Finn grunted a noise that I couldn’t decipher when we popped out of the portal onto the lawn of a sprawling estate, almost a full week after the mess in Area 51.
“Interesting choice,” he murmured under his breath, his eyes on the structure in front of us. “Not what I expected when you said we needed to gather an army, but I guess it makes sense.”
I shrugged, not bothering to reply as I strode across the lawn to the front steps. After the massacre we had caused in Nevada—and the power I had expended there—I’d needed to actually sleep for the first time since Lucy’s funeral. There had been no options for skin to skin contact with my guardians in order to replenish my magic stores, but River had laid alongside me for the better part of a week, and somehow—despite the spiked fur preventing our skin touching—it had worked.
Thankfully, the darkness had kept all dreams at bay, and I’d been spared any painful attempts from Wesley at trying to dreamscape me. It was for their own damn good that I’d walked away. Hopefully they could see that now.
To say I was back to the fully-charged, almost overflowing power level I had maintained since breaking Bridget’s bracelet off and inviting in the darkness would not be true. But it was good enough for what needed to be done here.
Bells chimed in the old-fashioned bell tower somewhere on campus, signaling midday. If there were any recruits here, they would be at lunch in the cafeteria. Perfect place to grab them all at once.
The doors to the main building flew open with a hard shove of River’s black-spiked shoulder, and we followed him inside the building, which contained the life’s work of my adoptive Dad—and blood uncle.
“So how is this going to go down, little fox?” Finn asked me as we strode down the empty corridor, our boot heels clicking along with the scrape of River’s deadly claws against marble tile. “Just going to go in there and, what? Start bashing skulls and then repairing them again? Seems a bit rough, even for me. How old are these kids again?”
“Youngest would be eighteen,” I replied with a nonchalant shrug. “Old enough to make the right choice. I don’t need to hurt them for this. Not unless they make me. Deep breath now, demon boy. This will be a real test of whether Jonathan told the truth.”
“Told the truth about what?” Finn pushed, but I was already kicking open the doors to the lunchroom like some sort of badass heroine in a vampire flick. Of course, he hadn’t been privy to the conversations I’d had with my dad pre-death. The ones where he told me almost all Omega recruits were aware of their magical DNA and had willingly signed on to be changed and fight the eventual fight with my bitch of a bio-mom.
Guess we were about to find out.
“Excuse me!” someone shouted from the faculty table, shoving back her chair with a loud scrape. “Who the hell are you and what—”
The woman’s words cut off sharply as I turned to face her, giving her the full impact of my blacked-out eyes. My magic was riding me already, desperate to be freed in a room packed with several hundred potential supernaturals, and I could feel it lifting my hair like a possessed breeze.
With the woman’s abrupt intake of breath, the rest of the room slowly fell silent as well. All eyes focused on me and my companions.
Admittedly, we were probably cutting a pretty scary picture. Or at least, River and I were. Finn just looked like a handsome asshole, but his hands were sparking with demon magic and there was no mistaking the danger we posed.
“Instructor Green, nice to see you again.” I greeted one of my former teachers with an expressionless voice. “I do apologize for interrupting lunch, but I’m glad to see the training center has reopened. You make my job much easier for it.”
“Miss Davenport,” Instructor Pine—another of my former instructors and a rather elderly gentleman—replied with a shaking voice and wide eyes. “We weren’t expecting a visit from you. Are you… okay?”
I gave him a tight, probably cruel smile and ignored his question. “Before his death, Jonathan told me all of his recruits and agents were aware of the hidden motives behind this organization. Is that correct?” I took several steps closer to the faculty table as I spoke, addressing the team of fully qualified Omega agents who had been trusted to train and guide these up-and-coming students.
There were considerably more recruits than I’d ever seen during my brief stay in Omega Headquarters, which told me Jonathan had seen the need to increase numbers. Fast.
“Yes, that is correct.” This answer came from the stern-faced, retired Marine Instructor, Smithson. “Except for a select few who are not present here.”
“Good.” I nodded. “That time has come.” Spinning to face the roomful of recruits, I panned my gaze across them all and mentally shoved the bloodthirsty darkness aside. We weren’t here to kill.
“Anyone who has changed their mind and wants to run, now is your chance.” I projected my voice to be sure I was heard by everyone present. “If you stay, you’ll be kissing your current human life goodbye and joining my fight. Lots of you will die, I can confidently say that. But more will die if Bridget succeeds in her plan to overthrow humanity. So, choose now; you have five minutes.”
Dragging an empty chair out from the table closest to me, I sat down and folded my arms and waited. There was an initial period of stunned silence as my words soaked into the room, but soon whispers started up, recruits checking with the people around them to know what they planned to do. Would they stay? Leave? Had they really believed this would happen when they signed on?
It mattered little to me what they were discussing. If they chose to stay, I would change them as best as my magic would allow. If they chose to leave… well. It would be illogical of me to allow anyone to escape this room and potentially run to Bridget with news of my new army, so they wouldn’t be permitted to leave the campus alive.
“Miss Davenport,” a middle-aged woman said politely, coming to stand near me. Not too near, though. She clearly wasn’t an idiot. “I don’t know if you remember me? I instruct etiquette and decorum to the third and fourth years. Ms. Dobelman.”
I gave her a small nod; she looked familiar but not enough that I would have placed her.
“I think you’ll find most of these recruits will stay. The majority of them have only arrived recently. Director Pierre went on quite a recruitment drive in the months leading up to his death, so these trainees are fresh to their pledges.” She nodded her head out to the whispering recruits. “It’ll be the active agents who might pose more trouble. Many of them have forgotten the true objective here and will find it a hard truth to swallow.”
What she said made sense and echoed my own thoughts on the matter. “They will be a challenge for another day,” I responded with a nod of acknowledgement. “I’ll expect them all called off active duty and reporting here as soon as possible, of course.”
“Of course,” she murmured with a tight smile.
“Time’s up,” Finn announced, and I glanced up at him. “None of them left.”
Sucking in a deep breath for what was about to prove a very long afternoon, I stood and kicked my chair back to the table.
“Good,” I murmured. “We begin right now. No one is to leave this room until this is finished or they risk being pursued by my companion here.” I indicated to River, whose eyes were burning particularly bright and his fangs on full display. “You’re first,” I told the etiquette instructor, Ms. Dobelman. To her credit, she didn’t even bat an eyelid as she stepped closer to me and met my gaze.
“What do you need me to do?” she asked with a confident voice, and a smile tugged at my lips. Something told me this woman would turn out to be a great ally.
“Nothing,” I replied, reaching out a hand to touch her face. “This should be a simple, painless process. We will see, though.”
Magic leapt from my hand and into Ms. Dobelman with the ferocity of a breaking dam, and she stiffened in shock. Making a mental note to dial it down a bit, I let my natural-born Ban Dia power do what it so badly wanted to do… heal the mistakes of my grandmother.
It was over in seconds, so much easier than healing someone from the brink of death. If only I had known this sooner, maybe I could have saved Jonathan the trouble of arranging so many “accidents” to test my powers.
“It’s done?” Ms. Dobelman breathed when I removed my hand from her cheek, and I nodded, admiring the effects of my power. The magic was nondiscriminatory when released in the way I had just done. It healed everything it could find, including the effects of time on her body.
“It can take some time for the changes to manifest,” I informed her, and I took the ballpoint pen from my pocked and inked my bonding rune to her wrist. “You’re permitted to leave now.”
The magic in the rune flared and disappeared as it sank into her soul, and she gave me a weary smile. “Thank you,” she smiled, but even her heartfelt appreciation couldn’t touch the ice-cold, black lump that had once been my heart.
“Next,” I snapped, dismissing the now youthfully beautiful Ms. Dobelman from my mind and beckoning to a recruit close to where I stood.
From there, time began to blur. The process was a simple rinse-and-repeat, and I pushed myself to get through them all as quickly as possible. My worry was that my magic store would run out before I was able to finish, and that wasn’t an option.
Without any of my dianoch close by to heal me, I would be out for weeks when this was all done. So, I needed to push through every willing soldier before that happened.
My eyelids began drooping when the room was two thirds emptied, and I paused to snatch a chair to sit in. Finn handed me a mug of steaming coffee, and I squinted into its black depths.
“It probably won’t make a difference, but Lucy always talked about your mad coffee addiction,” he told me with a sad smile. “Maybe the placebo effect will help.”
Not wasting energy on a reply, I took a few greedy sips of the hot liquid, then beckoned the next agent-in-training over. I needed to speed up, or I’d soon find myself passed out on the floor of the cafeteria. Not a good look for the new leader of a supernatural army.
Forcing myself to finish changing the remaining recruits required every ounce of strength I possessed, but the darkness propped me up and gave me more willpower than I ever could have summoned alone. Eventually, after two hundred and sixty-seven recruits and trainers, I was finished.
“Now what?” Finn asked me, his voice bouncing around the now empty room in an echo.
“Now,” I panted, pushing myself up from my seat with shaking arms, “now, I need to rest again, and I need you two to keep an eye on things here. Everyone has been marked with my rune, so they cannot betray me in any way, but I need you to stop wars from breaking out between them until I’m back on my feet. Start with the faculty; get them on our side first. Ms. Dobelman will be an asset in this.”
Finn gave me a half smirk. “The silver-haired babe you changed first? You got it.”
I glared at him sharply, feeling the last remnants of my magic spark in my eyes.
“Chill, little fox,” he sighed, rolling his eyes. “No one will ever replace Lucifer in my heart. But I’m still a red-blooded demon with eyes in my head. Appreciating the female form doesn’t condemn me to hell. Oh wait.”
In no mood for jokes, I ignored him and dragged my exhausted feet out of the room and in the direction of our old apartment. I could only hope it hadn’t been reassigned to any of the new recruits since we’d been gone.
“As soon as my magic is restored, I will be finishing what we started here. Make sure all active agents are pulled from duty,” I ordered Finn, seeing as he had followed me this far. My voice was weak, and my step faltered, almost pitching me headfirst into a wall.
There was no way I was making it all the way across campus to the residential block. Digging deep, I used the very last of my magic stores to cast a portal which would deliver me straight into the master bedroom of our old apartment.
Whether I arrived or not, I had no idea.
