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Just a little farther. As soon as the sergeant gave the signal…
At the edge of the clearing, the demon stopped. It made a grunting sort of groan low in its throat. A chill flooded me.
It could tell. It must be able to detect the magic we’d put into the cage, or maybe the copper was already repelling it.
It started to wheel, and the sergeant jerked her hand. All at once, the enforcers all around me whirled faster. I launched myself into the movements of my form with all the strength I had in me.
Our magic hummed in my ears, nearly drowning out the demon’s discordant energy. We threw it toward the demon with the force of a hurricane.
My spark sputtered in my chest as I heaved my magic to join the push. An ache split down the center of me behind my ribs. I choked on a breath and kept moving, kept following the dance of casting. It would hurt a hell of a lot more if the demon turned on us.
The demon stumbled a few feet into the clearing and then reared up on its haunches. As it started to swing toward us, my heart stuttered. No. We could do this. We almost had it.
I threw myself into the magicking even faster and more furiously than I had before. My spark flared and seared all through my body. I gritted my teeth against the pain and hurled another massive force toward the demon.
Several of the enforcers’ heads jerked around as my spell sang past them, their eyes wide and jaws going slack. The burst of propulsion smacked into the demon just as it twisted around. It sprawled on its back, its shoulders smacking the edge of the cage. So fucking close.
The unsettling tremor in my spark expanded, gnawing at my nerves. But as I whipped another bolt of magic toward the monster, I felt right down to the base of my teeth how my magic, with that taint, crashed right up against the demon’s presence and held, not dispersing like our spells last time had. I was matching fire with fire this time.
The sergeant was hollering, and the enforcers around me were flinging out their own magic with the pattering of their feet and the darting of their hands. If we could just bring it all together—if I could send that awful flavor from my own magic across all of their castings—maybe we could win this day yet.
My foot stumbled on the uneven ground, but I caught myself and spun on. The magic wrenched through me as I tossed more and more of it out across the crowd to merge with their spells. The forest around me blurred. I sucked in air and dug down even deeper.
The demon roared, a sound that seemed to echo all the way from that other plane of its regular existence. A fresh blast of our magic hit it, and it toppled farther onto the cage. Then it shoved its massive body up and around.
I scrambled for more magic, more, more, clutching at my spark and wringing all the power I could from its dwindling flame—
My spark sputtered, and my vision hazed. A splintered pain radiated through every inch of my body. My legs sagged. As I fell to the forest floor, the last thing I saw before my sight went completely dark was the demon yanking the cage from the ground and hurling it toward the trees. Then my eyes and my mind blanked out.
* * *
“Lady Hallowell? Can you hear me?”
The tight voice penetrated the fog in my head. I blinked, my eyelids heavy as lead, and a headache pierced through my brain and down into my chest in what felt like a thousand directions. My whole body flinched.
“Hey,” the woman leaning over me said, her tone softening. “There you are. Stay still. I’ll do what I can to make you more comfortable.”
She set her hand over my forehead and drew a glyph with a dance of her fingers. A numbing cold spread over my scalp. It dulled most, if not all, of the pain.
As the agony receded, my surroundings came into focus. I was sprawled on my back, knees raised, in a car that was bumping along some road, the rumble of its motor sounding through the padding of the seat. My head was on the witch’s lap. One of the medics who’d come with us to— Oh, dear Spark.
I tried to speak, but my tongue tangled. It took a minute or two, swallowing past the dryness in my throat, before I could find my words. “What happened? The demon—the cage—”
That image, the fiend flinging our trap away into the forest—had that really happened?
“You burned yourself down, pouring all that magic in,” the medic said. “I’ve never seen anyone…” She paused and seemed to gather herself. “The demon was too strong. We had to retreat. It was close, but…”
“Close isn’t enough,” I filled in. My mouth curled in a grimace. We’d failed, again.I’dfailed.
“You just worry about resting and recovering your spark now,” the medic said grimly. “We may need you again sooner rather than later. The last hour, it’s been picking up speed again. And it’s heading straight for Portland now. At the rate it’s moving… it might make it there tomorrow.”
Chapter Fourteen
Gabriel
The hitch finally left Rose’s breath about a half hour after we’d all climbed into the suite’s master bed with her. She kept her head tucked against my chest, her fingers clamped around a fold in my shirt.
“I tried,” she mumbled. “I tried so hard.”
