Chapter 28 #2
“And if we light it up in the middle of a crowd, we’ll not only tip our hand, we’ll cause a panic.” Wylder’s tone brooks no argument. “We need to be subtle.”
Asher and I both laugh at the same time.
“Oh, you’re serious,” I say, sobering. “Well, we can try, but subtle isn’t our best event.”
Asher grins. “We’re better known for our razzle-dazzle.”
Wylder ignores us and continues. “Is the feeding demon alone? And if not, how many are there?”
I get my head back in the game and look around. “I see only one.”
“Good. Asher take this.” Wylder hands him a red woven-thread bracelet with a small iron broomstick hanging from it like an odd little charm.
“While Poppy and I work on breaking the connection of the feeding demon, you’ll distract the old man and tie this on his wrist. Tell him it’s a festive gift being given out or something. ”
Asher takes the bracelet and touches the little broomstick. “Halloween was three weeks ago.”
Wylder shrugs. “It was all I had on hand. The important part is that it’s an iron nail. It’ll discourage reattachment while the old man recovers.”
Asher checks with me and grins. “Does this make me an honorary witch?”
I hold up my palm for a high-five. “Hells yeah. Of the highest order.”
Wylder takes us in with a comical look of confusion. “Just keep him occupied. We’ll be standing behind him, confronting, and hopefully disengaging the demon. To him, we’ll probably come off like pickpockets, and we don’t need the added complication of him making a scene.”
“Got it.” Asher winks at me. “Do you think ‘fake cleanup’ or ‘take my photo’ would work better?”
“Go with fake cleanup, but I don’t think you’ll need to fake the part about him needing help. The old guy looks like he’s about to drop over.”
Wylder follows our conversation looking even more puzzled, so I help him out. “What do you think surviving on the streets at sixteen looks like? Laurel didn’t dump me with a gold card. I had to hustle for food, and I’m damn good at it.”
“Peeps gotta eat,” Asher says.
Wylder’s green gaze is amazingly expressive when you take the time to look. And apparently, me having to grift to survive twists something big inside him. “Tonight, we’re not hustling. We’re getting a demon parasite off an old man.”
And I’m all-in on that.
I’m not sure if it’s the proximity to the demon minions or the awakening of my affinity, but ever since we got here, my skin has been crawling.
I grab Wylder’s elbow and pull him to face me. “So, what spell are we using? I don’t actually know how to detach a feeding demon from an old man.”
Wylder steps to the side to let a woman pushing a stroller and a loose five-year-old with his face painted like a jack-o’-lantern pass us by.
“Given that you can see the connection and I can’t, I’ll cast a privacy spell and hopefully keep our actions unnoticed.
You’re going to pinch the siphon thread six inches away from the man’s body, and twist withershin to unbraid it, while chanting, Unbind. Unwind. Undo.”
“What the hell is withershin?” Asher asks.
“It’s a witchy way to say counterclockwise,” I say.
He chuckles and raises his pinky finger. “How fancy.”
With that settled, I turn to Wylder. “Do you have any salt? My mom always said, ‘When in doubt, salt it out.’”
Wylder chuckles and pulls out a little cloth bag from his jacket pocket. “Mine said, ‘Salt is the duct tape of witchcraft.’”
I reach to take a handful, and Wylder grips my wrist with his free hand.
Startled, I blink and meet the intensity of his gaze.
“And despite what Asher said, it wasn’t a backhanded compliment.
I know you can do this. I’ve seen what you’ve accomplished over the past weeks, and now that you have your memories back, you have your connection to your ancestry.
Just believe in yourself and it’ll be cake. ”
I stand there, my brain trying to make sense of Wylder Howe, the man who treated brooding like a competitive sport, genuinely complimenting me.
The late-autumn wind stirs, swirling leaves into tumbling eddies around my feet, and I break free from the moment. With a deep breath, I send up a quick prayer to ask the goddess, Mom, and my Hallowind ancestors to help make this go smoothly.
“All right. Good luck.” Asher raises his knuckles for a bump and then gains some distance from us, coming around to the front of the old man.
When he gives me a nod, despite everything in me fighting against getting closer to the siphoning demon, we move into position.
“Happy Harvest Festival, sir.” Asher moves in front of the man and stops him from his slow plod through the crowd. “I see by your bare wrists, you haven’t been to the Emberwood Bountiful Blessings Booth because you’re not wearing one of our good fortune bracelets.”
As Asher ties the bracelet around the old man’s wrist, Wylder and I do our thing. Wylder’s lips move in silent casting, and I do as he told me earlier and pinch the silvery ribbon of siphoning connecting the parasite demon to the old man.
“Unbind. Unwind. Undo,” I whisper, pouring all my intention into those three words. “Unbind. Unwind. Undo.”
The demon creature turns its attention toward me, and I erect my personal shielding. It’s crazy how easy the warding is for me now that I have my memories and my connections restored, when a week ago, I got nowhere.
The demon lets out a disgruntled screech, but the hollow popping in my ears tells me Wylder’s privacy spell is in place.
I continue to unweave the siphoning thread by twisting withershin and chanting my intention, and a strange pressure builds in the air. It feels like a thunderstorm is coming, and the potential builds in the air right before the sky tears apart and the downpour begins.
But in this case, the coming destruction isn’t weather.
Asher is still shooting the shit and word-dazzling the old guy as I move onto the banishment part of our workings.
The salt makes the beast flinch back with a hiss, and the shimmer of its presence dims.
I reach into the inside pocket of my coat, my fingers closing around cool glass. The vessel we prepared for this is a small, hand-blown, midnight blue bottle, stoppered with wax.
Rowan etched sigils up the sides, Sebastian added the binding script, and I infused it with spirit fire. If we got it right, it’ll make quick work of collecting this thing.
When I uncap it, the flame inside doesn’t flicker, it pulses with intention—mine and Sebastian’s. The two of us bound our spirit affinity with as much power as we could to contain this asshole and end the suffering it’s causing.
The moment the spirit fire lashes out, the demon shrieks. It’s a ‘nails-on-the-chalkboard’ kind of shrill scream, the vibration of which crawls up my spine with jagged teeth.
I’m not sure if Asher hears it, because he’s babbling on about the pie-eating contest later this afternoon and his favorite scene in the movie, Stand By Me, but Wylder definitely does. He winces beside me, the casting of his spell only faltering for a moment before he regains focus.
But I’m in the zone and have the bottle activated and held at the ready even before the vibration of the demon’s cry has stopped rattling my bones.
“Ready?” I ask.
Wylder’s hand lifts beside mine, his long fingers forming a lattice rune with three sharp intersecting angles. “Let me know when you’ve got it and I’ll lock the gate.”
I twist my wrist, tugging on the siphon thread I removed from the old man. The long, silvery filament is still connected to the demon beast, and when I tuck the frayed end into the blue jar, our spell draws the tether into the bottle.
That’s when I speak the binding:
“Not of flesh. Not of bone. Not of breath. Siphon none.”
Like a high-powered motor turning a winch, the silver thread the demon was using to consume its victim’s soul energy pulls into the bottle until it’s stretching the beast itself.
Sebastian must have some serious juice because the spell is so powerful, it distorts the incorporeal, screaming demon, and it is sucked in and swallowed into the little blue bottle.
The moment I nod and reach to close the stopper, Wylder snaps the bottle shut with an impassable magical gate.
The stopper melts into glass. The opening disappears as the bottle is sealed as one. And the pressure in the air drops.
Still contained within Wylder’s privacy spell, I search the crowd, seeking the other people who had been connected to the demon. All the silver threads are gone, and everyone seems to be free of the draining.
Asher is saying something about remembering to leave the bracelet on until Yule, or at least wearing it when he leaves the house…
And then it’s done. Asher claps him on the shoulder, steering him back toward the cider tent looking ten years younger than he had just a few minutes ago.
Wylder drops the privacy bubble and my ears pop, no one any the wiser about the demon parasite that had just been feeding on them.
I take a deep breath and slide my arm around Asher’s back, giving my bestie a side hug. “Good job with the distraction.”
He bends and kisses the side of my head. “Good job with the demon vanquishing. We did it, right?”
“Hell yeah, we did.”
We step apart, and I check in with Wylder. “Okay, what now?”
He holds the compass so I can see the swirling silver of the face. It has once again gone black. “Rinse and repeat.”