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Jill merely smiled and crouched, opening the umbrella. Hers was orange and yellow with a giraffe head on it. “You go high, I’ll cover low.”
Ryan opened his umbrella. “What are you going to do, Kara?”
“I need to trap this thing!”
“Fuck,” he growled. “And I suppose you have to be in there with it?”
Yes. Out there would have been preferable, but that wasn’t really an option. I quickly shoved a pile of books off the table, cringing as they landed in ugly heaps with the sound of tearing paper. I grabbed a pen off the floor and inscribed a quick and crude circle into the surface of the wooden table, still holding the umbrella over me. Tessa would be livid at the damage to her table, but I didn’t give a shit at this point. I’d refinish the damn thing later. I stepped back and began to slowly pull power again, but this time into the circle. I was going to try a dismissal, but since I didn’t have the faintest clue as to what this creature was and didn’t know its name, the standard dismissal that I used for demons wasn’t going to work. Instead, I was going to open a generic portal and try to keep it small enough so the arcane creature would get sucked through and returned to wherever it came from, but nothing else would.
There were only two things that could screw this up. First, if the thing was actually a resident of this sphere, I’d be spending arcane energy to make a portal for no reason at all. Second, if the thing had been summoned by another and was somehow bound to this sphere, I would need to do a far more specific dismissal.
I kept my attention divided as carefully as I could while I created my mini-portal, fighting to keep the power under control as it began to form and also paying attention to the shelf where I’d last seen the creature go. I’d never tried to create a portal of a specific size before, so I was going strictly on barely remembered theory. It also didn’t help that it was hard as shit to draw power when it was daytime during a waning moon. But I didn’t need a lot for what I was hoping to make.
Pain suddenly seared the middle of my back, and my control of the forming portal faltered badly as fatigue slammed into me. I fell to my knees and scrabbled at my back as I mentally grabbed for the portal. My fingers closed on something that wiggled and clawed alarmingly, sending a deep shock through me. A third way for this to fail: There’s more than one creature!
I’d maintained my hold on the portal though, which had widened to a bright slit in the universe a few inches wide. I chucked the squiggling thing in my hand at the portal, grimly pleased when it was drawn in with a sharp pop, like a roach into a vacuum. I could hear Ryan shouting something to Jill, but I couldn’t spare the focus to make it out. The pain had spiraled up, and the strange fatigue had increased to the point where it was taking everything I had just to maintain the portal. I heard a high-pitched whine from the shelf that I’d been watching, and then the other one shot out from behind the book. It grabbed on to the heavy chandelier, wrapping claws around a dangling crystal and resisting the pull of the portal as it bared its teeth at me. I knew that all I had to do was swat at it and it would fall into the vortex, but the pain in my back had increased to breath-stealing proportions, and even the thought of standing made my eyes water with the agony.
“Come here, ya little fucker!” I heard Jill cry out. I watched through pain-slitted eyes as she bounded into the room with a garbage bag in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a fierce grin as she snapped the creature up into her tongs and yanked it off the chandelier, crystal and all, then stuffed everything into the bag.
“What now?” she shouted over the strange whine of the vortex.
“Into the portal,” Ryan and I shouted at the same time. Or, rather, Ryan shouted and I wheezed. Jill wound up and winged it right at the slit in a beautiful underhand throw that would have made any fast-pitch softball player proud. I had a split second of panic that it would be too large to go in with the garbage bag and tongs—then it shifted and disappeared.
“Kara, close the portal down!”
I shuddered, then yanked the power free of the circle, sending it down to ground into the earth. The sudden quiet seemed deafening, broken only by our collective harsh breathing.
I tried to stand up and whimpered. Ryan snapped his head to look at me. “Ah, shit.”
The pain in my back was well on its way to excruciating now. He grabbed me and pushed me to lie facedown on the floor, ignoring my breathless scream at the motion.
“Jill, get hot water, a knife, and matches or a lighter,” Ryan commanded. “Also, any salt you can find.”
Jill dashed to the kitchen again. I couldn’t help but think that she was enjoying this introduction to the arcane far too much.
“Just stay still,” Ryan said, voice unnervingly calm as he pulled my shirt up. He didn’t have to tell me that, though. Moving hurt too much, and the pain was spreading.
“How bad is it?” I managed to get out between clenched teeth.
“Bad enough,” he replied honestly. I was grateful for that, because if he’d told me that it wasn’t bad I wouldn’t have believed him.
“It’s not going to be easy, but I think I can get you through the worst of this,” he continued. Jill careened back into the room, holding the items out for Ryan.
He took the knife from her hand. “Okay, Kara, this is going to really fucking hurt.”
Maybe honesty wasn’t such a good thing, because he was right. I heard someone scream, then realized that it was me. My vision went dark and I fought it briefly, then decided that maybe going with my instincts to pass out was a good idea right now.
So I did.
Chapter 19
I woke up to the same amount of pain in my back, or so I thought at first. But after a couple of cautious breaths, I was forced to admit that it was nowhere near as excruciating as it had been before I passed out. Now it was merely on the level of hurts like shit.
I was lying facedown on my aunt’s bed, the yarn of her afghan tickling my nose. I shifted to get a tuft out of my nostril, grimacing at the dull spear of pain that accompanied the movement. I heard a chair scrape, then Ryan bent down, crouching beside the bed. Behind him I could see Zack leaning against the wall, his arms folded over his chest and his brows drawn down.
“How do you feel?” Ryan said, voice soft and thick.
“Like someone decided to shove an ice pick into the small of my back. Otherwise, peachy.” I moved carefully, relieved when I was able to roll onto my side without the pain becoming overwhelming. I gingerly reached to feel my back and discovered a wad of gauze and tape. There was a thick smell of garlic as well, so I had to assume that it had been used somehow in the treatment of the sting. Though I had no idea where they’d found garlic. Certainly not in Tessa’s pantry. I’d tossed out anything perishable some time ago.
