Birthright - Book 2 of the Legacy Series (An Urban Fantasy Novel) (16 page)

“Where is she?” I screamed again, clawing at its stomach and ripping the flesh apart. With an almighty, feral roar, I tore the monster’s stomach open, sending bits of gore flying. I pulled flesh out, hoping to see something, anything, that might lead me back to my vision to correct it. I would kill Crowley and Dad. I would heal Gil and resurrect my mother. Then, we would live a happy goddamned life like we deserved.

But the Baku had nothing. It lay motionless as I dissected it mercilessly.

“WHERE IS SHE?”

I abandoned the stomach and hopped on its head.

“Give me my mother back,” I yelled as I began pounding it furiously. I have no idea how long I stayed there, punching and hitting the elephantine skull. I have no idea how long Gil screamed at me, or when the room descended back into the Zoo.

I felt a sharp smack on the back of my head and turned to face my new enemy. I made feral sounds that no human should be able to make.

Gil stood behind me, her eyes wide with fear. She held her hands in front of her, still in position after shooting out a wind spell.

“Erik?” she managed to say.

I stood up and suddenly my head cleared. I looked at the Baku carcass and nearly threw up. The monster was a raw mass of splintered bone and ravaged flesh. Its face was mush, the head nearly caved in. Its stomach lay inside out, with bits of intestine dangling from the gaping hole running along the length of its underbelly.

I looked at my hands. Blood covered them all the way to the elbow. I saw bone on my hand and tried to flick it away with disgust, but it just wouldn’t leave. Only when I tried picking the bone with my fingers did I realize that it was actually
my
bone. My knuckles protruded from beneath the skin, hardening into smooth, white calluses.

Black tendrils, like billows of gas, clung to my body.

Slowly, as my head cleared, I saw the bone protrusions shrink back into my hand. Skin immediately covered the wounds and I felt only a slight sting. The black tendrils surrounding me dissipated and all that remained was a dark outline, like a living shadow.

I heard Mephisto approach from behind.

“That was certainly an interesting display of pow–”

I swung my fist into him in a hammer fist strike. The soft underside of my fist connected with him and sent him flying across the Zoo. The demon crashed into a table and broke several glass beakers, showering him with chemicals that sizzled and combusted.

Gil gasped. No one had ever landed a hit on Mephisto. We grew up thinking he was invincible, a monster beyond our grasp. And yet, without thinking and without planning, I managed to send him flying with one blow.

Mephisto stood up, clutching his arm. He must have blocked at the last moment to prevent serious damage. His arm was bent in three different angles. He got to his feet and stared at me for a full minute.

“How about now?” I asked him. We both knew what I was talking about.

Crowley. He had to be destroyed. I had no proof against him, save for a vision and some chills down my spine, but I knew it, deep inside my heart — inside my very soul — that he was a monster that must be destroyed.

Mephisto’s expression changed to a sadistic smile as he grabbed his arm and twisted it back in place. It hung uselessly by his side.

“Yes,” was all he said.

And it was all I needed.

Mephisto escorted us to our bedrooms in complete silence and left us there. He hadn’t said a single word after the incident at the Zoo; it was business as usual as far as he was concerned. Gil kept asking me what was wrong. My expression must have been a dead giveaway to someone who knew me as well as she did.

I told her nothing.

What could I tell her, really? How would I even phrase it?

“Hey, sis. Remember our dad and the creepy guy with him? Yeah, I just had a vision and saw them mutilating our dead mother and killing us. So, right about now, I’m thinking of killing them before they kill us. I have no proof, by the way, but after hugging some imaginary tree roots, I seem to have awakened powers that not even our millennia-old demonic teacher can begin to understand. So, I’m gonna listen to them, because good old-fashioned logic stopped working about five years ago.”

Somehow, I didn’t see that going well. My sister would play Twenty Questions, and I didn’t have the answers. I knew that my father and Crowley were plotting something sinister, but I didn’t know what, why, or how. I just knew. She would tell me to wait until we had some proof, but she didn’t have that vision.

She didn’t see the expression on our mother’s face.

I mean, it’s one thing to face death defiantly and choose to fight until the bitter end, but my mother’s look was one of surrender. She had no choice but to lie in that coffin, die, and then be ravaged by a monster. It was that look which made me want to hurt Crowley so much. My mother didn’t deserve to die. I didn’t know her, but I’ve seen pictures of her. I kept a small picture of her in my bedroom, just to have something to look at that was truly beautiful. The moment I got inside my room, I sat on the bed, grabbed the small frame, and just stared at her face. She had kind eyes, the sort you cannot fake. I believe that she was a genuinely good person. No good person deserves that fate.

I must have lay there on my bed for hours, holding the picture frame high. I had burned my mother’s image into my brain for years, and yet I still couldn’t get enough. This was my relaxation time, when I would stare at the one person who provided some sort of sanctuary from this world of horror. Alone with just my thoughts and my mother.

But this time, when I gazed into those green eyes, all I managed to see was the horrified, broken expression on her face as blood splattered all over her.

I have no idea why I had the vision. Baku poison was supposed to send the victim into a trance and their minds into a dream state. As the victims sink deeper and deeper into that dream, their minds slowly shuts down and the Baku gets a meal. Perhaps the toxins act as a hallucinogen. Or maybe I did enter the dream state, but my healing prevented my brain from shutting down. The voice heard during my hallucination kept echoing inside my head like an alarm clock gone off in a faraway room.

“
Every dream is a shard of reality
.”

It was the same voice I heard when I got fried by the phoenix. I had gone to the same dark void, the red desert. Both times, that strange tree had been there. And both times, I had emerged more powerful than ever. Perhaps it was all a build-up to this moment. Perhaps there was some higher power guiding me through all of this, pushing me toward a goal that I had yet to discover.

Or maybe it was just me. Maybe it was my voice and my own power. The reasoning part of my head told me that things aren’t always what they seem. I needed something to convince me that I wasn’t losing my mind.

And just like that, lying on my bed and staring at my mom’s picture, a plan formed in my head. I remembered the vision. It all happened in my father’s study, the one we were never allowed to enter. The one place where everything started. Where Mephisto took us to get our initiation in the magical world. Where my father nearly scorched me to death with a purple fire phantasm. If there were secrets to be found, they would be there.

But how would I get in? There were locks, bolts, wards, charms, you name it. Nothing was getting inside that office without a specific key, just like the Arena or the Zoo.

My mind connected two and two and I sat up so suddenly that my abdominal muscles cramped.

Of course. How could I have been so dumb?

I wiped sweat from my brow and placed my mother’s picture against my chest. It all made sense now. Gil and I didn’t need to train inside the Zoo — not when we had trained in the forest for nearly our entire lives.

We were being trained for sabotage.

It was the only thing that made sense. We knew how to capture and kill monsters. But Mephisto took a step further and taught us all about locks and seals. He seemed to know exactly what my father was planning, but couldn’t say. I remembered the lesson about demons. He had casually mentioned the contract he had with our father. There was no need to mention that, and yet he said it, nonetheless. The same thing with channels. Why raise the subject of super-channels if none of us could use them? He wasn’t surprised to see me die and heal back to life. Rather, it was more like he was waiting for it. He was training us not only to survive, but to rule.

All the pieces fit perfectly inside my head, and I was looking at a completed puzzle for the first time. He had taught us all we needed to know to overthrow our father and rule for ourselves. The question was, why? Why go against his master?

I rolled off my bed, stood up and opened the drawer. I kissed the picture and placed it back inside before reaching in again and pulling out a folding knife. After slipping the knife inside my pocket and walking to the door, I stayed there motionless, with my fingers curled around the door handle for a few minutes, collecting my thoughts and clearing my mind.

Tonight, I would break inside my father’s office. The locks would be easy. If there were phantasms or monsters guarding inside I would have to improvise, but I doubted that Dad would leave any creature to guard his valuable trove of information. You could never trust monsters: too smart, and they backstabbed you, too dumb, and they might just turn on you. Either way, I was confident that I could take on anything I met on my own. The knife would be less than useless, but having some sort of a weapon in my hand made me feel safe. The tricky part was the distance required. I had to move to the other side of the mansion, and do so without raising the alarm. I glanced at the clock on my nightstand. Midnight. It was two hours past curfew and the entire place was on lockdown. Gil and I never dared venture out of our rooms past our bedtime. Usually, we were too exhausted to even consider it. But now that I think about it, we didn’t know what went on at night in this house. This could make or break my plan, and if I got caught before finding what I wanted I would never get another chance.

I took a deep breath. If I lingered any longer I would probably chicken out. If needed, I would fight my way through. And I doubt even the toughest security guard on the premises had been through even an iota of the harsh training my sister and I had been through. Mephisto always used to tell us that if we could survive in a forest filled with monsters, we could survive anywhere.

Time to see if he was right.

I spent the night walking silently from one end of the house to the other. The wide corridors provided ample space to walk, but the overhead lights dimly illuminated everything. I had to press against the sides of the corridors, where shadows overlapped and provided me with some cover. I didn’t have as much liberty as I wanted; I had to stick to one side, away from the windows, or risk the patrol outside catching my shadow against the glass. Stealthily walking around your own house is not an easy thing. I kept my center of gravity low and my pace light, trying to avoid making a sound, and at the same time listening intently for anyone coming my way.

Turns out I had nothing to worry about. My legs ached after crossing an entire mansion, semi-crouched and taking one soft step at a time. I pressed against the wall and just as I began wondering why the mansion was devoid of security at this time of night, I caught a glimpse of one guard patrolling the corridor where I needed to go.

He wore the usual black camo’ outfit, and carried a small caliber automatic weapon from a strap across his shoulder. Around his belt, he wore several black cases and pockets — no doubt a small supply of magical ingredients. I’d seen his type before and knew these security guards weren’t powerful wizards. They usually fought as a team, overwhelming monsters with a relentless assault in numbers. This one looked young enough, probably around twenty years old. He must have been a new recruit to get stuck with guard duty in a dimly lit corridor with just a single office.

He hasn’t noticed me yet
, I thought as I grasped my knife and gently unfolded it. I didn’t have to kill him, just incapacitate him long enough to get what I wanted and then bolt. I could easily knock him out.

I turned to make my move, but before I could take one step, I heard a low growl from my feet. My heart nearly stopped as I saw a large, black figure, its yellow eyes peering into my own. I froze on the spot and the dog ceased growling.

Mephisto. What was he doing here? Where did he come from?

Was he going to stop me?

With a soft whimper, the dog turned tail and walked around the corner, into the corridor where I was headed.

“Who’s there?” I heard the security guard ask roughly as he levered himself away from the wall and tightly clenched his cigarette between his teeth. His hands were already on his weapon.

Mephisto walked up to him, his tongue hanging out. This was it. He would alert the guard and it would all be over. I pressed my back against the wall and squeezed the knife until the rubber of the handle dug painfully into my palm. I mustered the courage to peer around the corner, expecting the guard to call me out.

“Oh, it’s just you,” said the guard, as he leaned back against the wall and took a drag from his cigarette. I saw Mephisto turn his head back, looking at me, and he walked over to the other side of the corridor. He growled and let out a sharp bark before taking off.

“Shit,” swore the guard as he put out his cigarette and bolted after the dog.

I walked in front of the office door and looked over to where Mephisto and the guard had disappeared. Had Mephisto really just helped me out, or did he actually see something more suspicious than a sixteen-year-old with a knife trembling in the shadows of his own house? Either way, I took a deep breath and muttered my thanks to whatever kept the demon from ratting me out.

Now, I had to deal with opening the door. I instantly recognized the generic seal on the doorframe. Deciphering some of the components took more of a memory jog than others as I tried to remember all that Mephisto taught us. I began working on the familiar sigils, pouring traces of magic inside them, short-circuiting them, or else, just plain scratching the carving. It took the better part of an hour, working my knife and magic as precisely as I could. This was meant to be delicate surgical work, although with my lack of finesse, most sigils ended up looking like a child’s carving. Either way, I brought the system down and all I had to do then was pick the lock.