is not enough. You will not come through this gate. You will not touch this world. You will not touch her. You can stay in Hell where you belong. Forever."
The four eyes flared. Sand around the base of the gate lifted off the ground in a slow, wrong way. "YOU ARE MINE." The voice cracked. The film inside the gate rippled outward like something had punched it from the other side. "HOW DARE YOU DISOBEY ME."
"You don't own her, you red asshole," I snarled at the gate. "Get used to it!"
The film bulged.
Then it solidified.
Raven and I sucked in a breath at the same time, because the black surface of the membrane had just become a hole.
And out of the hole, a hand shot through.
A hand the size of a fucking skyscraper.
The skin was red, deep arterial red, cracked in places with veins of something hotter and brighter underneath, like the lava under a planet's crust had been pulled up through a mold of muscle. And it was reaching. Reaching for us. Each finger curled open in slow horror as it crossed the desert air toward where Raven and I hovered.
"Impossible," Raven breathed. "He, no, no, he should not be able to do that! Not without the gate fully open. Not without me. He, the cost, the cost on him would be, it would tear him apart, he would weaken himself for centuries to push this much through, Amara, it's impossible!"
"It is worth it!" Trigon's voice came back through the gate with a hitch in it. Pain. Real, raw, animal pain. "It is worth any cost to capture the both of you."
We let our guard down! I tried to fly back. I could not.
My wings were still moving. I could feel them. But the air around me had thickened. The presence of his hand, just the closeness of it, the weight of his focus, had turned the desert sky into something I could not push through. My body locked up like the worst sleep paralysis I had ever felt. I could see. I could feel. I could not move.
Raven was the same. Her eyes went huge. Her cloak hung limp around her.
The hand kept coming. The shadow of it fell across us.
Oh fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.
I could not move my fucking arm. I could not raise my wand. I could not even open my mouth to scream at it.
Raven was making a small, terrible sound next to me. A sound I would carry with me forever. The sound of a woman who had spent her whole life dreading exactly this and was watching it happen anyway.
The fingers started to close.
Something dark whipped down out of the sky!
It came so fast I caught it only as a streak of pure black. It came down at an angle from somewhere high above us, sliced cleanly through the wrist of the massive red hand, and kept going for half a second before it dissipated into nothing.
The hand stopped.
For one perfect, suspended moment, Trigon's giant red hand hovered in the desert sky with its fingers half-curled around Raven and me, severed at the wrist, smoke pouring from the cut where lava-bright blood should have been.
Then it fell. The size of a skyscraper. It fell.
I felt the pressure on me snap the second the hand started to drop. My wings caught air again. My lungs unlocked. I grabbed Raven and threw both of us sideways and up, beating my wings hard, climbing fast, dragging her with me as Trigon's severed hand crashed into the desert below us.
The shockwave hit a second later and threw us another twenty feet up.
WHOOOOOM.
Sand and ash and demon corpses blasted outward in a ring half a mile wide. A whole section of the demon army that had not already been running ceased to exist. The hand itself buried half of itself into the earth on impact, fingers still twitching, smoke pouring from the stump.
Inside the gate, still in alien hell, Trigon roared in pain!
"DAMN YOU MORNINGSTAAAAAAAAR!!!!
A figure came down out of the sky. Lucifer Morningstar looked like shit. His suit was destroyed. The shirt was ripped open across his chest, blackened along one side like he had been close to something that burned. His tie was gone. His hair, perfect at breakfast, was wild now, falling across his forehead in disheveled strands. There was blood at the corner of his mouth and a long, deep cut across one cheekbone that had not yet closed.
My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. I forced it down. I forced my face into something other than naked relief.
"Good timing," I said. My voice came out almost steady. "Because for a second there I really thought you weren't going to make good on your end of the deal. You know. The deal where you handle Trigon if he manifests."
Lucifer turned his head and grinned at me. "I am a devil of my word, darling," he said. His voice was a little rougher than normal. He had been screaming at something for a while. "Though I will admit, I did not expect one of my foolish brothers to drop in and try to stop me. Raphael always did have a flair for catastrophic timing."
"You beat him?"
"I sent him home." Lucifer rolled one shoulder. "I apologize for the delay. Family matters do tend to interrupt one's evening."
Raven was staring at him. Then at the severed hand still smoking in the desert. Then back at him. "You cut off my father's hand," she said.
Lucifer inclined his head. "I did."
"Thank you."
"My pleasure entirely, daughter of Trigon. He has been overdue for a lesson in manners."
Raven did not respond to that. She did not have to. Her face had already gone hard again, but in a new way. She turned to look at the gate, at the eyes still burning inside the wounded membrane, at her father bleeding through the seam in reality.
She raised both hands above her head.
The shadows of the desert came to her.
Every shadow within a mile. The shadow of every demon corpse. The shadow of every rock. The shadow of every bit of debris kicked up by Lucifer's brother's interference and the falling hand. They lifted off the ground and flowed toward her, gathering in a slow, dark spiral that climbed up her arms and pooled between her palms.
"Azarath," Raven started.
The spiral compressed.
"Metrion."
The spiral compressed again. Tighter. Denser. A ball of pure black between her hands the size of a basketball, then a softball, then a baseball, then something the size of an apple that had so much density behind it that the air bent around it.
She looked at the gate. She looked at her father's eyes inside it. She smiled, that cold smile again, the one I was going to remember for the rest of my life.
"ZINTHOS."
She brought her hands down.
The compressed shadow released as a single black beam. She struck the foundation. The base of the gate.
The foundation cracked. The whole structure shuddered.
The membrane in the middle, the black film with Trigon's eyes still burning in it, flickered too. Not black anymore. It flashed through colors. Red. Then gold. Then a sick green. Then a deep violet. Then, for one impossible second, a full bright rainbow that spilled out into the desert like someone had cracked open a prism.
The gate started to come apart.
Stone the size of houses began to slide. The runes spat sparks. The arch began to lean.
"You have bested me!" Trigon's voice came through the rainbow membrane, ragged and furious and very, very pained. "But I told you there would be consequences, you damned succubus!"
My stomach dropped. The voice was talking to me now. Not Raven. Me.
"ENJOY NEVER SEEING MY DAUGHTER AGAIN IN THIS REALITY!"
"WHAT!?" I blurted out.
Something on the gate lit up that had not lit up before. Runes we had not seen. Runes that were obviously a trap, meant to activate once the gate was destroyed.
My whole body lurched forward in the air. My wings beat hard, instinctively, fighting it. They did not matter.
A hook sank into my soul and it YANKED. That was what it felt like!
I shot forward towards the failing rainbow trap.
"AMARA!" Raven's voice. Behind me. Already too far behind me.
I twisted in the air, fought, beat my wings as hard as I had ever beat them, tried to angle away, tried anything. The pull dragged me toward the membrane like I weighed nothing. The desert blurred past me on both sides. The gate filled my vision. The rainbow flickered. The eyes in it were no longer four. They had narrowed in triumph.
I saw Raven lunge. I saw her hand reach for me. I saw her fingertips brush my wrist and slide off because I was moving too fast already and she could not match the speed of the pull.
I saw Lucifer turn, faster than human, faster than thought, one bone wing sweeping out toward me with terrifying precision.
He almost made it.
His fingertips grazed my ankle.
I screamed.
I do not remember what I screamed. A name. A curse. Raven's name. Maybe his. Maybe Morgana's. The sound came out of me ragged and full of everything I had, my wings still beating uselessly behind me, my wand still clutched in my hand, my body hauled forward at a speed I could not fight.
The membrane rushed up.
Rainbow flickered across my face.
Trigon's voice, soft and savage in my ear like he had pressed his mouth to it. "Goodbye, little whore."
I fell through.
…I had no idea how long I was falling.
The rainbow void stretched in every direction around me, just an endless churning kaleidoscope of color that shifted faster than my eyes could follow. Red bled into gold bled into a sick green bled into violet bled into colors I did not have names for. There was no up. No down. No air, exactly, although I was breathing.
There was just falling. Endless, screaming falling.
At least I had not ended up in Hell.
That was something. That was the thin, miserable sliver of a silver lining I had to cling to as I tumbled through whatever the fuck this was. I had been ready, in those first awful seconds, for the rainbow to dump me at Trigon's feet.
It had not happened. Whatever this portal was, it was not pointing at Trigon. It was pointing somewhere else.
The where was the problem.
This was like the worst possible portkey. A never-ending portkey from hell.
My clothes had been the first to go.
I had felt them shred about ten seconds in. The simple black combat outfit Morgana and I had transfigured for the assault, gone, peeled off me by the violence of the pull. My boots had ripped off my feet. My bra had snapped. My panties had torn away like wet paper. I had spent the rest of the fall completely naked, wings stretched out behind me whether I wanted them or not, tail whipping in the rainbow current, my black hair lashing across my face hard enough to sting.
I was extremely glad I was not a regular human anymore.
The forces in the void would have done a lot worse to a regular human than just stripping them naked. I could feel the pressure of it on every inch of my skin, the way the speed of my fall was abrading me, the way my body was being battered without me having anything to brace against. My succubus body absorbed it. The bruises bloomed and faded almost as fast as they formed. My healing factor was burning hot at the edges of my muscles to keep up.
If I had been Heather Potter, the squib, the orphanage girl with no enhanced regeneration and no demonic constitution, I would have been a fine red mist by now.
Then it ended.
One second I was falling through forever. The next, the rainbow stopped, the void stopped, the pull stopped, and I was simply moving very fast through real air in a real place with real gravity and a real, very solid wooden surface coming up at me at speed.
I hit it.
I hit it hard.
CRACK.
The table I crashed into shattered. I felt the wood split under me, felt my body punch through it like a wrecking ball through a fence, felt splinters bite into my back and shoulders and the meat of my hip. The legs of the table snapped at the joints. Something on top of the table, books or candles or both, went flying. I hit the floor a second later in a tangle of broken wood and my own wings.
The back of my head smacked the floorboards.
THUD.
White light exploded behind my eyes.
For a few seconds, I could not move.
The ceiling above me spun. Stone walls. Red hangings. Warm firelight. Curtains. Beds.
A dormitory?
My head throbbed so hard I tasted metal.
A hot trickle slid down my temple.
Concussion, my brain supplied helpfully. And it was a bad one and pretty much all my magic had exhausted itself already healing me in the rainbow death void.
Screaming. Yelping. Three voices all at the same time!
"AAAH!"
"AAAAH!"
"AAAH WHAT JUST HAPPENED!"
I tried to lift my head and the room tilted again and I had to put it back down on the splinters and my own hair.
"HOLY FUCK!"
The first voice that I could make out clearly. That voice. Something about it tugged at memory. Familiar, but wrong.
"DAMMIT, LILY!" Different voice. Same volume. Older sister energy. "I TOLD YOU TRYING TO SUMMON A DEMON WAS A BAD IDEA!"
"HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW IT WAS REAL, MARLENE!" The first voice again. The familiar one. "I JUST BOUGHT THIS BOOK FROM A SILLY MUGGLE SHOP OVER THE SUMMER, IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A FUN WAY TO START THE NEW TERM!"
A third voice, softer than the others, came in from somewhere off to my left. "Is she really a demon? She has wings, and horns, and a tail, I guess. But otherwise she is really pretty. And she looks human. And she looks hurt, look, her head is bleeding. And she is also naked, and her body… WOW."
I tried to push myself up. Bad idea. The room lurched sideways. My stomach rolled. My elbow slipped in something wet. Blood, probably mine. My wings twitched uselessly beneath me, one of them caught under a broken table leg.
I tried to speak. I think I tried to ask where I was. What came out of my mouth was a wet, slurred sound that did not have any words in it.
"Hhuuh."
Excellent. Very intimidating. Truly the entrance of a powerful demoness.
"You are right, Alice," said the second voice, Marlene. "She is hurt. She crashed into our table really hard."
"Did we, did we botch the summoning ritual?" The first voice sounded worried. "Hey. Hey, are you alright?"
I forced my eyes open properly.
Three girls around my age. All three of them were in nightclothes. One of them had a wand in her hand, lowered, like she had forgotten she was holding it. Another had her hands clapped over her mouth.
And the one in the middle—
My heart stopped. I knew her face.
Red hair.
Green eyes.
A beautiful face, younger than the one I hated, softer around the edges, not yet polished into the perfect mask that had smiled at me across a table while discussing selling me like livestock.
My lips parted. No sound came out. The room tilted again.
"Where..." I swallowed, but my tongue felt thick and clumsy. "Where am I?" My words slurred badly enough that all three of them winced.
"You are in the seventh-year Gryffindor women's dormitory." She gave me a small, uncertain smile. "Hi. I'm Lily Evans, Miss Demon." She glanced at my horns, then quickly back to my face. "Who are you?"
I blinked at her. My thoughts tried to connect, failed, and collapsed into one tiny, perfectly reasonable conclusion.
Trigon had not sent me to Hell.
He had sent me somewhere worse.
"Fuck," I said. Then I passed out.
XXX
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