The Night Everything Fell Apart (The Nephilim Book 1)(102)

Arthur directed the jagged energy toward a boulder on the moor, a target he’d chosen in advance. The bolt hit precisely in the center. Shards of rock and grit exploded with satisfying fury. Feeling marginally more hopeful than he had in days, he flew back to the garden at T?’r Cythraul where Cybele sat waiting under the heavy clouds. Real clouds this time. The hellfiend cloud had finally dissipated, leaving Arthur a clear sky in which to practice the weather-calling skills he’d gleaned from his ancestors’ memories.

Cybele’s shirt was wet from his rain, plastered to her chest. Her nipples were hard. He tried not to stare.

“It’s getting easier,” he told her. He sat beside her on the bench. Closing his eyes, he envisioned the clouds above them moving away. The rain stopped.

“Nice,” Cybele said. “I think you have weather down. Your illusions are complex, too. Much more convincing than anything I can conjure.”

“Maybe,” he allowed. “But Mab’s not going to be fooled by a glamour. At least not for long.” He leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his spread legs. “How can I fight her? I can’t go past illusion. I can’t manipulate reality. She can.”

He’d tried, over and over, until he thought his brain would explode. He hadn’t succeeded in bringing so much as a speck of dust out of illusion and into the material world.

Cybele shoved a hank of wet hair out of her eyes. “It’ll come. It’s only been a day and a half since we left London.”

“That’s more time than we thought I’d have.” How the hell had Luc managed to keep Mab away this long? Abruptly, he buried the thought. It didn’t bear contemplation. He could tell Cybele’s thoughts were traveling the same disturbing path. She shivered, her shoulders hunching as she wrapped her arms around her torso.

“You’re cold,” he said, though he knew that wasn’t the problem at all. It was a warm April night. “I’ve done enough for now. Let’s go in.”

He folded his wings into nothingness. In the kitchen, he pulled on a shirt. They set out food they didn’t feel like eating.

“At least the hellfiends are finally out of the sky,” Cybele said, shoving her sandwich to the center of the table.

“Out of the sky,” Arthur said, “but not gone.”

His father’s old battery-powered radio provided news from the human point of view. The volcanic eruption had ceased. The Welsh authorities were clearing debris and counting the dead. Air traffic and train service had resumed on a limited schedule. Most people were back at their jobs.

Concurrently, there’d been a disturbing spike in street violence. In the last twenty-four hours, eighteen people had been murdered in London—a count fifty-four times the normal rate. Assault and rape were rampant. London wasn’t unique—other cities in the UK and around the world reported similar crime surges. Global trouble spots were boiling over.

“The fiends did less harm in the sky,” Arthur said. “Now that they’re interacting with humans...”

He pushed away from the table and crossed the room to retrieve the staff, propped on the wall by the door. For about the thousandth time, he rotated the shaft in his hands, feeling for a spark, a vibration, for anything that might indicate the wood wasn’t dead or the touchstone permanently dark.

Nothing. And yet...he couldn’t believe the fault was in the staff. It was in him. He wasn’t good enough. Not yet. But was there enough time to learn what he needed to know?

Guilt and frustration crowded in on him. “The fiends are my fault. If I hadn’t been so goddamned arrogant and—”

“And what?” She pushed her chair back from the table and rose, her posture angry. “Let Dusek kidnap me? Let him rape me and use my magic?”

“No,” he said. “Never that.”

“So stop beating yourself up about what you did. Regrets aren’t going to destroy those fiends.”

“Merlin’s magic can destroy them. Or at least send them back to Hell.”

“Arthur.” Cybele crossed the room and plucked the staff from his hands. Opening a tall cupboard, she shoved the staff inside and slammed the door. “Forget the hellfiends. We need to think about Mab. She’ll be here soon with Rand and Evander and all the others.” She paused, her throat working. “With Luc.” Recovering, she pressed on. “Will she play by the rules and call your British relatives?”

“I don’t know,” Arthur said.

“Tell me about them. Did you know them well?”

He sensed she was asking out of a desperate need to think about something other than Luc.

“My mother was the last of Merlin’s line,” Arthur said. “All the relatives I remember were my father’s family.” Their faces flashed through his brain, filtered through a boy’s memory. “The English kin visited T?’r Cythraul rather often. Great Uncle Percival was my grandfather’s younger brother. Brax and Avalyn, my father’s full brother and sister. There were two older cousins. Ronan and Harry. Harry lived with a witch whose name I can’t remember.”

“And...the one who challenged Mab?”

He felt a stab of pain. Locked in the cellar, he hadn’t witnessed Magnus’s death. “I didn’t know him well. That branch of the family rarely left Scotland. There was Collum, a jovial sort. And his cousins, Magnus and Morgana. They were twins—”