Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Wylder’s Jeep lurches hard to the right, the tires spitting gravel as we tear out of the Fall Festival parking lot. Festival traffic clogs the narrow country road, a procession of SUVs and minivans crawling toward us with their hazards blinking.
“Move!” Wylder slams his palm against the steering wheel.
Sebastian’s voice cuts through the distance as I hold up my cell and he talks over the open speaker. “Asher was right. Those demons were winning and could’ve kicked our asses and been done with it.”
“Then why didn’t they?” Rowan asks from Sebastian’s car.
I grip the dashboard as Wylder swerves around a pickup truck towing a hay wagon. A horn blares behind us.
“Because they were keeping us busy.” Sebastian’s engine roars louder, and dust and dirt kick up in a cloud in front of us. “We’re the only witches invested in opposing the demons, and we were all focused on stopping the siphoning and demon crowd control—”
The McLaren’s tires grip the gravel shoulder as Sebastian’s sports car veers sharply onto what looks like a farm field access road.
It hits me then… what Sebastian is getting at.
“It’s a shell game.” The words scrape out of my throat. “We’re busy here, and the real threat is a demon incursion flowing through a rift somewhere else.”
“Hold on.” Wylder cranks the wheel hard, following Sebastian’s path. The Jeep bounces violently as we leave the road for a dirt track.
Asher grabs the back of my seat and curses. “Define ‘hold on’ because I’m already—shit!”
We hit a rut. My teeth clack together as I’m slammed sideways into the door.
My bell is truly rung, and I slide half my phone under my leg, so I can hold on to the holy shit handle and the dash with both hands. “Geez, guys. It won’t matter if we figured it out if we die before we get there.”
“Sorry, you’ll have to tough it out.” Sebastian’s breath comes fast. “Cutting through the fields over to the town line will cut five minutes off our time.”
He launches his beautiful car into a fallow field, dirt exploding up in massive mud clots.
Wylder floors it. The Jeep’s engine growls, and we’re airborne for a heartbeat before crashing down. Everything rattles—the frame, my thoughts, my bones.
“How do you know where to go?” Rowan asks.
Sebastian cuts across the field at an angle, heading for the road visible in the distance. “I don’t—not definitively—but I’ve been monitoring the tears in the veil, and the most vulnerable section falls right at the heart of the largest ley line instability. I’m betting that’s the breaking point.”
Orion leans forward between the seats. “If Tharuzel breaks through, what then?”
“Then we’re fucked.” Sebastian doesn’t soften it. “A demon lord on this side of the veil with unrestricted access to Emberwood’s ley lines? He’ll have enough power to tear holes between realms wherever he wants.”
The McLaren bumps and crashes over the uneven field before us, and I wince, watching bits of Sebastian’s undercarriage and trim snap and fling off to the side. If it hurts me to see his beautiful car getting abused, it must be killing him.
Still, if he’s right, lives are at stake.
Not a moment too soon, we’re closing in on the exit point from the farm field. Sebastian hits the town line and fishtails on the asphalt before straightening.
“Shit. We’re coming in fast,” Wylder shouts.
I grab hold and tighten my grip, closing my eyes. We get air as we crest the rise of a small hill and my stomach flutters with a swarm of butterflies.
Wylder has to do some quick maneuvering to get us straightened out on the road. The Jeep’s suspension groans, but it seems to have fared better than Sebastian’s sports car. “How far from here?”
“Half a mile, give or take.” Sebastian says.
Okay, that won’t take too long.
I watch the sports car’s taillights blur as Sebastian accelerates, and his car takes off. The road here is empty—nothing but darkness and pine trees pressing in from both sides.
Asher’s grip tightens on my seat. “What exactly are we driving into?”
“You probably won’t notice anything, but the rest of us will feel the instability of the magical energy.
” Sebastian’s matter-of-fact tone does nothing to calm the spike of fear in my chest. “The veil between magical realms and the reality of this world is like a heavy tapestry, but at certain times of the year, that heavy brocade thins to be almost sheer. That’s when I truly started losing ground. ”
“Because Tharuzel’s been working on getting through from the Hell Realm?” I assume.
“Yes, and I think he’s been able to use the claim he has on the Hallowind bloodline to get a demonic foot in the door. He marked Zoe, but he claimed Poppy when he summoned her to hell and blood-bound her with that contract.”
Wylder’s head cranks around, and he pegs me with a look. “What the fuck is he talking about?”
“A blood-bound contract?” Orion says. “Yeah, I’m with Wylder. What the fuck, Poppy?”
My mind blanks out. “I, uh, didn’t know how to tell you guys.”
“And it can wait until later,” Asher jumps to my rescue. “We’ve got bigger problems at the moment.”
“Bigger than her being blood-bound to a Demon Lord of the Hell Realm?” Wylder snaps.
“More immediate, then,” Asher says. “Right now, we worry about a demon invasion. If we survive that, we’ll worry about Poppy being bound to a ten-foot-tall Hellboy without a face.”
Wylder’s glare intensifies. “He knew about this and I didn’t?”
I frown. “Don’t look at me like that. Asher is my lifeline. We share everything. And up until that kiss an hour ago, I still thought you hated me.”
Orion sits forward in his seat. “What kiss? You two are kissing now? Seriously? What did I miss?”
“Enemies to lovers, baby,” Asher says, chuckling. “I’m telling you, that’s where it’s at.”
“Can you people fucking focus?” Sebastian brakes hard, and the screech of tires on asphalt comes through the phone as his brake lights flare. “The ley line convergence is just beyond those trees. From here, we go in on foot.”
Wylder pulls up beside the battered McLaren. As he kills the engine, all four doors open and we spill out.
Holy hell. Between the pine trunks of the forested area ahead of us, the air itself writhes. Purple-black energy pulses like a wound in our reality, spreading tendrils of shadow that claw at the night sky, the forest floor, and everything in between.
“That’s bad, right?” Orion’s voice drops to a growl.
Sebastian emerges from his car, backlit by that sickly light. His face is grim. “Yes. That’s bad.”
I step around to the front of the Jeep and stop beside the others. The ground feels wrong. It’s too soft, too yielding, like the earth itself has lost cohesion.
Rowan appears at Sebastian’s side, her face pale. “This is more than a tear in the veil, isn’t it?”
Sebastian stares at the pulsing rift and lets out a long sigh. “Yeah, it’s totally shredded. We’re too late.”
His words race down my spine like spilled ice water, but they don’t stop us. We’re in this until the end and now definitely isn’t the time to throw in the towel.
The six of us race forward as one.
The wrongness of the air thickens as I push through the tree line, branches scraping at my arms. Sebastian is the one who has been here before, but we don’t need him to show us the way.
The sheer magnitude of the energy hemorrhaging ahead draws us in. The tear looms larger with each step. It’s like someone took a knife to the thick tapestry between realms and hacked the shit out of it. Purple-black energy bleeds out in waves, and the ground beneath my feet trembles.
But there’s something else...
In the distance, there are voices. Chanting. Casting. Calling forth Wiccan energy.
We burst through the last line of trees into a clearing and stop short.
“Wow, I did not expect to find them here.”
Wylder steps in beside me and looks relieved. “I told you the coven wasn’t all bad.”
Yeah, well, the jury is still out on that one.
Laurel stands at the epicenter of the vortex of instability, her long silver hair whipping around her face in the torrent of power. Jane flanks her left, her hands raised, her amber eyes blazing as flames dance across her fingertips.
Stuart, the elder with the silver hair from the meeting last week, has his palms pressed to the earth, and roots surge up from the ground, weaving themselves into a lattice across the base of the tear.
A dozen other witches form a loose circle around the rift, each one channeling their power into the collective effort.
Relief wars with skepticism inside me. “I can’t believe they’re getting their hands dirty after all the fussing about demon issues being beneath them. Why do you think they are here?”
“At this moment, it doesn’t really matter.” Sebastian presses a gentle hand at the small of my back. “Jump in and help.”
I stride forward, pulling on the well of spirit magic that’s been growing stronger every day since my block was removed.
Laurel’s gaze snaps to me and for a heartbeat, I think she’ll tell me to leave.
Instead, she dips her chin and tilts her head toward a girl with teal blue hair, and amazing purple and green highlights. “Northwest quadrant. Mica needs support.”
I hustle off to help as Orion steps in beside the redhead, Jane, and Rowan goes to help Stuart. It doesn’t take long to see they’re trying to knit the tear shut from the tattered edges, but the veil is shredded, leaving very little to work with.
I position myself beside the girl Laurel called Mica, plant my feet, and reach for my magic.
It rises like a tidal wave.
Spirit energy floods my palms, blue-white and crackling. I push it outward, threading it through Mica’s silver energy, reinforcing it with spectral light that holds where the physical can’t.
Mica glances over at me and smiles. “That’s working, ghost girlie. Keep going.”