Cataclysm Read online

  Also in this series:

  Ancestral

  Between

  This book is dedicated to Craig Pollock, a fabulous friend and a fan of my novels whose input and endless support I will cherish for the rest of my life. Craig sadly passed away in September, 2017. Even now, I don't have the words to say goodbye. You will always be a valued friend, and I know that you have gone on to a better life, for one so thoughtful, kind and generous could only have peace and happiness in the end.

  Craig Pollock

  1977 - 2017

  Chapter One

  “No!” Lila screamed, hands flailing desperately at mid-air, clawing at nothingness, the feeling of a intangible battle sliding between her fingers. Strong hands gripped her upper arms, and a low, urgent voice was present in her ear, soothing and attracting her attention whilst her mind flooded with its familiarity. The pressure, more than anything else, drew her out of her tortured dreamland and into the stark reality of her bedroom, which looked like a work in progress these days. After her aunt's death, Lila had been driven towards decorating whilst she was in denial, and she had regretted stripping the wallpaper ever since, hating the loss of her safe haven. Now, all she seemed to have were bare walls and the feeling of tears escaping through tightly pressed eyelids and sliding down towards her ears. This was her first conscious experience, and she was not okay with that fact. Before she could complain, the grip on her arms shifted, sliding up to her cheeks, calloused thumbs brushing away the tears before they could settle on the shells of her ears. It was one of the worst sensations she'd been cursed with recently – it was damp, and uncomfortable, and when it happened, she was a complete failure at getting rid of all the moisture inside her ear to a satisfactory level, instead enduring the sensation for hours afterwards.

  Crying was rarely as glamorous as television would have you believe. It was an ugly, suffocating emotion, your mind trapped in sound, your skin roughened by the tissues used to wipe away moisture from your eyes and, if you cried enough, your nose. There was nothing romantic or beautifully tragic about it in the slightest, and she had checked every time she'd cried, staring into the mirror, desperately hoping that the puffy skin around her eyes would suddenly vanish. The only thing even remotely pretty about it was the sudden clarity in the colour of her eyes, which seemed to burn an unusual blue-green. She had no idea if this was normal, or if it were some kind of manifestation of her Spirit power. Maybe one day she'd ask a bunch of people, like a normal civilian enjoying her college experience and not dealing with the fate of the world in her hands. She could dream, no matter how unlikely it was to ever happen. Dreaming was definitely preferable to waking up, which she was reluctantly giving in to that very moment.

  Lila had opened her eyes to see Liam hovering over her worriedly. It gave her time to truly appreciate how good looking he was. His sandy brown hair almost reached his eyes, which were an impossibly deep blue. They could easily be mistaken for black in this light, but she knew better. They'd been together for weeks now, and yet the depth of his eyes continued to surprise her. It spoke of a world seen so thoroughly and so painfully that she feared the years to come more than she could say. Most of all, she feared never getting to contemplate the depth of his eyes again. If he were taken from her, she would give up on the world. It might sound melodramatic, but he had become her anchor in surviving reality in a very short space of time.

  Liam brushed her dark hair back against the pillow, and she raised one hand to run her fingers along his defined jaw, covered in just enough stubble to be considered self-neglect, especially when it came to Liam. Unsurprising, really, given that he'd been spending his nights sleeping on a pile of bedding beside her bed. He refused to sleep beside her, afraid to take advantage in her vulnerable state and escalate their relationship to a level she might find difficult to pull back from at a later time. She suspected that he was also reluctant to get too deeply involved in case she wasn't able to overcome his link to the recent traumas. This, of course, was utterly absurd – he'd been fighting with her, not against her. His past affiliations were brainwashing, as far as she was concerned. What she didn't know, however, was that Liam was still instinctively drawn to the reactions the hunters had drummed into him. Every time he saw reckless magick, he reacted – he'd simplified it to the barest twitch of his hand, now, but he had the nasty feeling that one day, he wouldn't resist his old training.

  It had been barely two weeks since her aunt and mentor had died, and mere months since the loss of her parents. She'd been fine regarding her parents ever since they'd shown themselves to her in their final goodbye, but the battles they'd found themselves in more recently had opened the wounds – particularly since she'd seen everyone she cared about dead, even if it had been temporarily. No one could truly appreciate the weight of that image on her psyche – much less her. They had been dead. She knew that to them, it would have been like passing out and waking up confused and disorientated, somewhere they'd never expected to be. Lila both envied them and was full of relief that they would never carry this burden. She knew that the pain she was feeling was making her unpleasant to be around, and that fact just made things so much worse. It wasn't like she could just go to a doctor and get some antidepressants – most civilian medications didn't work as well on them because of some complicated biological reason involving their electrical impulses in their body. They would use them if they found themselves stuck for options, but it was usually always supplemented by their own methods and magick.

  Seeing her friends dead had done more than shake her up, as much as she was trying to hide it from everyone in her life these days. Without the imminent threat of the Keres coven, she'd been left with too much free time, and this was proving to be dangerous to her mental state; She was far too used to operating in crisis mode, and she was completely lost without the conflict. She was always exceptionally tired, though she slept too much, and she was living in a haze, feeling the finer points of depression which no one talked about, like the constant feeling of thirst because she had cried so much, lying in polyester blend sheets which made her sweat until she was dehydrated, the anchor in her chest which made her feel like she was being pulled into the centre of the bed. Not to mention the pressure sores on her skin from hiding out in bed when she would normally be up and walking about. Well; she mostly ran. Even when there had been very little to do, she always found herself running to keep up with people who felt like they were twice her height. It was almost a metaphor for her life – one little girl trying to keep up with gigantic problems. She would kill to only worry about an overdue essay. It was ironic; she had spent all of her school years wanting this, wanting to be in charge of the coven and seeing no point in her education despite doing reasonably well in all of her tests. Now that college was a pipe dream, it had become something she secretly craved. When she'd imagined being in charge of the coven, it had been when her parents had handed it over to retire, and it would be an easy ride, holding the usual rituals and blessings, nothing more. Beth's invasion of Sadie's body and the rituals she'd been fooled into participating in, had broken the world. Nothing resembled what she'd grown up with any more, and even the buildings were damaged with the corruption of the Keres coven. The plants had begun to grow and replenish the Earth, snowdrops signalling the end of that winter, but there were signs of what had happened everywhere.

  Her mind often drifted into the edge of premonition, the image of her death as she was buried alive, the feeling of dirt flooding her nose and mouth until she couldn't even choke. It was terrifying, and she had to remind herself firmly that premonitions were often full of metaphors. She couldn't figure this one out for love nor money, and wished that her aunt was here for the billionth time to help her work out how to survive.

  Ev
en though she had an entire super coven to discuss it with, she wasn't in a hurry to talk to anyone about it – without her aunt, she was loathe to mention anything which might make people think she'd completely lost the plot. She'd had a few premonitions recently, but in the past it had been Gloria who had tried to answer her questions, and had helped her decipher them in a way which allowed her to pass on valid messages to her coven of leaders. Without her, she found herself feeling like a fraud, and believed rather illogically that telling anyone else about what she'd seen would be a betrayal to her aunt's memory. Deep inside, she knew it wasn't true, but that rarely mattered in times of grief, particularly when you felt guilty for being alive when others had died in your place.

  “Lila, are you okay?” Liam's concerned voice broke her reflective trance, causing her to blink, and the world which was previously frozen and phased out began to move once more for her. She couldn't exactly call it a welcome turn of events, but at least her spacing out was becoming less frequent. Maybe it marked the turning point, and she was about to break out of her funk. Chance would be a fine thing. She was obviously destined to spend the next few months at least doing this, until she'd alienated everyone who had ever said a kind word to her in both the witch and the civilian world. Heck, she'd probably even alienate everyone in the Spirit realm, at the rate she was going. Living in her head was just so much easier than facing people who made her feel protective, guilty and scared for all at once. It was a bit overwhelming when you were experiencing a mental breakdown.

  “I'm fine. I've just been having really bad dreams recently. For obvious reasons. I'm guessing I'm not the only one having them, though.” She answered, hearing the detached tone in her own voice which was diminishing her own problems and his view of them in order to stop him actually investigating further. Internally, she cringed; she really didn't want to push him away, but she was doing a good job of it. She sat up as Liam retreated, pulling her arms around her own frame, inadvertently echoing the previous placement of his hands on her arms with her own. Her long, dark and slightly tangled hair drifted over her shoulder, tickling and making her shudder. It was like being touched by something which wasn't there. She'd had more than enough of phantom-like sensations in the last few months, and it was something she was avoiding – there was an imminent danger from the spirit world, and she was sick of it. There wasn't a single person in her close friendship circle who had escaped the last few weeks unscathed, though one or two of them seemed to cope far better than she herself was. The thought filled her with shame. Liam's own sister was trapped in the spirit world Lila was too scared to venture into. The last time they'd been there had been when they'd discovered not only Elsie's crumpled frame, but a rip through the fabric of the veil where it shouldn't have been possible, from the demon realm – straight through to the human world.

  Despite their attempts to scry for the demon or demons, they had come up empty, and Lila suspected it was because they were so unwilling to get into the fray of things while their wounds were still healing, literally for some. Rose's injuries were going to take months to heal from, even with help from the fire coven. Magick could do very little for broken bones which weren't straightforward, and with Rose's fragmented injuries, healing them too quickly could cause it to set improperly, or for bone fragments to break off. In this case, civilian care was the best option for her. This was difficult for a young witch to accept, especially since there seemed to be a magickal answer to everything else. Impatience was a trait Rose already had in abundance, and to say it had been stirred from slumber was a poetic term for a sleeping beast. Sadie had been recovering well from her collapsed lung, though she still had bruising from the somewhat rudimentary and emergency triage she'd been given prior to being taken to hospital, but she would heal fully within a few days thanks to the fire coven, who had been working non-stop to offer healing to anyone who required it, whether they were witch, civilian or hunter. There were no divides between those who had fought together, though many hunters still blanched when they were touched by witches. Prejudice was hard to erase, even when you had conquered a group of evil, possessed, witches who wanted to destroy the world and everyone in it. Maybe it would always be like that, but it was going to be difficult to find anything to compare their scenario to, meaning there would be no predictions for their future relations.

  Adam had reluctantly taken his own advice, taking Sadie and Rose to Australia for two weeks, after hunting down no less than four doctors who were willing to give both Sadie and Rose the okay to travel. They would be back in no time, but Lila still felt the absence of her friends keenly, no matter how much she insisted to him over Skype that she was fine, and faked a smile. She suspected that he knew she was lying to him, but was confident that he had no idea how much she was suffering – if he did, she knew he'd be back home on the next flight, leaving the girls in Australia to relax, and she didn't want that. On the contrary, she kind of wished they could all vanish off to different parts of the world and pretend they weren't about to face yet another threat.

  Only Liam and Grace knew how bad things had been for her recently. She'd been distracted (more than usual) and forlorn. Lila suspected that Liam knew how much of it was down to her use of spirit magick – he'd probably seen many witches who had gone insane thanks to their powers. It could be a very dangerous state to fall into, especially given there was several ways it could go and no way to tell in advance. Many witches who had been cured by their coven claimed to have no memory of it, but none could answer conclusively on what had happened – or wouldn't, she suspected. It was different for Liam; he'd never seen a cured witch before, he'd grown up in mental health institutions, and then he had been claimed by the witch hunters, or rather, his uncle Jeffrey, who had taught him that all magick was bad and that the only way to use it correctly was to turn it on your own kind. She wondered absently if he'd been trained to kill the witches for it, but she also knew she didn't want to know the answer, as it would put him in an impossible situation. She was constantly torn on what she should and shouldn't ask Liam about his life before he'd joined them and taken over the fire coven. Living without and believing that his magick was evil must have made him feel so alone in the world, and, despite the dated opinions they'd had on their kind, she couldn't believe the hunters would put anyone through that.

  It wasn't so much that she held a grudge with the witch hunters, well, most of them – they'd been raised a certain way, and she was trying to get along with them now, in the wake of their truce. It would be naïve of her to expect that hunters were incapable of moral growth. As long as they only rounded up witches who committed minor crimes and allowed their covens to deal with them, she was fine. If something more serious (like demons) came up, they'd deal with it together. It was a truce which was delicately balanced, mostly thanks to Grace, since she had yet to appear at one of their meetings. It was part of her many-pointed plan to avoid anything that might trigger the ghostly images of the people she'd lost. In some ways, they were worse than actual spirit visitations – they were the echoes civilians spoke of when they claimed to see their lost ones everywhere. She definitely didn't want to revisit the witch hunter's compound, where it seemed like she'd spent so much time planning the deaths of her friends, her coven mates, her aunt, the nameless hunters and witches she'd never known. Being a leader was a hard task, and she really didn't know if she was up to the job.

  In a stark contrast, Troy and Noah had spent the last week in the compound with Finn; Noah was making weapons intended to neutralise rather than eliminate and Troy keeping all of their spirits up. Lila was sure that both of them were convinced they were protecting the other, when the truth was that they were entirely competent on their own. Troy maintained that Noah was the brains of the outfit, but his own creativity often inspired his boyfriend to think of problems in a new way, and pulled Noah out of the pessimism which could often infect the intelligent. They were a perfect fit, both with each other and with the coven – Lila would be l
ost without them.

  Grace, at this precise moment, was probably by their side, or chatting over tea with some politician who was in the inner circle. While they'd been in school, they'd discussed college as simply as any other student about to graduate, when in reality only Grace would have the opportunity. She'd be studying politics, naturally. She would probably end up becoming the Prime Minister by the time she was 30. On that thread of thought, they had been surprised with the knowledge that the government knew about their existence, but it seemed that they had known for quite some time and hadn't cracked down on their covens. They had observed their truce with the Hunters, and had asked to join the new alliance so that they could keep the civilians informed – in the guise of things they could actually digest, like freak weather. It had become Grace's job to act as a go-between, and she did her college work alongside her new top secret internship.

  “Lila.”

  She snapped out of her daydream quickly, giving Liam an apologetic smile.

  “Sorry. Not sleeping well is doing wonders for my famous attention span.” she joked lightly, but Liam saw through her mask immediately, his smile as insincere as her words. Something in his eyes was stern, yet understanding. Lila felt like a chastised child.

  “Lila, I'm not stupid. I know what's going on – how do we deal with it? I've never... helped.” he trailed off, his voice sounding hopeless at the end. It confirmed her suspicions regarding what he'd done in the past with people like her. It sent a chill up her spine, and she shuddered noticeably, still hugging her arms around herself. Instead of addressing her reaction, which neither of them could deal with, she pretended it hadn't happened.

  “I'm not ready. To be away from you all. As long as I don't use my powers I'll be fine.” Lila answered. “Which is why I'm not leaving this house. Nobody asks you to rustle them up a quick rise-from-the-dead spell if you're in seclusion.”