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What an idiot. I shot him again. He blocked that time, raising a finger to bring a piece of the ward to life he’d already had set around himself and my mother. He was surprisingly clever, and very well-prepared. Idiots shouldn’t also be clever.
He said, “Surrender, and I might give your true love a clean death. No sense in pleading for his life, because I’ve been wanting to kill him for a very long time.”
I snorted. “My true what? You surrender to me and I might not kill you. I’ll just turn you over to the police so that you can be processed in the most public and humiliating manner possible. All gargoyles will be shamed by your actions, and no humans will blindly trust your kind again. All in all, that sounds like a very worthy cause.”
He nodded his head at the demon, and he moved, like a blur of light, so fast towards Percy, who was struggling to hold his own against Mrs. Hanley, probably because he didn’t want to kill someone who was fighting him against her own will. That was such a clever trick. Too bad it was so incredibly unethical.
“Percy, watch out! Demon!” I yelled as I opened my jar of spiders and shook them onto the floor, hoping that they’d be smart enough to attack the bad guys.
He barely brought around another shield, similar to the one that I wielded, and blocked the demon with a great enough shock to knock him back in Scott’s direction.
“You’re pathetic!” I yelled at the loser who was supposed to be better than human. “Picking on healers and nobody’s, because you can’t handle making your own name for yourself? I was going to refuse my dad’s legacy, but now, you know what? I’m not. I’m going to take his legacy and do something really weird with it. You will cringe, from jail, every day, and all because you’re too weak to do what you can with your strengths and build them into greater and greater strengths until you’ve made your own name. No, you have to turn to demons, which everybody knows will make you their slave when you think you’re enslaving him. Does he look like he’s in your power?” I asked, gesturing at the terrifying, red-skinned, fanged monster who was attacking Percy so fast that he was a red blur.
Percy was just as fast, somehow able to hold back the demon and Mrs. Hanley, but how long could he keep it up?
I fired my golden magic darts at the demon, and Mrs. Hanley, and Percy, because everyone was moving too fast to have great aim. Percy took a second to give me a very serious frown, which, for some reason, made my heart well up with happiness in spite of everything. He was here, and he saw me, and no matter what happened, we were together in this conflict. It was the briefest moment, but it filled me with energy, which I needed when the spiders hit the barrier and grew, exactly like the bugs had done with Percy.
The demon growled when he saw the freaky big bugs coming for him, and lashed his tail out, knocking me over. The defense sparked out, but I shifted to gargoyle and gripped his tail, coming down to bury my toes into the floor to brace myself so that I could get a really good grip on that demon and rip him off his feet and throw him into Scott. It was surprisingly easy, and I wanted to leap after them both and rip them limb from limb, but I couldn’t trust the floor not to have Scott’s vicious spells, so I crouched down where I was instead. Percy took that break from dual assault to strike Mrs. Hanley with a spell that sent her over, stunned for a moment.
I beamed at Percy, flashing my sexy gargoyle fangs at him, and he smiled back, so soft and human looking, which was suddenly a bad thing, a very bad thing, because he needed armor so that he wasn’t killed by the demon. The demon needed to die. Too bad you couldn’t use fancy magic and be a stone gargoyle at the same time.
I growled at the demon and snapped my teeth in his direction while he faced off with me in front of Scott, realizing that I was more than his match in this form, and the spiders were causing problems for them.
Percy crouched down and drew on the floor, bringing to life the arrays Scott had set. “He wants to use you to control your mother once they’ve summoned the big demon,” he said calmly, like this was no big deal. “Otherwise, Scott would have gotten up to kill you himself. He will kill you once they’ve finished using your mother. Am I wrong?” he asked Scott.
Scott smashed a cat-sized spider and scowled at me. “You are going to die soon enough.”
“It’s impossible for you to die soon enough,” I replied with a snarl at the end. “Betrayer of the innocent. You have brought upon yourself your own downfall.”
The demon grinned at me as he shook out his tail and swept a few spiders towards the side of the room. “You sound like one of them. I thought you were more sophisticated than that. Pity. Perhaps I could help you if you made a deal with me.” He winked at me, and I wanted to kick his face.
“Do you hear your demon, Scott? He’s not loyal to you, and will devour your soul, if you still have one of those left after killing all the construction workers.” He probably didn’t. There was no point in trying to talk to him, except that I didn’t know what else to do.
Percy got the last of Scott’s arrays to spark up and die down and then ran at Scott. The jerk reached back and grabbed my mother’s throat, casually lifting her by it so her body flopped around bonelessly. My whole soul rebelled at the careless way he handled her, like she was a rag doll, not someone whose neck you could snap far too easily.
“You’ll have to go through your true love’s mother first. Percy, you’ve already lost. You aren’t a cold-blooded killer, which is why you failed out of the Knights of the Order. You know that in an actual battle against me and a demon, while trying to defend the helpless garbage girl, you’ve already lost. You want to save the city, which is worthy and noble, if it were anywhere other than Singsong, but think of it, the end of duality, the end of conflict, the peace that will come once the struggle has ended.”
“You should just kill yourself if you’re so anxious to get to hell instead of dragging all of us with you,” Percy growled, crouching over Mrs. Hanley, but glaring at Scott.
That’s when I noticed Poe hopping out of the shadows behind her, keeping small, sneaky as he went until he got close enough to my mother to peck her leg, hard.
I could hear him talk to her in her head like he talked to me.
Gabriela’s in a real mess this time. You’re going to have to wake up and save her.
My mother opened her eyes, throat still in Scott’s claws, half shifted to stone. She looked at him, then at her hand, opened and closed it a few times, and then shoved it into his chest cavity and pulled out his heart. It beat in her hand while he gasped the most horrible sound in the world, shock, pain, and more shock before he turned to stare at the pale woman who was holding his heart.
Wow. Don’t mess with the Grand Sorcerer, even if she can’t remember who she is.
Chapter
Nineteen
The demon leapt at her, but I was faster because I had wings, and he did not. I hit the demon from the side and rolled with him while Scott gasped and shuddered.
I lost track of the rest of the room in my wrestle with the demon. I’d fought with Percy countless times, but this was completely different, triggering instincts and abilities that came with my gargoyle form that had nothing to do with beating people with skateboards or punching jerks. This was what a gargoyle had been created to do, and there was something incredibly satisfying about ripping apart a demon with my bare claws and teeth.
I ripped a particularly large chunk out of the demon when Scott screamed, and I looked at him in time to see him throw my mother across the room, and then shove his heart back into his chest with the most sickening sound you’ve ever been happy not to hear. It was gross, and then the demon I was fighting started screaming as Scott drew on the demon’s life force and turned to face Percy, who was feverishly working over Mrs. Hanley, hopefully undoing the brain control spell.
