Angie slumped. Her staff clattered down.
He let her go.
Chapter Twenty
Angie
Finally, after an eon of pain, the color of the magics arcing from the collection chamber into my staff altered. Leviathan ripped and tore. The brilliance of the blackness that coated myblood gauntlet hedgewas less intense, graying here and there, the greens and oranges less lurid. The pain of the leviathan that had molded thehedgeinto my null cloak eased. The cold was no longer the cold of the darkness of space, but simply the cold of glaciers a million years in the making. My bones ached. My skin was inflamed and frostbitten at the same time.
The vision of the demon’s energies sputtered.
Paused.
The darkness and the garish colors were sucked into the staff and behind us, into the containment vessel. Ripping Leviathan into two parts. I had never heard of such a possibility.
At last, the giant of a demon was gone. The ley line energies cut off.
My head was buried against my brother’s shoulder. EJ gagged. The muscles in his arms softened and relaxed slowly, asif they had been locked into place. He groaned quietly. I slumped on the ice in the street. The staff dropped down, my hands still around it, but my grip lax. My stomach burned with acid and, like EJ, I retched. The motion threw me forward, onto my elbows in the snow. I released the staff and vomited. When my belly was empty, I raised my head, so tired I wasn’t sure I could sit up again.
After what seemed like hours but was probably only seconds, EJ pulled me upright.
He was still sitting beside me. “Ange?” he asked.
I shook my head. I fought a stutter, my voice graveled and rough when I spoke. “Th-this was wrong. This was sssstupid. There was no reason for this attack, or the one before, the air drones. We’re missing…Oh. Walt—”
“Walter.” So fast he might have been a vampire, my brother pulled strength fromsomewhereand whirled from sitting to his feet, in a single heartbeat. He raced to the apartment building, shouting orders into his headset.
“Remind me. What does Walter have to do with demons?” I asked. But he was gone. I felt as if I should know the answer, but my brain was fried.
The comms to my family coven were still open. I tapped and managed a soft, “Thank you. Your ley line saved our butts.” Before any of them could reply, I cut the communication. However, the connection to EJ was less easy to stop. What had my little brother done?
I settled slowly, as the last of my energy drained from me. I lay back on the frozen street. My staff to the side. My breath was rough. Coarse. My throat pained as if I had been screaming. Maybe I had.
Snow fell onto me, melting onto my scalp, my face. The nullcloak sent pain deep into my core as it continued to cancel my own magic. I needed to roll away from the staff. Get out of the null cloak.
I shivered. Footsteps crunched across the ice coating the street. I knew the cadence.Villetti.
His arms came around me and lifted me to a sitting position. He held me, his body so much warmer than my own frozen one. He felt like a furnace. He laid his cheek against mine. His scent filled my nostrils, that subtle scent of tiramisu.
The staff rolled away and bounced on the ice.
I was sitting in the street, in the refrozen slush and brine. Soaked. Lee on one knee beside me.
I breathed out against him, a sound that was mostly weeping.
Softly, he said, “I would like to lift you and carry you,cara, like in the romance films, across the ice, but I fear I would slip, and fall, and you would land on me, and I would be gravely injured, and then be unable to make gentle, passionate love to you.”
At the image he painted, I laughed brokenly, a weak and feeble attempt. “Are you calling me fat?”
“Never,tesoro. You are perfection.” He propped the staff in the crook of my elbow, tightened his arms around me, braced his feet against slipping, and stood, lifting me to my feet. He held me upright until strength returned to my legs.
Tesoro.Treasure…
I said, “We need to watch the videos again, the ones of the queen’s reception. We missed something. But first, we have to check on Walter and EJ.”
We crossed the ice and began the long slog through the snow, approaching Peg at the containment vessel. I studied the older vet, his weight on his bionic leg. He wasn’t possessed.Good. I tapped my ear-patch to allow comms on the generalchannel and ask for an update. But instead of the wrap-up of battle, I heard screaming and weapons fire.
The fight wasn’t over.
