AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That was a surprise to me, but it didn’t change what we had to do.
“We’ll do this the old-fashioned way, then,” I said, using my vampiric speed to rush down the slope toward them.
At the same moment, La Cora conjured a quicksilver blade and sliced open an unconscious demon hunter’s throat. His body convulsed as he rapidly bled out.
“Dishonorable bastard,” Nico growled just behind me.
An invisible force — Hudson’s air magic — knocked La Cora and Cyrene back from the unconscious bodies of their allies, but La Cora sent a blast of fire right back at us.
“Now, now, children,” an eerie voice called, “stop fighting.”
I froze in my tracks, turning toward the infernal threshold. Just as he had the first time I’d seen him, Ty/Andras stood at the very edge of his smoky realm, wearing a cloak of shadows made from the threshold itself.
In spite of my surprise, I studied him.
The devilish owl eyes overlaid his face in a grotesque manner, burning with hellfire. This was the devil that possessed Ty, a humanoid parasitic-spirit that needed a host, and wanted me to be next.
We needed to find his weakness. It seemed he had to stay connected or near to the infernal threshold for its shadows to still touch him. Could we break the link somehow?
Ty’s voice dripped with condemnation. “You kept Andras waiting.”
“I wasn’t sure how many more souls we’d have to steal before you showed up,” La Cora said in an imperious voice.
That’s when I realized… even though the threshold had receded, if it had reclaimed any ground at all, it had to have been the same way as before — through the suffering of human souls trapped inside.
And an even darker realization followed on the heels of the first: If we killed Ty before freeing those souls, they might be trapped for eternity.
I glanced over at my coven-mates, hoping they understood the significance of this. We couldn’t follow our original plan if it meant sacrificing other witches to eternal torment. Our plan was ruined.
Unlike her counterpart, Cyrene fell to her knees before Ty. “My lord, I brought you a new host,” she gestured to La Cora, who still stood at her side. “In return, I only ask that you allow me to rule Charlotte at your direction.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jax groaned.
Nico frowned as I said, “So, we either let him take a new, stronger host or…”
“Better that we kill the two of them and feed him their souls instead,” Hudson reasoned.
Fortunately, Ty’s order seemed to have some kind of time limit, as nothing stopped me when I unleashed my combined magic. I lashed out at La Cora with a swirling, crackling barrage of lightning-flame. His eyes widened as it struck him, but dissipated around him thanks to their artifacts. We had to be eating through them, though. Even artifacts had their limits. The guys also stopped pretending and unleashed their own barrage of magic, some of which Cyrene countered.
She gasped, and as I closed the distance between me and them, I saw the greed in their gazes.
“You can use—”
“Yep,” I said, adding my power to the guys’ as we sent a whirlwind of water, lighting, and wind against them. Jax stood on Hudson’s circle to add the wind.
La Cora and Cyrene went flying, but they instantly got to their feet. “How did you manage such a feat?” La Cora demanded.
“Too bad the two of you don’t have coven magic to harness,” I said. “No one wants you. Everyone knows you were toxic. The only ones who could ever stand the two of you were each other.”
“This is tedious,” Ty said from a few feet away. “The two of you, kill each other.”
La Cora and Cyrene both instantly panicked, their faces contorting in rage and fear as their bodies turned toward each other. They simultaneously conjured quicksilver blades. Cyrene let out a helpless, mewling cry as she resisted, but their bodies weren’t under their control. Without wasting a moment, the two raised their blades and sliced them across each other’s throats like someone else pulled their strings.
The shadows of the infernal realm lunged forward as if to catch their souls before they could flee. I sighed as the infernal realm’s magic pulled back with the silvery souls caught within the darkness. The shadows and smoke then returned to their place, seething in a vertical wall once more.
“Ugh, we have to go in there and rescue them,” I groaned. That was the last thing I wanted to do, but we couldn’t let the infernal realm keep a single human soul.
“Now, now, Mel, don’t be greedy,” Ty tsked at me like I was a child. “I already let you have all the other souls, including your mother’s, as agreed.”
