Chapter 35 #2
“You have nothing to offer me.” He spoke the words, his mental focus entirely on resisting the demon.
He used everything he had learned helping Sadie master her telepathy to hide his thoughts deep in his mind, throwing wards over them that would prevent the demon from seeing his greatest fears and desires.
But the demon didn’t need to dig deeper to know his greatest fear.
Not even your lover’s life?
Nicholas fought the images the demon shoved into his mind, refusing to see Sadie broken and bleeding. It would not happen. He would not let it happen.
“She’s safe from you,” he gritted out, trying to expel the demon but unable to affect it at all.
That’s right. I am beyond your power. No one is safe from me. Unless you are ready to bargain.
Nicholas was barely aware of the physical world.
Images of pain and pleasure, triumph and defeat hit him one after another as the demon attempted to find his weaknesses.
It offered rewards for cooperation, but Nicholas wasn’t tempted.
He knew the demon could not give him Sadie.
He knew what it was to have Sadie come to him with trust and desire, and no image the demon conjured could match those memories.
The demon could weave fantasies of Sadie kissing him, stripping for him, touching him, but it couldn’t mimic love.
It couldn’t see her the way Nicholas did.
The demon realized its ploy wasn’t working and switched tactics. The threat of punishment for resisting hit. Those were harder to ignore.
Look what will happen to her if you don’t ally with me. Working with me is your only chance to protect her.
The demon shoved an image of Sadie with a dagger in her gut at Nicholas. Then the image flickered, and instead of Sadie bleeding out, it was Abigail. Sadie. Abigail. Sadie.
Isn’t saving your lover worth the sacrifice of the other?
Whispers that weren’t words or images slithered through Nicholas, telling him he could protect Sadie by killing Abigail. He would be the hero. No one would miss Abigail, anyway. She deserved whatever happened to her.
Pushing at the demon was getting harder and harder. Then Sadie’s hands cupped his cheeks, her dark eyes wide with worry. “Let me in, Nick.”
He dropped the mental ward the demon had already bypassed without hesitation.
That was when the demon stopped trying to bargain or threaten and instead tried to seize control.
Nicholas! Sadie’s mental presence flooded the battleground that his mind had become. You can’t have him, demon.
I already have him, telepath. You can’t stop me now.
Despite what the demon claimed, it didn’t have full access to Nicholas’s mind or body. It couldn’t truly possess him.
“Sadie,” Unsure how much she could understand among the chaos in his mind, Nicholas spoke aloud. “The potion is working. It can’t take me over. It’s lying.”
Sadie’s presence in his mind cleared some of the fog the demon had caused and energized Nicholas. He began layering ward after ward through his mind, starting from the core of his thoughts and radiating out. Nicholas approached the demon. He pretended it was a thought he wanted to share and pushed.
Sadie was right there with him, shoving at the intruder in his mind.
They heaved. The demon sank mental claws in.
Sadie hesitated, but Nicholas didn’t. “Don’t stop. We can do it.”
She threw her power behind him once more.
“Directly at the portal.” Nicholas panted.
Sadie rubbed her thumb over the sapphire in her ring, then her presence in his mind shifted. She was no longer pushing alongside him, but pulling the demon.
She stumbled backward, and Nicholas cast physical wards to keep her upright as she staggered toward the portal sitting so incongruously under a hydrangea, the demon caught in her mental grip.
Suddenly, the pressure in his mind disappeared, the demon sucked away.
???
“Now,” Sadie shouted the moment she felt the demon disappear completely into the portal. She wanted to sag to the ground, but they couldn’t stop yet. Getting rid of the demon meant nothing if it could come back the moment it recovered.
Nicholas was at her side a second later, cutting the final line in a large glyph-stone he had been preparing for days and had carried out here only an hour earlier.
Beatrice’s readings had suggested that a demon couldn’t easily traverse a portal into the human world. That it took time and energy. That a demon that had just been banished couldn’t jump right back through.
But they didn’t know how much time they had.
They didn’t know if any other demons lurked on the other side of the portal, waiting for a suitable host to wander by.
Nicholas finished carving, but didn’t lift his tool from the stone. “Sadie, I can feel the portal draining the power of the glyph. It’s not going to be enough. It won’t hold long at all.”
It was the glyph his ancestor had used. The one that might have failed, but not for nearly two hundred years.
The glyph they had decided to trust in place of the one they didn’t fully understand.
“Add the glyph from my amulet.” Sadie stared at the stone. She couldn’t feel the magic through earth, but she could see the worry in the way Nicholas kept his tool ready to carve.
“I don’t have it memorized.”
Sadie no longer wore the necklace, trusting instead to the ring. But she had traced that glyph thousands of times. She crouched, smoothed out a patch of dirt, and began to draw, her finger dragging through the soil.
Nicholas didn’t wait for her to finish, carving the first line seconds after she started. He etched the entire glyph onto the stone lightly first, then went back and deepened the grooves. His shoulders relaxed as he added power to the glyph. “It’s working.”
Sadie let out a relieved breath. “We did it?”
“We did it.” He went over the glyph one last time, then stood, offering a hand to Sadie to pull her to her feet with him. “That glyph is strong enough to seal the portal closed, but it will burn through magic quickly. I’ll need to make a siphon of some sort to power it.”
“That’s possible?”
“Yes, but it only works on a large scale. Ultimately, we’ll probably have to place a boulder out here, and I’ll have to cover the entire thing in magic-absorption glyphs.
But once that is done, the boulder will absorb magic forever, and the glyph locking the portal will feed off of that power and never fade. ”
“How long before you need to make the siphon?”
“We have at least a month before it becomes critical, though I’d rather do it in the next week or so, just to be safe.”
“In that case, I think we have more immediate concerns.”
“Such as?”
Sadie pointed at where Abigail was still trapped behind an invisible ward, alternately banging her fists on it and kicking. “Why can’t we hear her?”
“I added an aural ward when she screamed.”
“Good thinking.”
Nicholas sighed. “Brace yourself.”
The invisible wards around Abigail fell right as she kicked, and she ended up falling over when no barrier stopped her wildly swinging leg.
Sadie bit her lip. You timed it like that on purpose, didn’t you?
Of course. Otherwise she’d have run right at us and attacked you. Nicholas strode forward and looked down at Abigail. He didn’t offer her a hand up. “We know you cooperated with the demon.”
“It used me,” she wailed, still sitting in the dirt. “I’m a victim.”
“We know better, Abigail. You worked with the demon willingly.”
“Is that what she told you?” Abigail pointed at Sadie. “You can’t trust her. She admitted to being a telepath. She’s influencing your thoughts!”
Sadie froze. She would have sworn the demon had been surprised when it tried to possess her and discovered she was a telepath. How did Abigail know?
Nicholas grimaced. Sorry. I almost always use one-way aural shields. I didn’t want to hear Abigail while we dealt with the demon. It didn’t occur to me to make sure she couldn’t hear us.
And Sadie had told the demon she was a telepath aloud, needing all her mental energy to keep it from entering her mind.
“You like bargaining, right, Abigail?” Nicholas crossed his arms. “I’ll make a deal with you. You tell no one that Sadie is a telepath, and we’ll tell no one you cooperated with a demon.”
What? Sadie looked from Abigail to Nicholas, but he wasn’t looking at her. You can’t let her go free just to protect my secret.
Nicholas’s eyes cut over to Sadie for a second before he returned to glaring at Abigail.
If she spills your secret, you’ll run off to start fresh somewhere else.
That’s not happening, Sadie. Besides, it’s not like we can actually report her to the authorities.
To prove she cooperated with a demon, you’d have to share how you knew, and we’d have to admit to locking the demon away after using forbidden demonology texts.
“Do we have a deal?” Nicholas’s voice was cold in a way Sadie had never heard from him before. There was no give, no veneer of gentlemanliness allowing Abigail to believe she could twist him around her finger.
Sadie heard the finality, knew he’d only accept one answer—from Abigail or Sadie.
“I am the granddaughter of the Duke of Kinseran!”
Nicholas didn’t let Abigail finish her rant. “I don’t care who you are. I don’t care who your grandfather is. I don’t care who the father of your child is. You tried to kill Sadie. This is the only mercy I will offer you.”
The mention of her child was enough to make Abigail blanch. If Sadie had to guess—and she really didn’t because Abigail’s thoughts were loud—she’d say being called out as pregnant worried the other woman more than the accusation of attempted murder.
Abigail slowly rose to her feet, dusting off her skirt with as much dignity as she could muster. “I will not mention Sadie’s abominable power, and you will not mention my condition and will agree I was a victim of the demon.”
“Deal. You will also head home tomorrow. You are not welcome in Marstede any longer, Miss Candile.”
She tilted her nose up in the air, sniffed, and turned back toward the manor.
Sadie and Nicholas watched her march away until the bend in the path hid her from view.
“I really hate that she will go free, but holding her accountable isn’t worth the consequences,” Nicholas said, slipping an arm around Sadie’s waist and pulling her tight to his side.
Sadie sighed. She didn’t want Nicholas to get in trouble for having a library full of demonology texts.
She didn’t want to be forced to leave and start over in a new village where no one knew her secrets.
And though Abigail had worked willingly with the demon, Sadie couldn’t say for sure how deeply hosting a demon would affect a person.
“Her worst crimes might truly be the demon’s fault,” she admitted, resting her head on his shoulder.
“Not that I think Abigail deserves absolution for her part in everything, but the demon could very well have warped her thoughts. She presented it with a perfect envious and spiteful canvas to work on, but the desire to kill everyone in her way I think only came because of the demon’s whispers.
Left to her own devices, Abigail wouldn’t have gone that far. ”
Of course, she also showed no remorse. Nicholas knew that, so she wouldn’t point it out and make him feel worse about having to decide between holding Abigail accountable and hiding his own use of forbidden glyphs.
Sadie lifted her head. “Shall we head back to the manor?”
Nicholas looked around, but there was no sign of their battle with a demon for him to study besides the new glyph-stone over the closed portal.
The forest was the same refuge it had been before, with no hint of hauntedness, just the normal shadows that came from being sheltered under towering trees.
It only took him a moment to look back at her. “I suppose. There’s no point lingering here, and the spring is never going to have quite the same calming effect on me again.”
Sadie raised a brow. “I’m not sure I’d call your memories of the spring calming, anyway.”
He smirked. “But they were pleasant. We’ll have to find a good spot for swimming in the stream, instead.”