He did see Cael just yesterday after all.
Gage shook his head and then urged me forward.
I took one last look at the battle. Aurelia and Cael ran together into battle with over a dozen angels of Avalon behind them. As they reached the horde, they fought their way through the demons to protect my friends.
They’d reach them in time and protect them. I had to believe that in order to focus on this cube.
The cube. This stupid thing went against the laws of nature, and I was going to put a stop to it.
Taking in a deep breath, I rubbed my hands together and stepped closer to the onyx stone.
“I got your back,” Gage said, and pulled his sword, snapping his wings out to literally cover my back.
Here goes nothing.
This was the one thing I hadn’t trained for. I’d healed souls and I’d created portals dozens of times, but this… there was no test run, only intuition.
Pulling on my power, I let it fill me up until my body was buzzing with it. My angel marks swirled as I inched closer, letting my gut guide me. And right now it was saying grab the cube and go from there.
There was a clang of metal behind me but I didn’t turn. I knew Gage wouldn’t let anything happen to me, and we were running out of time.
Reaching out, I grasped the cold black stone and then screamed as power, stronger and hotter than I’d ever felt before, shot up my arms and gripped my brain like a vise.
“Tate!” Gage yelled.
“I’m okay,” I grunted, but it was a lie. I wasn’t okay. I was definitely dying.
Pain ripped through my skull and invaded my head as I fought to flood the cube with my purple magic, doing everything I could to try to wrangle control of the magical object away from Apollyon and stop the stone from collecting souls and transferring them to the Netherworld.
I was weakening by the moment, and that’s when I figured out what was happening. The cube was feeding off of me. It was like a vacuum had been attached to my power and now it was sucking the life out of me. For every ounce of power I fed into it, it pulled ten times more and then turned it back against me.
A familiar sinister laugh echoed in my head, and I knew without a doubt that Apollyon was somehow using the thing to consume my soul.
I tried to pull my hands off of it but they were stuck. It was like Apollyon and I were playing tug of war for the enchanted stone. Me in Tartarus, him in the Netherworld.
Spoiler alert, I was losing.
Just when I thought I might keel over, a hand pressed against my back and a powerful burst of energy shot through me, giving me strength.
“I got you, sister,” Harley’s voice called into my ear, and I grinned.
She called mesister. Even if I died now, that was a win.
With renewed strength, I pulsed my power into the onyx stone and a crack shone on the surface. The wispy fibers that fluttered around it started to vibrate and squirm.
“Now pull!” Harley shouted, and a light bulb went off in my head.
The cube was pulling from Tartarus into the Netherworld. A vacuum. I needed to reverse the flow.
Instead of pushing my power into the object, I pulled, inhaled, calling all of my magic back to me—my soul, the souls that had been taken, everything, and it was like a bomb went off.
A kaleidoscope of colors burst from the cube. It cracked in half and souls exploded out of it. They shot out by the hundreds, floating, rolling, and running through a gash in the air that looked like a tear between the two worlds.
The fabric of reality between Tartarus and the Netherworld had broken and now it was bleeding souls. Souls that were whole and healed from my magic now that I’d destroyed the power the stone once held. Souls that the moment they stepped foot back on their homeland turned solid and wept for joy.
“Mind blown,” Harley muttered behind me.
I turned to look at her and was shocked to see that the land of Tartarus washealingalong with the returned souls. The grass turned green before my eyes, the sky growing from gray to ice blue. Souls were the essence that powered Tartarus, so with each soul that returned, Tartarus’ vitality returned as well.
