Determined, Nick returned to school. He left the bathroom to find Kody still waiting for him in the hallway.
She glanced around Nick’s shoulder, to the door. Then scowled. “Did you leave him in there?”
“Flashed him home.”
She let out a relieved breath. “How’s he doing?”
“Not good. He’s in a coma or something.”
Gaping in disbelief, she paled. “What? How is that possible?”
Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. What do we do, Kody? I don’t even have a clue on how to start to make him better.”
“Me neither. I’ve never heard of this. What did Zavid and Liv say?”
“Demons don’t get sick.”
“They’re right.”
Nick glanced to the door where the rider had vanished before homeroom. “Did you see or feel anything earlier?”
“What do you mean?”
“Before class started? When you were trying to get my attention? I saw a rider on a black horse with scales come tearing down the hallway. He rode straight through me and out the door that was flung open for no reason.”
She arched a brow at what he was saying. “Yrre? You saw Yrre? Here in the hallway?”
He shrugged. “I guess. Was that Yrre?”
“Dressed all in white?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded slowly. “But Yrre isn’t a guy. It’s a woman.”
“Oh. I didn’t get that. I couldn’t see a face or body shape. All I saw was the horse and the robes and scales… You think she had something to do with this?”
Kody took a minute to consider that before she answered. “You and Caleb closed the gate, right? You sealed everything?”
“Caleb said we did.”
“Then there’s no way Yrre could be free. The u?umgallu can’t assemble and ride without the Malachai to lead them. You’re their head and they need your blood to rise… I think it must have been another of your visions. It’s probably why you didn’t know she was a woman and couldn’t see her face. Maybe she was trying to reach out to you to get you to free her?”
That made sense, then. And she was right. In the past, Nick had always seen the riders in their true forms. Bane, Laguerre, and he was on first-name basis with Grim. They had come up to him as flesh-and-blood beings, not as the Ghost Rider of St. Richard’s Before the Bell.
But something was attacking Caleb. Something that was out to harm them all.
“You think it might be a sickness the Arelim sent to weaken him and get back at me?” An ancient society of divine protectors for humans, the Arelim were charged with maintaining order and ensuring that the Malachai demon remained dormant. Unfortunately, some of them had decided the best way to do that was to kill off Nick before he came into his full Malachai powers. They were the ones who’d originally resurrected Nekoda after her death in a future battle, and had sent her back in time to kill him before he matured.
Now that he had inherited his father’s powers, they wanted him dead before he mastered any more of them. And because Kody had blatantly refused to carry out her assassination orders, she wasn’t on good terms with them anymore, either.
Their rebel sect wanted her dead as much as they did him.
Kody shook her head. “If they were able to do that to Caleb, they’d have gone after you instead.”
Everything kept coming back to that one basic oh-so-testicle-shriveling fact. While the Arelim were in the middle of a bloody civil war, Nick was the number-one target for the rebels. They’d give anything to lay hands to him.
Kody was right. If they had something powerful enough to take down Caleb, they wouldn’t have wasted it on Nick’s protector.
They’d have unleashed it on Nick and taken his head as their trophy.
“This day just couldn’t get any stranger.” No sooner had those words left his lips than the lights went out in the school and the building shook as a loud clap of thunder sounded right before hail pelted down.
Hard.
“Nick… you’ve got to quit saying such things.”
“Yeah. If —”
Kody covered his mouth with her hands before he could speak another word. “I’m not kidding. You are one of the handful of beings who can call down Armageddon, and from the looks of things, you just did it. Congrats. Now, until we have more information, you should probably play mute.”
That was good advice.
For once, he’d take it.
At first, Nick just thought the storm he’d seen earlier had arrived. But there was something ominous about this one. A heaviness to the air that wasn’t quite right. Every part of him sensed it. And he wasn’t alone. Everyone in the school seemed to be on edge, all of a sudden.
As the storm picked up volume, and the hail started striking the old brick building with enough force to shatter windows, teachers brought students out to the hallway in a tornado-style drill.
Nick slid his gaze to Kody. “You know, I’ve been through more than my fair share of hurricanes and tornadoes… I ain’t never heard anything like this. What about you?”
“Sounds Apocalyptic.”