Drooping against him, flagging, Angie gasped, “Less talk, more action.”
The old country song was there, full-blown, in EJ’s mind. Still in Delta Mode he sang the title line that wound through the old lyrics. “A little less talk and a lot moreaction!” With the power of his voice and their magic, he reached out to the wards in the apartment and down, through the energies, into the bedrock. He sang the line again.
The demon erupted from the vessel.
Linked to Angie, he could see it as well as hear it. The leviathan was blacker than the deeps of space. Dark as the seventh circle of hell. The stench of death and burned bones and brimstone filled the street, whipped by the wind. The sound of prison camps and the wails of torture filled the night. Clashing notes, cacophonous, dissonant, grinding along his nerves, pounding into his bones, reverberating in his brain.
Somewhere, closer than he had expected, a ley line sang, silver bells ringing, trilling, gonging in perfect harmony.
EJ gripped the ley line. Sank into it. Hooked hisa little less talk and a lot more actioninto the power, and dragged the power to them. Trying to keep a distance from the coven he had left behind because…because he had orders. Classified orders. He could never let anyone know what he had done, what he had become in the war.
Delta Mode. No one could ever know about Delta Mode.
But there were no secrets about magical power in a full family coven, one bound by blood, love, and power. So, he and Angie had to do this alone.
“A little less talk and a lot more action!” he sang, the notes ringing. Delta Mode turned the phrase into awyrdof power. Ley line magic powered up, blasting through the notes, into him.
Brimstone filled his nostrils. His lungs.
He coughed, and his song stopped. But with the full-coven energies meshed, he stepped to the side of Angie and wrapped his hands around hers. He shoved the power of the ley line, of the coven, into her hands, through their looped magics.
The demon was free of the collection vessel, filling the street. Raucous. And it sang.
My name is…Leviathan.
The notes clashed, words a landslide of broken stone grinding upon tortured souls, the avalanche slammed upon them, wrapping around their bodies. EJ shook as if he were being Tasered.
Angie wept aloud, her eyes closed, her head turned into his shoulder.
EJ, who seldomsawmagic except for a hint of color, saw the demon.
The demonlookedat him.
And the demonsawhim. Lookedintohim. Gazed upon his soul. And through him, it saw Angie.
Mine, it sang.
EJ angled the staff toward the demon. The empty universe within the wood, the place-non-place that pulled all energies inside it, yawned open.
The demon contemplated the place within the staff.
Place of other. Leviathan will not go.
Its power smashed into him. Crushed him down. EJ dropped, hit his knees. Pulling Angie down with him. The staff wavered a moment.
In that moment of freedom, it turned its attention away. Looked up.
“EJ. Cut me,” Angie whispered.
He didn’t argue. He braced the wide, glowing end of the staff against Angie’s belly. With his left hand he released the staff and reached into a pocket. Removed a tiny folding knife, snapped the two-inch blade open with a flick of his wrist. Angie’s hands were gloved and what he could see of her fingertips were bloodless and dead.Holy hell. He shoved against her sleeve, exposing a line of living skin. He pricked her and flicked the blood into the ice.
Angie said something, awyrdhe didn’t quite understand, but he heard the magic open around them, like taps of steel on steel, rapping smartly. Herblood gauntlet hedgestrengthened around them. EJ looked up to make sure the staff tip was free of thehedge, but Ange was too smart to make that kind of mistake.
Leviathan was bigger than a bread truck, dark and screaming with the tortured voices of hell. It ignored the tip of the staff as if it weren’t even there. The demon thinned and spread, encircling them, a slow swirl that cut out the last of the ambient light and the remaining view of the nighttime street. Like a constricting cloud of bubbling tar and torture, it wrapped around Angie’sblood hedge. It tightened against the energies of her blood-infused magics.
Angie hissed out and gasped a breath of pain. Her body jerked as if lightning hit her.
Where the leviathan touched thehedge, it sizzled and shrieked. With a sound like a vampire dying, an ululation of anguish, a single blacker point of matter grew, shaped like aclaw. It pressed into thehedge. And the demon still ignored the might of the interdimensional portal that pulled at it.
