feet, stumbling to stay upright, only to crash into a body beside me. I don’t even have a chance to look up before the person is shoving me away from them, the force so violent that I go flying back, smashing into someone else before I land hard on the ground.
“Don’t...fucking...touch her.”
My head snaps up, my aching arm forgotten as I look around to find the voice. “Toreon.”
He’s there, on his knees, his arms outstretched and held high above his head. My eyes follow the direction of his palms, and I gape at the sight of the portal that he’s building above him. It’s got to be thirty feet in diameter.
Reeling from his palms are threads of golden power. It slowly unspools from him and into the portal ring above, circling and spinning, the thin strings of light like glowing strands of hair that are braiding together.
“Toreon,” I say again, but this time, my eyes take him in, and I see the heavy exhaustion in his face. His golden eyes are gone, and bleached-out irises look back at me. His face is sunken, his green body sickly with a graying pallor. Even his hair has faded from thick, silky black strands to stringy chunks, the roots starting to go white.
He needs help, and he needs it badly. He looks like life itself is being sucked right out of him, and my mate instincts are screaming at me to go to him, to give him my blood and power.
I start to scramble to my feet, only to find a helping hand on my arm, and I look over and find Delta. She has a grim look on her face and a flash of fear in her gray eyes, her gaze trained over my shoulder. As soon as I’m on my feet, I look around, noticing our surroundings for the first time.
We’re outside, but from the look of the red-star speckled black sky, we’re still in Hell. Surrounding us in a gathered circle are thousands of demons. They stretch farther than I can even see. Some have wings, denoting them as Abdicated, but most don’t. They look on, absent of any expression, no fidgeting or noises coming from them, and for a group this large, it’s uncanny. The lack of life in them gives me the creeps.
My eyes scan around, and aside from a heavy mist in the air and a colorless ground, it almost looks like we’re in a graveyard of some sort. Except...there are no graves or markers, save for a single stone jutting up from the ground. It’s the blackest, shiniest obsidian, and it’s taller than a house, jagged and raw, like it’s always been there and always will be.
The Origin Stone.
I don’t know how I know that’s what it is, but I do, and standing right in front of it is Morax with a now restrained Lucifer. I frown at the strips of glowing white cloth that Lucifer has wrapped around his arms and legs, keeping his limbs bound together. It looks...negligible, and yet, Lucifer is straining against it like it’s the strongest material in existence, his body unable to move.
“What the fuck is this?” the Devil snarls, his arms wrenching and pulling, his muscles bunching with every move, the tendons in his neck strained.
“I thought you’d like it. Just a little family heirloom I saved from our time in Heaven,” Morax says with a satisfied expression before he reaches up and shoves another piece of the glowing cloth right into Lucifer’s mouth. Just as quickly, Morax wraps the last strip around his head to bind the gag, all while Lucifer stares at him like he wants to shoot fire out of his eyes.
“It’s stopping his power,” Delta hisses into my ear, and my stomach drops at the implication of that. How the Devil himself could be cowed so quickly terrifies me. He’s supposed to be so powerful, so formidable. If he can’t best the Ophidian, what the hell are we supposed to do?
A ragged gasp to my right brings my attention back to Toreon. He’s waning. His body slumping forward, even as his hands are still held up above him, arms shaking with effort. How much more power does he have to give before he dies?
I start to move toward him only to be immediately stopped in my tracks. “Don’t even think about it, Annulus,” Morax calls out.
Delta holds my arm tight as we turn to face him, and he looks back at us with unrepressed displeasure.