“This is bad,” Angie gasped. Her breathing was too fast, heart drumming. Missing beats.
EJ found the tiny thread of life and magic that connected them and wrapped Angie’s around his own, lesser magic. Hoping it would be enough to protect them, he drew on the ley line. Raw magic like a furnace, like being inside lightning, filled him. Burning. Flaring. Its energy and power so loud his belly cramped. Vomit rose. His thighs knotted and his back spasmed. It was too much, too much, too much.
Unable to draw in a fresh breath, he forced out an exhale against the pain and managed a rough, single note. Somehow, without knowing how he did it except that he was still connected to his sister, he fed all that might to Angie. But Leviathan still ignored the staff’s pull.
The single point of darkness pressing into herhedgesang a note of triumph.
The staff grew frigid beneath EJ’s and Angie’s hands. Their magic mingled and coiled and knotted. Power, raw and dangerous, flowed to them from the ley line, and suddenly the power surge steadied as if a strong hand wrapped around the ley line, creating a buffer.
EJ recognized the signature of the coven circle. The stability firmed around the power and coursed into the staff. The dimensional opening widened.
There were sounds outside the narrow safety of Angie’shedge. Gunshots. Shouts. A horn blaring. A shock wave of concussive power.
The demon claw stopped pressing into thehedge. It pulled away, letting in the night, so much brighter than the darkness they had been trapped in.
A tendril of the demon moved from the street.
EJ turned his head and saw a wedge of the snow-blurred parking lot and the apartment building.
Behind them, Villetti’s containment vessel caught at a wayward note. Attracting and then dividing the demon’s attention.
The interdimensional opening in the staff instantly pulled and tore into the leviathan, ripping into the energies. The staff tore at it, rupturing the energy of its fear and hate and death, seizing gobbets and chunks that sounded like the clanging of broken bells and the crashing of steel beams.
The staff cleaved out bitterness and war and the torture of prisoners. Between the staff and the containment vessel, the demon was trapped.
It screamed, a sound of power that beat at EJ’s brain. The sound was a freight train to hell, filled with the dead of a thousand wars.
And Leviathan…ripped in two.
The concussive blast of dark energies rolled over them in a wave of sound. The roar of a freight train hit thehedge. Moved it.Shoved it against them. Molding thehedgeto their bodies.
Angie braced against him, gasping, gripping the staff by force of will. Thrusting the power of the ley line into thehedge. Shoring up the shield. Desperate.
The coven fed them a steady stream of ley line power. Angie took it into her magics, into her gift. He heard something different in her magic. A pure tone. A deep breath filled her.
With their twined magic, EJ followed the ringing of Angie’s will and, intent as his sister, directed strands of the leviathan’s power into the staff, stripping it from the EEB as if flaying flesh, compelling the tattered demon magics into the open maw of the pocket of somewhere and nowhere.
He sensed the rest of the demon being drawn into Villetti’s containment vessel.
The creature, the EEB, the thing that wanted inside them, to kill and maim and torture, shrieked. The blackness that coated thehedgefrayed and shredded. The night was brilliant as the snowfall reappeared.
Ley line raw magic resupplied Angie’sgauntlethedge, driving the demon power back. He had no idea what raw magic would do to his body or his own magic.
The cacophony of screaming stuttered. Paused. Began again, softer, less painful.
EJ caught a glimpse of movement outside thehedge. Human-shaped.
And then the world fell silent.
The massive chaos was gone.
Carried on the wind, snowflakes pasted themselves on thehedge, the patterns delicate. A white covering that diffused a distant streetlight into a veil overlaying his vision.
EJ gagged.
Delta Mode was used up. He folded it like a frayed and ragged piece of origami and put it away. Feeling the coven energies, knowing through the deep connection, that his family, that Angie, knew he had done something different. Something that was unfamiliar to witches. And that Angie and he were bound together in some arcane way that never should have happened at all.
Thehedgefell.
