Page 83 of Legacy of Chaos

“You shouldn’t. It’s been shut down for almost two months.”

Excellent. Closing her eyes, she channeled the powers that allowed her to weave electrons from all sources into spells. She wove a long thread into the device and then into the control panel, where it shot through the platform’s electrical grid, seeing the line that would take it to the glyphs.

She gripped the artifact tightly. Its power assist wasn’t needed yet, but as the thread began to travel below the water’s surface, her power started to fade.

In her fist, the device sparked a glow. Dim at first, its eerie green-white light intensified as it pushed her energy thread deeper and deeper. In her mind’s eye, she could see the depth as a set of numbers and could even read the temperature and pressure as the existing line transferred data.

The device’s glow became so bright she had to turn away from it. Others shielded their eyes. Mace, Blade, and Scotty popped on sunglasses they’d pulled from one of their dozens of pockets.

Keep going, keep going…

The thread stretched, inching down.

There! She could see the uppermost glyph. Fragments of it, anyway.

Almost there…

The thread stopped.

No!

Clenching her teeth and fists, she strained, drawing on every drop of her abilities. The artifact grew hot in her palm, its glow spreading through the rig as far as she could see, breaching even the darkness beyond the railings, where flying things flitted at the edges, screeching when their leathery wings touched the light.

“You can do it, Cyan.” Stryke’s deep voice, smooth like good whiskey and just as warming, gave her a much-needed boost.

The thread stretched farther until its tip brushed the top of the glyph, and she could see the rest. Hopefully, that was enough.

She imagined the fix, allowing the spell to form through electrical currents. Hope filled her—

The spell sparked, fizzled, and the thread receded.

“No!” she cried, desperately trying again. And again.

But the glow around the artifact was fading, and so was her power. She’d exceeded her limits, and the more she tried to reach into the well for more, the weaker she became.

Hope turned to despair.

“I failed,” she whispered. “I’ve doomed us all.”

Chapter 19

Gabriel soared across vast oceans and wide swaths of land as his internal homing system guided him to the North Sea. The coordinates of theSea Stormhad been easy to find, and his built-in GPS had done the rest.

Outfitted in gold armor forged by an ancient, now-extinct race of fae, he zipped through space and time, circling the globe, wondering if he was doing the right thing.

No doubt, destroying the portal was the right thing. But what if it resulted in a very wrong thing?

What if, by destroying the Gehennaportal, its twin, the Gaiaportal, was also destroyed? Once, it had been the sole means by which Celestials could travel between Heaven and the human realm…and the demon realm, if needed. It had been shut down for millennia, but now that Heaven’s barriers had been erected once again, perhaps it should be kept functional.

One never knew when one might need to escape a tyrannical rule.

What if he could merely shut down the Gehennaportal, leaving it intact instead?

He drew to a stop a hundred miles from the platform, hovering in clear skies over another oil rig, its blowout preventer pumping out gases. He was pretty sure Stryke’s platform was no longer operational. It made him wonder how much StryTech had paid the oil company for it. It also made him wonder why Stryke had bought it. Was it genuinely a save-the-world thing,or would StryTech somehow benefit from the proximity to the Gehennaportal?

Not much was known about Stryke’s alignment on the scale of good and evil. He appeared to be siding with humans against demons, which was why Heaven had chosen to take a wait-and-see approach to him. Until Stryke, it had been unthinkable for Heaven to allow a demon to have so much power and influence over humans, but so far, he’d helped mankind far more than he’d hurt it.

His first mistake, however, would probably be his last, even if he was Primori. Especially now that the Thrones were in charge and Reaver wasn’t around to defend his demon friends and family. After all, Celestials had, in the past, reassigned Memitim guardian angels in order to destroy Primori before their time.

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