My heart sunk at his words.
“What is going on?” Leanne’s groggy voice filled the cavernous cathedral. I could no longer see her beyond all the beings that crowded around her.
She didn’t sound like someone who knew they were about to die. She sounded scared and surprised. Maybe I’d misinterpreted what she made me swear to earlier. And now my conscience warred against itself: break a promise, save a life, and damn myself this evening, or save my soul and leave Leanne to die.
“Ah,” the devil said, turning his head towards the altar. “It seems your friend has woken up.”
“What . . . ?” I could hear the confusion in Leanne’s voice. “No—” Her voice cut out to a scream and the smell of blood hit my nostrils.
At the smell, anger rose within me. I would no longer be meek. That had gotten me nowhere.
So I did something really, really stupid.
While the devil looked away, I lifted my leg and kicked him square in the chest, throwing all my weight into it. The force threw him across the room, and he smashed into the far wall.
The bones in the wall behind him shattered, and a plume of dust and decayed bone billowed out from the impact.
I ran for the altar, where the smell of blood had increased. I managed to easily elbow my way through the minions that surrounded Leanne since their attention no longer focused on her. Instead their bodies stood rigid, and their black, beady eyes were trained on the devil, probably shocked that anyone would try to harm him.
When I got to Leanne’s broken body and took in her absent, unfocused stare, I lost it. I fell on my friend, clutching her to me. No pulse pounded through her veins, no air moved through her lungs. She was gone.
It shouldn’t have ended this way; she shouldn’t have had to die simply because she was my friend. I was a coward to not insist on letting her go.
I sobbed over her body, only looking up once I felt the hairs along my arm and my neck stand on end.
The devil was impaled against the wall, three sharp white bones jutting out from his torso. They must have speared themselves right through his body when he hit the wall.
As I watched, he put a hand to one of his stomach wounds. It came away drenched in bright red blood.
For a second his eyes pondered the blood, and then a line between his eyebrows formed and his brows pulled together.
From the windows near the top of the church, a bolt of lightning lit up the cathedral, and from below the ground trembled. It seemed as though energy was gathering around the devil.
His lips drew downwards and his hair lifted.
Not again.
Andre had done something similar at Bishopcourt when his anger had possessed him. Something told me that Andre’s show of power would be nothing compared to this.
And it wasn’t. The devil let loose a roar, and the room exploded. Bones of all sizes and shapes burst from the walls. I shrieked and covered myself as fragments hit me, some of the sharper ones embedding themselves into my skin.
Above me the roof had blasted upwards. I only had precious seconds to get out of the room before the thing came back down and crushed me. If ever I needed to use my unnatural speed, now was the time.
I sprinted across the room and back into the catacombs I had passed through earlier.
“Get her!” The devil’s voice no longer sounded human. For someone whose day job was to torture damned souls, he sure didn’t deal with pain well.
Seconds after the words left his mouth, the ceiling slammed back down to earth. The ground shook and a burst of wind blew past me from the collision.
I glanced behind me and saw that rubble covered the entrance to the cathedral. I didn’t know how much time that would give me to get away, but I wasn’t going to waste it.
I sprinted down the subterranean hallways, turning down passages without stopping to worry where they’d take me. Anywhere was better than here.
The truth was, if we were on a ley line, I had no idea what city or world I was in. Nor did I know if I could get away from the devil on a night like tonight even if I found my way off the ley line.
“Gabrielle!” a girl’s voice called out.
That voice. It couldn’t be.
I stopped running and turned around to where the source of the voice had come from. Behind me stood three people I thought I’d never see again: Oliver, Andre, and Leanne.
Chapter 25
I blinked a few times. “Le-Leanne?” How could she be real? I’d left her bloodied body only minutes ago.
“Gabrielle . . . what happened to you?” Andre asked, his voice hoarse. His eyes raked over me, and I realized that bits of bone and rubble dusted my skin, and blood stained my clothes and face.
“Listen,” Oliver interrupted, “explanations can wait. Gabrielle, I say this with love: get your ass over here.” Even as he spoke, the shadows along the walls shivered.
Consort, they whispered.