SWNOVELS Phantasma: Chapter 43
VIOLENCE
Peeling herself from beneath the covers, Ophelia dressed for the trial ahead. Not just any trial—the one that would mark her official release from this sole wing of Phantasma and allow her to look for Genevieve.
It was the only thing that got her out of bed, truthfully.
When she made it to the dining room, Charlotte and Cade were already there, waiting in stone-cold silence. Leon, however, was nowhere to be seen.
“He forfeited,” Charlotte answered her unspoken question.
Ophelia’s brows rose. “Did you see it happen?”
Charlotte nodded. “Late last night I heard a scream in the corridor outside our rooms—his was two doors down from mine. When I went to see what was going on, he was being swarmed by a thousand crows. I’m pretty sure he lost an eye during the ordeal. I never realized how gruesome birds could be.” Charlotte shrugged. “He forfeited in minutes. I think the crows may have been his greatest fear—the one he gave up entering.”
“Birds? He was chased away by fucking birds?” Cade said. “That little pissant got Luci cursed, and he couldn’t handle some fucking crows?”
“You can’t always help what you fear,” Charlotte reasoned. “I met my greatest fear the fourth day here. I nearly gave up then, too.”
“Yet you’re still here,” Cade shot back. “I’m going to make that bastard’s life miserable the moment I get out of here. He’ll be lucky if I don’t drown him in the river and leave his body for the gators.”
Charlotte and Ophelia didn’t respond. Charlotte because she most likely didn’t want to hear any more from Cade, or in shock that the man was showing care for someone beyond himself for the first time. By the way he’d spoken to Luci, no one could have ever guessed he’d feel the need to defend her honor. But Ophelia was distracted by something else entirely. It had suddenly dawned on her that Phantasma hadn’t thrown her greatest fear at her yet. A foreboding omen to say the least.
The three of them—the finale of their group—waited out the rest of dinner in silence. Ophelia was watching the clock, waiting for the Devil to appear, when Blackwell blinked in beside her in his ghostly form.
“Hey,” she whispered to him, locket pulsing at his unexpected appearance.
Charlotte threw her a look of confusion, while Cade narrowed his eyes.
“Don’t respond,” Blackwell told her when he spotted the way Cade was watching her. “When you get into this level, make sure you summon me, alright?”
She dipped her chin in a subtle nod.
“Good girl,” he murmured. “The way this level works—it’s absolutely vital that I can be there to give you intel at the start.”
Another nod from her and he vanished.
Two minutes later, the Devil arrived. Tall and slender, they had a medium-brown complexion and straight brown hair—and smooth skin where their eye sockets should be. Embedded in the backs of their hands were their eyeballs. The strangest Devil’s Mark Ophelia had seen yet.
This Devil didn’t bother with an introduction as they revealed the portal and their clue.
A choice of two tokens, a decision to make, if all only take one, nothing is at stake.
If two choose one, and the third takes all, the third will walk, the others will brawl.
If two choose all, and the third takes one, the third will be free, the other two are done.
Cade was called through first. Then Charlotte. And finally Ophelia.
As promised, Ophelia didn’t waste a second summoning Blackwell.
“Alright,” Blackwell began without preamble, “I’m going to have to go back to the Other Side in order to see what they are choosing. Don’t touch a single token until I return.”
“Will I need to summon you again?” she wondered.
He shook his head. “Now that I’ve been here, I should be able to come at will, but if I’m not back in five minutes, call just in case.”
She nodded and he blinked away.
The holding room she was in looked identical to the one she started in for level five. Only, instead of two handles in the small alcove carved into the wall, it was two round tokens made of obsidian. Their surfaces were embossed with what looked to be roses on either side, and though she had the urge to reach out and smooth her fingers over the textured surface, she resisted, heeding Blackwell’s warning not to touch.
She kept track of the time in her head as she waited for Blackwell to return and had got to seven minutes and forty-two seconds when he popped back in.
“Alright, there’s a dilemma,” he told her. “Charlotte took one token—Cade took both.”
Ophelia went through the lines of the clue they’d been given, carefully, in her head. Unlike the vagueness of the other trials, the clue for this level had been glaringly straight forward. An intentional warning. Or rather, a threat.
She swallowed. “So that means—”
“Pick your poison,” he murmured. “Cade or—”
“Cade,” she inserted immediately. “Charlotte can walk free. But he’s not getting out of here.”
Blackwell smirked. “Have I ever told you how much I adore a woman who isn’t afraid to get her hands bloody?”
Ophelia ignored the way his words made her stomach flutter and took a deep breath as she grabbed both tokens, gauging the weight of them, of her decision, in her palms.
“You know how to use your magic,” Blackwell told her. “Don’t let him get close enough to touch you.”
The walls around Ophelia shook and fell back one by one to reveal a circular arena with a six-foot stone wall surrounding it. On opposite sides of the arena were Charlotte and Cade. A door instantly appeared next to Charlotte, who swung her gaze to Ophelia in surprise.
“I knew he would take both,” Ophelia said, holding up her own tokens in example.
Charlotte dipped her chin a respectful nod and said, “Good luck.”
With that, she disappeared, and Cade and Ophelia were left alone.
The tokens in their hands dissolved into wisps of obsidian smoke. Cade began to stride toward Ophelia with purpose, interlicking his fingers and pushing them away from his body to crack the joints in his knuckles.
His malicious grin was all too confident as he announced, “I’ve been waiting for this moment.”
“What moment is that?” she quipped back. “Your death? I’m sure the entirety of New Orleans has been waiting for this moment.”
Cade bared his teeth as he continued to prowl across the arena. “I knew you were trouble the very first fucking day. You may bleed red, but you have dark magic in your bones. You summoned a Demon to torture me on your behalf. You skulk around talking to yourself and kissing Devils. You play at being as human as the rest of us, but we both know you aren’t. Beneath the surface you’re a fucking monster. I never liked that Luci ran around with your sister. Or that this city so readily invites your kind to live amongst us and encourages such witchcraft as what your mother did. It’s evil. Unnatural. Your whole family has tainted blood.”
Blackwell’s expression had turned more murderous with every word Cade spoke, until the point that he was nearly shaking with his unconcealed rage. She knew that if it were in his power to rip the other man limb from limb, Cade would’ve been dead already.
“I should’ve killed him after he hit you,” Blackwell seethed, tone dripping with regret. “Watching the light drain from his eyes would have been worth the risk of you hating me for doing such a thing.”
“Is that why you spared him?” she questioned, shocked.
The intensity in Blackwell’s eyes deepened, but he didn’t confirm nor deny.
Cade simmered further. “Who the fuck are you talking to? What spells are you saying beneath your breath, Demon?”
Ophelia groaned. “For the last fucking time, I am not a Demon! And you clearly know nothing of paranormal beings, so stop speaking the names of those you are unfamiliar with! Demons reside in Hell! They cannot even leave Hell except for a single day a year! I am a Necromancer.” She smiled now, showing him her teeth. “And I wasn’t reciting any spells, but if you’d like to see some magic, it’d be my pleasure.”
Cade had gotten close enough, and it was time for her to show him exactly what he was up against. She summoned her magic to her fingertips, the blue sparks zapping out into the air as she poised her hands to strike. Cade came up short, watching her in disbelief as it slowly sank in what he’d gotten himself into.
“You really should have just taken one token,” she told him with a smirk. And then she struck.
She aimed her magic at the center of his chest, a streamlined shot just like Blackwell had taught her. When the concentrated energy hit him, he stumbled back with a scream, the magic burning through his clothes and into his skin, but it wasn’t enough to take him down—just enough to piss him off.
She aimed and fired twice more, the first strike hitting his right shoulder; he charged at her harder, the second shot missing when he feinted to the side. Ophelia began to walk backward, attempting to put more distance between them while he worked on closing it. She could feel Blackwell’s energy somewhere behind her growing increasingly anxious.
“Go away,” she told Blackwell. “I need to concentrate.”
“No,” he responded, firm.
“Don’t be a nuisance.” She turned to glare at him for a split second, before locking her eyes back onto Cade. “You’re distracting me. I’ve got this.”
For a moment, she didn’t know if he was going to listen to her, but when she felt the static of his energy flicker out, she knew he had gone back to the Other Side to spectate. With her focus no longer split, she homed in on Cade dashing for her, waiting for her next hit. She gave it to him. One, two, three, in rapid succession. He dodged two but was slammed by the third, and she noticed it was beginning to wear him down. She could see the skin through the pocked holes she had created in his clothes, red and angry, bubbling with blisters from the burns of her magic.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, tone dripping with innocence. “I thought you said this would be enjoyable for you?”
“Fuck. You. Bitch,” he spat as his chest heaved and he pushed himself to trudge forward.
“I’m not even tired,” she taunted. “For me this is the easiest trial we’ve had by far.”
That got a rise out of him. He lunged forward, and she did nothing to stop him, waiting until he was in arm’s reach and then, just before he crashed into her, she made herself invisible. He dove through her and landed on the ground with a pained thud, and Ophelia spun. Before he was able to push himself up, she threw herself atop him, straddling his hips as she pressed both her hands into his throat. There was a rage inside her she had never really felt before for another human being, but Cade had hardly acted human the entire time that they’d been here. There was a guilt, deep inside her, that told her she wouldn’t come out of this unscathed—that taking a life would take a toll on who she was as a person. But the alternative was letting him win, and that was simply not something she could do.
She squeezed his throat until she blocked off his oxygen; he thrashed and bucked beneath her, trying to knock her off. She held tight, the muscles in her hands and biceps tightening with discomfort, unused to such strain. There was no time to summon any more of her magic to end it all then and there, however, because he managed to use his legs for just enough leverage to flip them over.
She grunted as her spine and the back of her head slammed into the cold, hard ground. Her vision went dark from the hit for an alarming moment, and when it faded back in, spots of light floated before her eyes.
“This feels familiar, doesn’t it?” he said, seething, spittle from his mouth hitting her face.
Gross.
She wasted no time, turning invisible to slip out from beneath his hold. He roared in frustration at her ability to evade his attacks, grasping forward at whatever he could. Before she could fade all the way out, he managed to clutch her locket and snap it right off her neck. She rolled her invisible form to the side and got to her feet in one fluid motion. She returned herself to her solid state and braced herself to lunge for her necklace when something strange happened.
Her heart rate began to slow. The temperature in the room seemed to drop thirty degrees, and her head began to swim. Cade held up the locket with a triumphant smile.
Follow your heart. Apparently, that’s exactly what she’d been doing this entire time. Emphasized by the way the organ inside her chest was about to stop entirely.
This needed to end now. The sooner it was over, the sooner she could find her sister. The sooner she was out of here for good.
She was too weak to attack at the moment, but she was grateful that Cade wasn’t the kind of man to pull any punches. If she offered up bait, he would surely take it. So, she let her body drop to the ground, pretending to faint before she actually did. Within seconds, Cade took the opportunity to dive atop her. She almost rolled her eyes at how predictable he was. As soon as he was close enough, the locket still clasped in his grip, she struck. Clamoring to get her hand on the golden trinket, she managed to make the locket—and herself—invisible just long enough to fasten it back around her neck.
The heart in her chest began pounding once more.
As her strength returned, she made herself solid and threw a punch right into Cade’s temple. Hard enough to make her knuckles throb but definitely nothing well-practiced. It worked well enough, though, and he slumped forward with a groan. Next, she crawled out from under him, lunging to her feet so she could slam her knee up directly into his face, smashing his nose and sending blood spraying over the ground as he screamed in agony. She didn’t break for even a moment as she tackled him back to the ground, her palms becoming coated in the blood that was still gushing from his face.
Yes. Yes. Kill him, make it slow, gouge his eyes out and rip his flesh from his body, the Shadow Voice chattered, greedy for the violence as always.
“I’ll make it quick,” she promised to Cade sincerely. “A mercy you don’t deserve after what you attempted to do to Edna. After the selfishness you displayed this entire competition.”
No, not quick, agonizingly slow, the Shadow Voice hissed.
He tried to choke something out, but her thumbs were pressed into that sensitive indentation of his throat and only strained huffs of air escaped his lips. She loosened her grip just enough to let him have his last words, and they did not disappoint.
“You’re going to burn in fucking Hell one day,” he spat.
“And you’re going to fade into obscurity now,” she told him. “Soon enough, not a single soul will remember your name. You’ve made no lasting mark on this world. I know which fate I’d rather have between the two.”
Something like devastation glistened in his dull brown eyes, but there was no more lingering as she slid her hands up over his face, gathered every bit of magic she had left on reserve, and blasted it into him. She nearly gagged at the sight, and smell, of his flesh melting away, as her magic seared through his skull.
The Shadow Voice cackled in delight as she hauled herself off Cade’s lifeless body and stood on shaky legs. When she looked down at her hands, she found them covered in scarlet. But unlike with Eric, the shame and guilt was not immediate.
Ophelia found that she liked the blood on her hands just a little too much.
Yes, Necromancer, the Shadow Voice encouraged. Embrace your calling, harbinger of death. Unleash your darkness on the world.