Words of Power (Alice Gray Book 3)

59

I was high up in the Minster, up where the angels slashed at each other with fiery blades, the fury on their faces increasing with each impotent thrust.

This fight was as bloody as it was eternal. There was no way for these arrogant immortals to co-exist peacefully. Not when their so-called God made His wishes so ambiguous. It was a cruel joke to set creatures so powerful on a path defined at the beginning of creation with no more instruction than a vague concept of right and wrong.

Down below, the action had become sluggish and delayed, the power having ripped me out of that reality and suspended me somewhere in between.

The look of anguish on Thomas's face broke my heart even though I'd tried to harden it against him. He knew that he couldn't win, that he couldn't save me, but he would fight to the death to give me any little chance that he could.

I knew that about him. I always had.

Brother Jerome stood at the staircase to the Crypt. Watching his plan unfold, waiting until he could step up and take control of the DPA, the vamps, hell, the entire paranormal community.

And as I pondered why, in my bodiless state, I noticed something else.

Something that I should have remembered before.

All around the Minster, little symbols glowed with magic.

Gold, blue and crimson particles drifted up from pillars and tiles in a perfect circle around the Tree of Knowledge.

The charms had worked.

In my desperation, I'd invoked the little glowing eyes when I recited the words of the White Paternoster.

I'd thought that those charms were going to help me influence the magistrates that were here to decide my fate. Hell, I'd even hoped to push a little goodwill through the tendrils of alluring magic that combined to give the charms their power.

God knows that I needed it.

But now, as I watched those tiny specks of magic; Gray and Device magic intermingled with something else, something that wasn't from the mortal world, I realised that this combination could be much more powerful.

The tiny specks of colour gravitated up to where my incorporeal consciousness floated above the drama that played out below.

Was this how God experienced everything, I wondered as I watched the different tiers of activity play out. I remembered all those pictures of the Tree of Life that showed the cosmos like this; layers of existence, their goodness reflected by how close they were placed to the Divine Creator.

God, angels, humans, demons. That was the standard order of things.

But this wasn't the Tree of Life, representing the wonder of all creation. It was the evil-twin, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and nobody's status was easily defined around this ambiguous shrub.

When the particles of magic reached me, there was a moment of understanding. Everything that I was, all the strands of DNA that had come together at one time or another in the last four hundred years to create Alice Gray, were reflected in those charms, those words of power.

Blue, gold and crimson.

These strains of magic had merged over and over, generation after generation. On the Gray side, all those brown haired, blue eyed girls that looked so much like me. On the Device side, that blue magic, repeating and strengthening. The crimson of Azazel's influence popping up here and there, until transforming in my father.

Creating a new strain.

Silver.

Madness, corruption, despair, destruction.

That's what the ancestors had chanted when they'd shown me Jonathan's torture. That the silver magic could bring all those things was not a new concept for me. But that wasn't what my creepy doppelgängers actually meant.

I was sure of it now.

Madness, corruption, despair, destruction.

That is what the world faced if Brother Jerome worked out how to use my silver magic. It's what would happen if the DPA understood how to pick it apart and re-assemble it to their own design. The Tree of Knowledge would work its crafty influence and humanity would be driven to destruction with the understanding that they so craved.

But there was more than one side to the silver energy.

And Jonathan had shown me what silver could do.

Come on Alice, you can do it!