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“I guess I should say the same,” Caroline said at my other side. “The best I might be able to do is stand back and offer the boost of my magic to anyone who needs it.”
“That’s mostly how I’ll be contributing too,” I said. “The enforcers have a lot more training in offensive and defensive magic than I do.” I nodded to the witches at the front of the jeep.
But I had plenty of magic at my disposal. My spark was blazing brightly in my chest, barely used since I’d come out to help the Assembly. If I could make the difference between this plan succeeding and it not, I wanted to be here.
The demon’s unnatural energy wavered into the air around us and quivered down to my bones. I rubbed my arms against the crawling of my skin. Caroline shuddered, and Thalia’s shoulders stiffened.
“If it looks half as horrible as it feels,” Caroline murmured, and then she didn’t need to finish that sentence, because we came around a treed bend into view of the creature itself.
The demon was still taking a slow exploratory route across the farmlands and forests in this isolated section of the state. At least that part of the Frankfords’ plan—setting up their portal where no one was likely to stumble on it—had worked to our advantage. Right now, the monster was moving with its lurching gait across a meadow spotted with trees. As we watched, it tested its massive clawed hand against one. The way its mouth twisted in apparent gratification at the sagging of the rotted branches made me queasy.
The cars in front of us pulled off onto the sides of the road. Our driver followed suit. We clambered out alongside several dozen enforcers and the two men from the Frankfords’ faction.
“Everyone in the positions we agreed on,” the sergeant in charge hollered, managing to pitch her voice so it wouldn’t travel too far across the field. “Cautious with the approach. Begin the push on my signal.”
Thalia stuck with me, as we’d agreed on back during our strategy meeting. Another squad of enforcers moved off with Caroline. The older witch and I and the eight enforcers who made up our squad marched with cautious but steady footsteps into the tall grass. The blades rustled against our calves. The delicate smell of wildflowers rising from the patches here and there might have been comforting if a prickle of decay hadn’t reached my nose from the demon’s path.
The squads who were escorting the men gathered in front of us. We were coming up beside the creature. Its path had been winding, and we didn’t need to push it straight back, just to the left of the way it’d been going, to get it back toward its “home.”
The demon’s head turned toward us, and the sergeant waved for us to stop in our tracks. My heart thudded as those opaque eyes scanned our ranks. There was nothing but malevolence in them now.
It started to swing its hunched body toward us, and the sergeant jerked her hand again. We were only about fifty feet away now—we’d have to hope that was close enough, because if we waited any longer, there was no telling what it might do to us first.
My arms lifted into the air, twining and releasing as I summoned the energy from my spark and cast it out toward the enforcers ahead of me. All of them were moving too. Their bodies swayed in sync with each other through practiced magical forms, with a few new twists to account for this unusual strategy. The two men who’d joined us stretched their hands out in front of them, palms toward the demon.
It’s through the palms, one of the faction members I’d talked to yesterday had told me.I don’t know why. That’s how we take it in, and how we let it back out.
A different sort of hum dispersed the unnatural quivering in the air around us. It was a warbling of our own magical energy that the great Spark had blessed witching kind with, as much a part of me as the thump of my pulse and the strands of my hair now tossed by the wind. Tremors of that dissonance ran through the wave of magic from the men, but mostly away from me, toward the demon. Only a hint of it touched my body.
The first rush of power smacked into the demon just as it had finished swinging toward us. It flinched, and the reddish glow on its hazy skin wavered. The enforcers swiveled on their feet, moving even faster. With a hollow-sounding groan, the demon shuffled back one pace and then another. Its already gnarled face contorted into a grimace.
It was working. My spirits leapt. I pushed my own gestures faster, urged my own spark higher and hotter, pouring all the magic I could summon toward those who could shape it best.
The demon scuttled backward another few steps. Then its back arched. A flash of panic shot through me in the instant before it lunged at us.
The sweep of its clawed fingers propelled a shrieking wave of its awful energy into us. The blast rocked me on my feet. Thalia let out a cry, falling to her knees. The enforcers near the front of the assault stumbled, many of them falling to their knees.
“Regroup, regroup!” the sergeant shouted. “We had it. Push back—push harder. Encircle it.”
The squads ahead of us spread out in a semi-circle around the creature. Their arms lashed through the air, and their feet stamped against the ground. I threw myself into another round of magicking, my breath sharp in my throat. We had to get that control back. We’d managed to move the demon a little. If we could just keep that effort up—
But the creature didn’t even wince this time. Its head swiveled on its thick neck as it took in our scramble around it. Its black eyes gleamed. Thalia stayed crouched on the ground, but I forced myself to walk closer to the edge of the circle, where I could continue passing on my magic most effectively.
I’d just come up a few feet behind the front lines, the rest of my squad around me, when the demon’s gaze jerked straight to me. Its fathomless gaze fixed on my face with an attention that crept through every nerve in my body. My feet lost their rhythm; the sway of my arms faltered.
The monster leaned forward as if studying me, and that horrible smile I’d seen when it had rotted the tree stretched across its face again. The witches between me and it were casting more spells, but the demon barely seemed to notice. I staggered backward, unable to tear my gaze from its inhuman eyes. The intensity of its focus gripped me as tightly as if it’d closed its claws around me. My thoughts jittered. Was it trying to tear right into my mind?
No. I concentrated on my spark, on the heat and the glow of life inside me. My magic flowed through my limbs and over my skin.
The demon made a sound like a groaned snarl. Its claws whipped out, smacking into the front line of enforcers. One speared a witch right through the skull. Another sprawled on the ground, her legs streaming blood.
“Retreat!” the sergeant called out. I caught sight of her for an instant before the surge of the squads swept me up. Her face was bloodless, even her lips near-white.
I whirled and dashed toward Thalia, who was struggling to her feet on the field behind me. But even as we ran, the demon’s eyes bored into my back. I felt it tracking me, niggling at my mind, from the moment my hand closed around the older witch’s elbow, all the way back to the jeep, and through the screeching of tires as we fled.
Chapter Eight
Damon
