The sickly orange mist of demons in the physical room with us, in the battle, shrieked. Dark energies ripped away, claws tearing, teeth gnashing, leaving my soul bleeding. Leaving EJ. Leaving Nyoka’s leg. My hand burned, froze, dying. Every energy that was free suffused the room with light and darkness. EEBs wailed. Demons were yanked, traveling along my staff, into the interdimensional nothingness. Orange and green and the foul stain of old blood I could see even with my eyes closed.
The screaming of EEBs softened. Stuttered.
With a last long wailing screech, it ended.
Silence covered me. Shiloh was still holding one hand, our power braided with EJ’s.
I opened my eyes, blinked, my eyeballs dry as desert sands. Focused on my white, frozen, blood-smeared hands. I gasped,hyperventilating. My head sagged. Blackness crowded the edges of my vision.
Fainting would mean death.
I took a breath. Another. Relief and desperation wheezed in my lungs.
Through the silence, Shiloh panted, her fingers quivering in mine. She was lying on the smooth painted concrete. I hadn’t known or realized it, but the floor was baby blue.
Beside my staff lay EJ. My eyes followed a blood trail from where he had lain, to here. He had crawled to me. Now he lay in streaks of his own blood, at my feet, joints sagging.
My bell-shapedhedgedied, dripping sparks.
Beneath me, I sensed the magics of the tainted demon circle carved into the floor, the alien and powerful EEBs the witches had struggled to claim and control. Blood and death and darkness. The ley line blazed through me.
So much power. Raw power.
If I dropped the staff, I’d die. I knew that fact as surely as if a prophet stood in front of me. The magic was knotted, braided, twisted, into a latticelike net, opposing raw powers meshed, waiting.
I threw the netted energies over the possessed people and bodies all around me. Light flowed from them like illuminated liquid. Rotated, tightened, and plunged into the net. Into the place-no-place of emptiness.
Energy rebounded through me.
Shiloh freed my hand. EJ rotated away.
I focused on the magic in the room. The EEBs were gone, leaving behind trails of reds and greens and the blackness of utter emptiness.
I released the trigger on the staff.
Where light and darkness touched thedeathmagic circle,fire flashed, lighting up the room, blinding flames. It coursed around the circle once, and was gone. The stench of blood cooked into ash once again blended with the reek of brimstone and death. The bloody, broken circle deactivated entirely.
A wind came from the open doors and swept its stench away.
With myseeinggift, my precog fully activated, and my human sight working together, I looked around the room. Turned to the back door, the one I had come through, that led to the parking area. Where the vans were. Vans that were full of containment vessels.
“Holy hell,” I croaked.
Someone was opening a containment vessel. A big one.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Angie
EJ lay limp near Walter. The air roared with darkness and the stench of brimstone and death. A wind colder than the reaches of hell.
Walter was still sitting cross-legged, Willim’s head on the floor in front of him. Sprites and a larger ????? ? ??????? poured into the room, toward my staff.
Nyoka, eyes fully orange and green, began to scream, her sword rising in jerky motions high over her former lover’s head. Screaming. Screaming. Fighting the compulsion to kill.
Shiloh threw her own body at the witch. Tackled her to the floor. Grappled with her on the flash-burned concrete. Cousin Wacko screamed awyrdof power, syllables I couldn’t remember once they were spoken. Nyoka’s body stiffened and toppled. Quivered with what flashed like lightning.
I rolled over my brother. Tightened my grip on the trigger stone of my staff, my dead-as-dirt finger too numb to feel. I wrapped my right hand around my left to keep my grip. I was totally vulnerable to any mundane weapon, but I had to protect EJ.
