“Blue isn’t really my color.”
My lips twitched before I could stop them. His unexpected humor lifted the stress, and I blew out a second, calmer breath. Blue was absolutely his color. Not said. “You genuinely are an idiot.”
“So you told me. Often.”
The cop wrapped himself in the null cape and sat against the kitchen wall, in a position between me and the back door, but with a good view of the hallway leading to the front door. He was holding his service weapon in a two-hand grip, a smaller gun on the floor beside him. His backup piece.
Walter stood in the open back door. Icy air blew through the house.
I folded to the floor near EJ in a rare unbloodied spot, and assumed a full lotus position, the staff at my knees.
I was a rare double-gened witch, having gotten the x-linked genes from both of my parents. Unlike most witches who could work magic only throughseeingworkings and amulets, and who could only create new workings with math and often dangerous trial and error, I could see magic and work with it directly, raw, in certain quantities, and under specific circumstances. Not the way I could before my angel left me, when Iwas a kid and could handle massive amounts of raw magic like it was multicolored yarn to be woven into new forms and patterns. But I could still manipulate it better than most.
Perhaps part of my ability also came from grampa, a vampire. He had contributed his own special magic to the Everharts’ power. He was the wild card in my family genetics. No one knew what EJ, my sister, Cassey (still in college), and I were, or how our magic worked. No one but family had ever watched me work. Not ever. Until now.
I shook out my hands and dismissed mygauntlet. Even with the personalhedge, now both hands were the white of dead skin, frozen deeper than the upper layers of dermis. My fingers were numb and tingly, with a deep-down ache of death and demon magic.
There were legions of EEBs and, before the war, only a few types had been documented. That was all changed now, and the government and the U.S. council of witches had categorized over a hundred different varieties of extradimensional, extraterrestrial beings, though few were fully documented. I pulled four null sticks and took two in each hand, both clumsy but able to hold them. Using them like chopsticks, my hands’ motions stiff and ungainly, I began to unknot the tangled magics.
EJ
Trapped inside thestasis wyrd,but fully aware of time outside it, he watched Angie’s hands move, the sticks in the empty air seeming to knit the invisible with a symphony of sound only he could hear. Her magical tones, warped by thetimeworking, sang softly against the disharmonies of darkness.
She was sweating in the frigid air that swept in and outthrough the open doors, the stench-sweat of fear and concentration. Her breath was shallow and fast. She blinked too seldom. Her right hand looked horrible. Her left hand looked dead. If she didn’t finish whatever she was doing soon, she might lose that hand. Even vampire blood can’t re-alive dead flesh.
Minutes passed as he watched, counting them down.Too long.
Walter was in the clear, watching Angie. A sliver of the detective was visible at the edge of the doorway. Villetti was wrapped in Angie’s cloak, which matched his blue eyes, starkly contrasting with his dark-skinned face. His service weapon was drawn, pointed at Angie, his expression one of contained horror. EJ figured the magazine was loaded with ammunition that would take down a living being inhabited—possessed—by a demon.
Possession of Earth beings, even dogs and cats, by spiritual beings from another dimension, had been common in the war, enough so that the Seattle coven had joined with the military to research and develop rounds that, when fired into a possessed creature, held the demon inside the body—for a very limited amount of time—until the demon could be collected in a containment vessel. But it killed the possessed.
The rounds were called demon rounds and they reeked of brimstone and burned bones, like the stench of demons themselves. They were illegal for civilians to purchase, were expensive enough that even on the black market they were too costly for most people to obtain, and there was little call for them these days, since the entryway into the realm where the demons lived had been closed.
Or so the military and the witch council thought. What if EEBs were being summoned again?
CPD would have demon rounds, as would all police departments with a paranormal crimes unit—a woo-woo department. And Villetti would kill Angelina or himself, or both, if necessary, to prevent possession. Possession of a witch gave EEBs access to witch magic.
Ice flowed through EJ’s veins.
If Villetti killed Walter’s charges, Walter would rip off his head and send it to the queen. And then, for killing a law enforcement officer, he’d spend a few decades in a prison built and maintained for vampires, his captivity overseen by his queen, who ran the only vampire prison in the world. The same queen who had sent him as guardian over her godchildren. The irony wasn’t lost on EJ.
Walter moved closer to them. What would their bodyguard do if the demon got free?
Angie was huffing breaths, her hands shaking. She leaned forward, her strawberry blonde curls swinging, and pulled an invisiblesomethinghard to the right. Soft tones sounded, clearer.
But thewyrdbegan to wear off.
With her nearly dead hand, she placed two of the null sticks on the floor. Tapped the blue stone on her staff. It was the same movement from the video.
Air whipped though the room, a whirlwind of power. It coalesced at the narrow tip of the staff on the floor at her knees. Swept up the staff to her thumb. And began to disappear into nothingness.
Villetti was standing, still wearing Angie’s null cloak. His weapon was pointed at EJ’s sister. Walter whirled. Shoved the cop’s hands up. “No.”
“You’re interfering with the duties of a law enforcement officer.” Villetti’s voice was empty. But agony and tears filled his eyes.
“She is not possessed,” Walter said. “She is banishing the demon.”
“Not possible,” Villetti said. “There’s no containment vessel.”
