Demons Anchor

Chapter Nine: The Tear Opens

It came through the building walls like they were paper.

Not a wraith. Not any classification Selene had heard in the past forty-eight hours. It was a Hollow, the direct physical manifestation of the entity's will, wearing the shape of something almost human the way a hand wears a glove. Three of them. Moving through the shadow layer of the building's structure, visible to her the same way all shadow things were visible, as presence, as intention, as the particular wrongness of something that was designed to take.

Zarian moved first.

He was extraordinary to watch. She had no other word for it, not in combat, not in defense, but in the absolute economy of his power. Shadow demons, she had learned in two days of concentrated study, could not be touched in the same way shadow wraiths could not be touched. They existed between states. But the Hollows were different, manifested, physical, bound to the shadow layer but present, and Zarian met the first one with his bare hands and something happened between them that was both violent and silent, a collision of shadow energies that shook the walls.

Selene took the second one.

She didn't think. Her hand caught the Hollow's shadow-form the way it had caught the wraith in the alley; not grabbed, wrapped, her power encircling it the way roots encircle stone, slow and inevitable and impossible to argue with. The Hollow screamed. She felt the sound in her bones. She pulled, and it came apart like smoke, and the room blazed white for three seconds.

Then the third Hollow did something neither of them had anticipated.

It went for her shadow. Not her body. Her shadow, the specific attachment between her physical self and the shadow realm. It reached in and grabbed the connection, and Selene felt it like a hand reaching into her chest.

She gasped. Went to her knees.

"SELENE."

Zarian was there before she finished falling, one arm around her, his shadow flooding out around them both in a barrier that was not protective in the conventional sense but was absolute, a six-century wall of sheer force of will made manifest in darkness.

The third Hollow slammed against it and shattered.

Selene was breathing hard, both hands pressed to the floor, the glow everywhere now out of her control, blazing. She could feel the tear, four hundred feet below them. She could feel it the way you feel a wound. Raw. Demanding. Widening.

"The tear," she said. "It's"

"I know." His arm was around her, his voice against her hair. "The Hollows coming through means the breach has widened. The day-after-tomorrow window is gone."

"It's now."

"Selene"

"It's now, Zarian." She looked up at him. He was close, closer than he'd let himself be, his face three inches from hers, both of them on the floor of a room that was still shaking from the Hollow collision. "If I don't go down now, more will come through. Larger ones. And the people above us"

"I know."

"Then let me up."

He didn't let go. For one moment he didn't let go, and she felt everything in that moment, the six centuries and the eight weeks and the file he'd read three times and the coffee he'd made and the hand he'd turned over and the smile.

Then he released her, stood and held out his hand.

She took it and stood.

"Together," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Together," she said.

****

The descent into the tear was not physical.

It was the strangest thing she had ever experienced, stranger than the Council chamber, stranger than the shadow assault, stranger than her own power blazing through her hands. Zarian led her through the shadow network into the deep city, past the ordinary world, past the transitional zone, down into the layered dark below Chicago where the shadow realm was ancient and thick and the entity's presence was everywhere, a cold pressure in every direction.

The tear itself was visible from fifty meters away.

It was not what she had expected. She had imagined damage, a rip, a wound. What she saw was light. A vertical s***h of impossible white against the darkness of the deep shadow realm, ten meters tall and widening, and through it she could see, not the void, not the darkness, but another world. A world that looked like this one might have looked before the split, before shadow became separate from substance, when everything was one continuous layered reality.

She stood in front of it.

"The anchor point is at the center," Zarian said beside her. "The binding that the first Shadow Born placed, you'll be able to feel it."

She could already feel it. Of course she could. It sang to her the same way the shadows had always sung to her, the same frequency, older than anything else she had touched. Old and tired and loosening.

"The one who's been in there," she said. "Five hundred years. Can you feel her?"

A pause. "Faintly. She's very far in."

"But she's there."

"She's there."

Selene looked at the light. At the world through the tear. She thought about the Shadow Born theory, about becoming part of the barrier, about being the anchor.

She thought about five hundred years.

"If I'm Shadow Born," she said, "I'm not re-reinforcing something that's degraded. I'm replacing it."

"Yes."

"A new anchor. With my energy."

"Yes."

"Which means the old one would be, released."

She felt him go still beside her.

"I hadn't considered" he said.

"Because no one has ever tried to replace the anchor. They've only tried to reinforce it." She turned to look at him. "But if I put a new one in place"

"The old binding would dissolve," he said slowly. "She would,"

"Come out," Selene said.

Five hundred years. A woman in the tear for five hundred years while the Council called her a mechanism.

She looked back at the light.

"I'm going in," she said. "I don't know how long this takes. I don't know what it looks like from out here. I need you to stay at the boundary."

"Selene"

"And I need you to trust me."

He was quiet for a moment that contained a great many things.

"I trust you," he said.

She stepped forward.

The light took her.

It was not pain. It was not darkness. It was the sensation of being everywhere at once and from somewhere deep inside the tear, something ancient and exhausted felt her arrive and whispered, in a voice that had been waiting five centuries for an answer: you came.