Page 104 of Her Psycho Beasts

“I think I’ve found the outlet,”Xander says, sounding far away. There’s a loud metallic screeching noise of something being torn off.“Send Sav up first.”

“Always the guinea pig,” Savage says, leaping up and grabbing the duct by only his fingers. “Hut, hut!”

Lyle shoots Savage upwards into the vent like a missile. After a moment, Savage shouts down an affirmative. Lyle sends the two eagles and Eugene through next, followed by me.

It’s pitch black and so dusty that I sneeze twice. It’s thirty feet or more before I start to feel uneasy, but that’s when a fresh gust of night air coasts down. I look up to see two white glowing orbs that can only be Xander.

“Tell me when,”Lyle says.

I shoot out of the vent like a missile, cold air slicing at my face as I narrowly miss Xander’s big head.

“When! When!”I shout.

Lyle lets his power go and I’m left to fall straight back down, right into Savage’s arms. “There she is,” he says in a soothing voice, planting a kiss on my cheek before setting me down.

I clutch his hand and take a moment to gain my bearings. We’re on the lawn at the back of the property, and I turn to see Susan and Mina hurrying towards the front of the estate, their phone lights reflecting their faces as they no doubt call their families to tell them to pack their bags.

Naga mansion towers over me, a silent, malevolent void that sucks everything around it and destroys it.

Fury turns into rage, hot and sharp, while hate is a bitter poison funnelling alongside it. Scythe emerges easily out of the vent, something tucked under his arm and Lyle follows him, my mother cradled safely in his arms. I check on her quickly, brushing the hair off her face. Her heart beats slowly in her small chest. One tiny thump sounds amidst the dark. The rhythm of the dying. There is some magic in her, yet, holding on just barely.

That sound, small and sad, is the only thing that makes my legs work as we hurry across the lawn and round the property.

Each step is agony, is grief, is torment.

I stifle another sob as another tiny thump reaches my ears when we make it to the front of Naga House and the circular driveway that haunted my dreams as a teenager.

And then I’m watching my mother pass through those cursed black gates for the first time in sixteen years.

Only when she is free do I turn around and look at my childhood home. And that primal thing that’s been waiting inside of me tears loose.

And screams.

I scream into the frigid night air. For my mother. For the agony she felt. For the agony I now feel. I scream my rage at the mansion that had once been my home. That now represents everything that is evil and abhorrent in the world.

Light explodes into being from that dark place of horror. A red beacon thatroarsto life. A sacred light that fills my vision with red and orange and yellow. That fills my ears with a roar.

And it is satisfying.

I’m going to burn it down. I’m going to burn it to ashes along with the rest of my father’s forsaken world.

Faint voices are shouting. I wonder if they feel the same pain I do. I wonder if they feel this infernal, justice-bringing heat.

Someone touches me and yanks back, exclaiming. There is more shouting, more words. Worried and alarmed.

But I am none of those things.

I am mesmerised by the way flames tear down and rip apart and melt. By the way the acrid scent fills the air. By the way black clouds of smoke billow like hell itself has been called.

Awoken.

Because within me now, something has stirred awake, something colossal and powerful whose voice roars alongside the eagle’s cry and the wolf’s growl, and the lion’s roar and the shark’s gnashing, and it will never be put back to sleep.

Large, strong hands grab mine. Fingers wind around my own, squeezing. And a voice like the molten places deep within the earth demands my attention. “Enough, Aurelia.”

“Never,” I whisper.

It won’t be enough until it’sallashes. Until every last brick and tile is consumed by the flames.

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