The staff reacted. The pocket universe beneath my thumb opened.
My exposed hand went white with frostbite from its power. Nausea and a headache hit all at once. Gorge rose.
TheBesenergies snapped tight against the wood of the staff.
The sound of demon anguish rose and fell. Awyrdthat cursed and damned.
Thewyrdwas vicious. The staff bucked again. Orange-black coils of power, heavy with motes of hellfire, curled up from the disk on the top step. It sparked against the vibrant deep blue and green power of my staff. The energies were knotted, perverse, warped. TheBesshrieked. Heaved into the staff. Into the pocket universe.
Thethingin the staff sucked the screaming demon into itself, pulling it into the single dark hole of nothingness beneath my frozen thumb. As the last of the demon wailed into the darkness, the disk exploded.
I woke up on the floor of the gym, the lights overhead glaring. I blinked, but my vision was fuzzy. Not good. I might have a concussion. Walter was standing over me. Two Walters. And two EJs. The Walters looked really mad. The EJs looked really distressed. And naked. I closed my eyes. I did not need to see EJ naked.
When I spoke, my speech slurred, my mouth desert dry. “I shee two Waltersh and two EJsh. EJ. Pu’ on pan’s,” I begged. The world spun. Nausea rose. “I migh’ have a concusshon.”
“Open your eyes,” Walter commanded.
“EJ be’er have pants on.” I opened my eyes and the nausea receded a little.
In each of his two left hands, Walter held up a tiny, flat screen. On each, my mother’s face glared down at me.
“Oh shi’,” I said to myself. “I migh’ have a concusshon,” I told her.
“I would not be surprised,” Molly Everhart-Trueblood snapped. “Where in the name of all that’s holy did you get a staff that would do…that?”
“I’m in sho mush ’rouble.” But that thought skittered away. “I migh’ have a conshusshe…concusshon,” I said.
“Which is the only thing keeping me from driving up there and strangling you,” Mama lied.
“Don’ be upshet, Mama. I migh’ have a concusshon,” I said.
On the screens, Molly closed her eyes and prayed. If Mamawas praying, shit musta really hit the fan. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember what shit or which fan.
EJ
On the floor above him, Walter was dressing in his super ninja clothes. In his own apartment, EJ also changed. Yet again. Third time today? He was losing count.
As he stripped, he watched the entire vid sequence, collected by the stairway cam, at quarter speed, then again in ultra slo-mo. The disk exploded, shrapnel shooting everywhere, damaging the iced wall of the stairwell. Denting the steel door. Naked, he stopped, socks in hand, watching the explosion again in extreme slow motion.
Angie could have been killed.
Or Walter, when he picked up the disk.
At the moment, EJ was assuming that the cold of the air and of Walter’s T-shirt and his cold undead hands had kept the disk from exploding the moment it was touched, also assuming the containment chamber of the disk had been activated when Londyn placed the amulet in the pot. The warrior he had once been hated assumptions.
Maybe the amulet had been primed for a warm touch to set it off, not a vamp-cold one. Or the touch of magic energies. Londyn wouldn’t have wanted to kill a curious human, would she? A human death would have brought down the presence of the Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of whatever national enforcement or military department they were under now. So…Londyn had intended the disk and the demon for his hand or Angie’s?
A detonator that detected the presence of magic? Thatwould make sense. Maybe the bombmaker had known of their null sticks. Perhaps their enemies had even known of Angie’s null staff. The staff, though null magic, was still magical energy. They may have been watched more thoroughly than he had realized. Or an enemy had obtained access toOjos, or the queen’s computer servers.Damn. Too many unknowns to make a hypothesis.
Walter had been through a course in improvised magical explosive devices—IMEDs—yet he hadn’t recognized the collection device as a bomb, which meant it had been spelled to make anyone seeing it want to pick it up. EJ had never seen a weapon like the one on the camera footage. It looked like a hockey puck made of stone.
Someone had created a weapon that was an extraterrestrial, extradimensional, sentient-being collection chamber, an explosive charge, a null-sensitive, magic-sensitive, or maybe heat-sensitive detonator. Maybe the amulet had had a multi-reactive detonator. If so, then that detonator was a completely new kind of device, and a very dangerous one. Figuring out the detonator was problematic as there was nothing left of it.
The temporary containment vessel that had kept the EEB trapped, had shattered against the cement brick walls of the stairwell when the detonator blew and the demon was freed.
The working itself had disappeared along with the demon. Where had Angie put theBesafter the explosion? She too had to have access to a containment vessel. But surely, she would have told him if she did.
Where was the demon?
