Someone stepped in front of Walter, a booted foot obscuring his face. Legs standing over him. The clash of steel clanged into the silence. Blood splattered across Walter.
Over comms, a gun sounded. Three shots, fast, no hesitation. Three more.
Angie
My brother’s power seeped, and then flowed into me, yellow, pure light. Tears flooded my eyes, falling down my cheeks as I was able to take a breath.
“Ohhhh,” I said softly, a note of grief in the word. “Little Evan. What did you do…?”
But I knew. I remembered the moment I had unwrapped our parents’ bindings, the magical bindings that had tied our unexpected, premature, and exceptionally strong magical energiesinto the bones of our bodies, so we didn’t hurt ourselves or others. I had unwrapped the bindings, pulled them away, and created a shield to protect us from attack. I wove the raw magic so I could get help for Mama and Daddy and find a way to stop the magical attack from up the hill. So I could call Edmund, my Dark Knight, the vampire who was blood-bound to protect me for as long as I lived.
The vampire who later went on to become Edmund the First. The Emperor of Europe.
And he had come. Family had come. He and my aunts had saved us.
But somehow, when I twisted EJ’s energies together with my own and my angel’s, they had…stuck?
Standing in the winter storm, EJ’s hands on my shoulders, his healing amulets directed into my flesh, breathing became easier. But the pain in my hands was intense even with the gloves and Mama’s amulets to protect all but my fingertips. Freezing.
Demons poured up the tip of my staff. Imps, sprites,chorts. So very many. ABeswas sucked toward me, filth and horror and all the colors of hell sliding up from the tip of the staff. Screaming, icy, it disappeared beneath the blue tigereye.
Some imps got away. I knew that. I saw when their energies split off from the river of power pouring at us and flashed black light into the night. I could only hope the containment vessel brought by Villetti was able to capture them. And that I wouldn’t have to kill Peg and capture a demon who possessed him. Or one of the others.Villetti.
Time passed. My frozen fingers transferred the cold through my hands, into my arms.
EJ’s magic thrust through me, driving against the hypothermia, the frostbite, trying to reverse the damage, warming me. He sang a soft note and hishealingamulets sent more powerinto me, power I let heal me as much as it could. Power I twisted and sent into my arms as strength for exhausted muscles, and into my numb, screaming-in-pain trigger finger. Agony, bone-deep, permeated my left hand. My hands ached with each heartbeat, as if someone hammered them with a maul. If pain had a purity, a single existential truth, this was it, penetrating, piercing, stabbing pressure, heat like a thousand needles beaten into me. Ice. The frozen depths of a glacier within my flesh and bones.
Tears froze in the icy night air.
EJ shoved back with his power and the cold lessened. Humming a soft note, he activated the last of thehealingamulets on his body.
But unless the demons were nearly gone, it wasn’t going to be enough. And…
Something is coming.
Theknowingstrengthened. We had never been touching, never linked magics, when Ifeltthe possibilities.
“This is why the vessel is so effing big,” he whispered to me.
“I don’t know if the staff is enough,” I said. “Not for aleviathan.”
I felt his disbelieving reaction through the link.
“Call Daddy,” I said. “If we have to, open us to the coven.”
“Angie—”
“Do it. You know they’re sitting in a circle. You know it. Iknowit.”
EJ
EJ tapped his ear-patch. Before he could say a word, his father said, “I’m here, son. Alex warned us. Your mother and I aresitting with Cassey, your aunts Cia and Liz, at our circle in the main room of the queen’s winter residence. Molly is at north.”
“It’s a hell of a long way for a coven to work,” EJ said.
“Chattanooga sits on the same bedrock as Asheville. Lizzie secured an arc through a ley line when we set the apartment’s wards in place.”
“Woulda been nice to know,” EJ spat.
