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Rose’s smile relaxed at their automatic rallying around us. “Good idea. Each of you should wear one of the protective tokens, and it couldn’t hurt to be carrying a baton in case the demons have manifested in any ways more corporeal than we’ve seen so far.”
Gabriel loped to the house to grab the equipment. As soon as he’d distributed it, we set off around the side of the house toward the woods. I ignored the guilt twined through my innards as well as I could and focused on those threads of decay that echoed through me.
“This way,” I said, veering to the west. The awareness of the demonic presence tingled through me as if I were smelling it on some unconscious level.
Jin and Ky got out their phones to provide us with some light. We tramped over tree roots and around bushes until I’d just about left the guilt behind. A swelling of purpose had replaced it. We were marching out here to deal with this menace with me in the lead. I hadn’t really conquered the demons before, but I could now.
As my sense of our destination grew stronger, it became more of a taste, an almost electric energy crackling over my tongue with unsettling dissonance. My skin started to crawl, and my nerves twitched.
Rose clasped my hand harder. Around us, the other guys’ postures were stiffening as the unearthly power touched them too.
A faint shimmer came into view between the trees up ahead, with a ruddy tint that showed it wasn’t simply moonlight. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. We slowed our strides, approaching the area with due caution.
The patch of forest we’d found was a rough circle maybe ten feet across. All through that space, every plant that had been growing, from tuft of grass to towering pine, was dying if not already dead. The smaller plants slumped blackened against the dirt. A sapling had hunched over, its leaves shriveled. Splotches of mold and rot gripped the pine’s trunk.
In the very center of that circle, a smaller patch of earth had turned completely black, the remnants of vegetation there putrefied with a stink that made my stomach turn. The glow emanated from that ring: an erratic, wavering light that for instants here and there seemed to fall away far into the ground and perhaps even farther into another domain altogether.
With that glimpse, my whole body went rigid. Rose sucked in a sharp breath.
“They were breaking a new way through to our world now that the cave is sealed off,” I said, not needing her to confirm it. If I’d given in and slaughtered her dad the way they’d wanted, that bloodshed might have been enough to finish the job.
“They’re too late,” Rose said grimly. “We’re kicking them right back where they came from, for good this time.”
“How?” Kyler asked, his eyes gone nearly round.
“They got a foothold here through the mark the one demon left on Damon—the magic it planted in him.” Rose looked up to catch my eyes. “That magic is what’s letting them keep acting on this plane of existence. You can send it all back at them, push them out.”
I swallowed hard. “Every time I used the power before, it helped them.”
“Because you were using it to try to get something for yourself. Making a bargain they didn’t spell out the terms of.” She grimaced. Her fingers slid from my hand to the bandage around my forearm. “I think if you simply let it go, return it to them, they won’t be able to manipulate that gesture. They’ve never been able to manipulate the power we offer freely. I’ll be right here with you—I’ll help every way I can.”
“Okay.” I shoved down my horror at the scene I’d been instrumental in creating and focused on the idea that I could heal it. That I could cut off the last hope the fiends had of ever hurting me or the people I cared about: my family, all standing ready to defend that strange bond we’d forged.
“Are you ready?” Rose asked. She’d have to remove the wards she’d placed over the mark before I could let that energy out, of course.
I dragged in a breath and nodded. She unwound the bandage carefully. With each layer of gauze peeled away, the burning in my arm spiked hotter.
I closed my hand into a fist instinctively and then, not liking the feeling of that gesture, spread my fingers instead. As Rose lifted the last bits of fabric from my skin, I extended my open hand toward the rotted circle, palm forward.
“Go back to where you came from,” I said, training all my will on the searing energy snaking through the muscles of my arm. “Go back andstaythere. I’m finished with this.”
Rose murmured something beside me, raising her hands with a sway of her hips as she moved into a casting. Her strength wrapped around me. The other guys remained poised with their batons, determination etched on their faces.
I could do this.Wecould do this. I knit my brow as I concentrated even harder on propelling that energy out of me, out of this place, to sever the connection the demons had forced on me.
A stream of light flared from my palm. It blazed across the patch of forest, brightest where it hit the matching ring of glow. At the same time, pain lanced through me right down to my gut.
A gasp spilled from my lips as I fought to keep my arm up. The muscles clenched. Some of the vicious energy crawled up toward my shoulder, seeking admission. Tempting me with the quivers of power it offered to my command.
I gritted my teeth against the power and willed all of it out of me, out and across the decayed circle, back into the demonic realm where it belonged. The agony dug deeper. For a second, I thought my ribs would crumple in to pierce my heart. But then, as more of the power poured out of me, I sensed a shift in the air.
The energy I expelled was searing across the vegetation too—scorching away the rot. The sickly patches on the tree trunk contracted until they vanished. Delicate stems and leaves shed the darkness of decay, curling upward. And the putrid mess within the glow congealed as it shrank, inch by inch. The glow diminished with it.
More. I put every ounce of my being into propelling the rest of the energy from my arm. As it burned out of me, the rush of it starting to diminish, the silvery lines marring my skin drew back. They faded away until nothing was left but that scar from the raked claw. That blemish shivered and dwindled too, healthy skin filling in its boundaries until my flesh was whole again.
The last pulses of power left me. My arm fell to my side. My chest heaved with ragged breaths I’d barely been aware of in the past several minutes as I performed my last act of magic.
The forest before me looked as vital and alive in the thin light cast by the guys’ phones as every other part of the woods did—as it always should. I couldn’t make out where the eerie opening had once begun or ended.
