Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Prepare to die? All right, so he got what he needed from me, and now I'm just a thorn in his side. Well, good. It's important to know where you stand in a relationship, no matter how toxic or dangerous it is.
The sheer number of demons hemorrhaging into the chamber hits like a physical thing.
We're so screwed. Yeah, so, what else is new?
I plant my feet wide on the chamber floor, spirit fire already climbing my forearms. "Then I guess the gloves are off."
Tharuzel tilts his bone-mask face toward me, and the vertical mouth in his belly opens wide. Black tentacles surge from his chest cavity, glistening with stringy slime. They coil forward like snakes striking their prey, reaching for me.
I dive to the side, ducking behind the stone of the altar as the blood-bond ignites. Pain rips through me, and as much as I despise it, Tharuzel the Soul Thresher has the ability to tear pieces of my soul away, pulling me apart from the inside.
I can't breathe. I can't think.
Asher blinks in beside me and then wraps around me, and we're across the chamber. The moment he raises his shield around me, the pain is cut off, and I can breathe again.
Like he’s done before, he’s encased me in a glowing gold aura that will shield me from the worst of things.
With trembling hands, I squeeze his arms. "Thanks for the save."
"It's what I'm here for, P." Asher and I take in the chaos while another slew of demons charge in. They come in a wave, a solid black wall of claws and mass, and for a half-second the chamber is nothing but noise and movement and the sharp smell of char and rot.
Asher flashes me a wide-eyed look. "What's the plan here? Evacuate? Stand our ground? How do you want to handle this?"
My mind spins. If we leave the lockstone unprotected, I think Asher's shield wall will hold it, but I can't be sure. If we stay, people who trust me, who came here with good intentions, will be hurt.
A demon comes at us, and I throw both hands forward and send a column of spirit fire roaring into the front line. It catches one of them smack in the chest and scatters the others sideways as it burns.
"Left flank!" Freya's voice cuts through the chaos.
Bjorn and Sebastian pivot and meet the second press head-on. Bjorn drives a hammer-strike of spirit energy through the jaw of a demon twice his size.
Sebastian weaves fast and low with twin lances of cold blue light that punch clean through the leathery-flesh like needles through paper.
The rune circle behind us is still glowing. Still holding.
Asher's shield pulses gold over it, warm and steady, and I feel him at my side—until he launches to the side in a scramble.
"Ash, are you all right?"
"There's a demon on my shoe. A little… tiny… munchkin demon." It's not easy to see in the dim light, but the thing looks similar to S'Nark in his gremlin form.
S'Nark. "Okay, deal with it. I have a plan."
"I am dealing with it. I'm talking to you while I deal with it, I'm multitasking—Wow, he's a tenacious little bastard."
I send out a call for my demon familiar and pray that for once, he actually comes instead of ignoring me.
The demon and Asher's shoe both go sailing across the chamber with a burst of golden light and crash into the wall.
"Dealt with." He sounds deeply satisfied. "But the little jerk took my Nike Air."
I don't have time to respond before the air snaps and my demon familiar materializes at my feet.
"What do you—" S'Nark's beady little eyes blow wide. "No, no, no. Why am I here? I don't want to be here."
"Then go to Arcana. Tell Mica we need those weapons here, now. Whatever she has. Then, have Violet call Garrison and bring them and reinforcements here. And hurry."
He's gone in the next heartbeat.
I spin and take in the room, gauging what I've missed in the seconds I was distracted. Tharuzel is still blocking the entrance. Which also means he's blocking our exit.
He stands in the ragged hole he made in the tunnel wall, his freakishly long arms eliminating any chance of getting past him, his tentacles writhing like horrific ropes, lashing toward anything that moves.
Demons pour around him like sludge running down the gutter after a hard rain, and for every one we put down, another two crowd through the gap.
He sees me, but doesn't seem to be targeting me. Maybe I'm right and he really doesn't know what to do about Asher's goddess energy.
Wylder is on one knee beside a crack in the chamber floor, both his palms flat against the stone. A cluster of roots tear through the far wall and wrap around a demon's legs, dragging it backward and crushing it against the rock before it can reach Priya.
"Getting low on growth down here." His jaw is tight. "This stone is old and deep in the ground."
"I've called for backup. Try to make do."
He looks up at me briefly. "I'll try."
I catch a demon mid-leap with a spirit-fire strike to the chest, and drive it back into another. The two of them tangle and go down.
Dae-Jung is there in an instant, driving the heel of his palm down in a concussive burst that finishes both of them at once.
"Are we making progress?" he asks, breathing hard.
"No." Priya's voice is impressively even for someone with a bleeding gash across her forehead. "For each one we kill, two more take their place."
She's not wrong.
The gap in the wall is a wound that keeps bleeding. Tharuzel is feeding more of his minions through at a steady pace, throttled enough to keep us burning energy without giving us a clean finish line.
He's not trying to win quickly. He's exhausting us.
He has the chance to destroy nine spirit witches at once.
I'm sure that would go a long way in securing his plans of freeing his mentor.
But I think the wildcard is Asher. If he can't get past Asher's shield, he's in big trouble.
Because as of now, ten of the thirteen lockstones are up and protected.
We’re holding him back, but that isn't the same as winning, and the chamber is getting smaller as debris accumulates and the ceiling continues its slow, threatening complaint every time something hits a support wall too hard.
Still, I need to give S'Nark time to get those weapons and bring reinforcements.
Not that I'm even sure Mica's got weapons for us.
I drive back the immediate press in front of me with a wide arc of spirit fire and take a breath to think.
Nine spirit witches. One plant witch. One guardian angel. We're holding our own, but spirit magic isn't a direct attack against a demon. And honestly, we've been through this enough times that Tharuzel's minions know what's coming for them.
He understands spirit magic. He's sitting back and watching. He knows what powers we've got, and he's biding his time. At least, he thinks he does.
He thinks he knows what I am, but he doesn't—not completely.
I stop reaching for the spirit fire and reach instead for the other side of things. The power that still feels new and strange and unstable.
The atmospheric pressure in the chamber becomes evident to me the moment I touch it. It's strange to feel it so subtly while the world is in chaos and everyone around me is fighting for their lives.
I give it a pull and there's a change in the weight of the air, something that makes Freya glance sideways and Bjorn's next strike go fractionally wide as the air around his fist suddenly pushes back.
"Sorry." I raise a quick hand in apology and refocus. "Give me a second."
I breathe it into my lungs and let it build. The thing about the air down here is that it isn't as still as I first expected. It's moving through cracks and fissures and hollow places in the rock, pulled by temperature and pressure and the subtle draft of deeper passages.
Now that I'm tuning in, I feel all of it. Every thread and current, every place the air thins and every place it stacks.
And, like Orion suggested a few days ago, I experiment.
I pull it tight… and the demons in the center of the chamber stumble as a rotational pressure system drops around them. It's a bit like wind but kind of the opposite. More like a plane hitting an air pocket and bouncing around in the turbulence to find its position again.
I try it again, and Tharuzel's attention turns from my friends and the rune circle and retargets me.
Good. If he's focused on me, they are safer.
I drive a column of pressure down, and the four demons beneath it slam into the floor like they've been pressed there by an invisible fist. The floor cracks under the force, and I realize just how much strength this new affinity affords me.
Freya stares at me. "What was that?"
There's no time to answer. I've got Tharuzel's attention now, and that means I've also got the next wave of demons redirected at me.
That's fine. It pulls them away from the rune circle and from Asher, and it gives the others space to breathe.
I meet them with both magic systems running simultaneously, spirit fire in my left hand, atmospheric strike in my right, and it is genuinely the most cognitively demanding thing I've ever done in my life.
But it is also working in a way that spirit fire alone was not.
Amara lets out a short, fierce laugh somewhere to my right. "She's a wind witch too?"
Wylder flashes a wide smile. "She's something."
Nolan grunts, his left arm hanging limp at his side, blood dripping down his fingers from under his sleeve. "Any other surprises we should know about?"
"Ask me when we're not about to die."
The next few minutes are the most alive I've ever felt and also the most terrified. We fight well as a unit without practicing or planning to, the nine of us with spirit affinities understanding the magic each of us wields, even if it presents in different ways.
The variables added are my second affinity, Wylder's plant magic, and Asher's angel power. Where Tharuzel and his demons are darkness, torture, and suffering, Asher is all light, joy, and celebration.
There's no fighting that.
Well… there's definitely fighting it, but they're having a hard time defeating it.
Poor Wylder is fighting to keep the chamber intact. Every time Tharuzel hits the walls with a strike, Asher's shield holds, and more of the cave structure around us crumbles.
And the demons keep coming.
And coming.
And coming.
Priya is the first to go down hard. A demon the size of a refrigerator catches her mid-turn and drives her into the wall. I hear the impact from across the chamber and it turns my stomach. I don't think she's dead, but she certainly isn't getting up anytime soon.
When her attacker steps back, she crumples to the ground and is swallowed up by darkness. Sebastian sees what happened and drags her clear of the mass of fighting in the center of the room.
"Poppy!" Bjorn shoves me to the side and takes a strike to the chest that should have been mine. The force throws him six feet, and he lands badly and doesn't get up.
And still, the wave of demons doesn't slow.
I'm burning through magic at a rate that I can feel in my bones now. It's a deep structural fatigue that has nothing to do with muscles and everything to do with the part of me that feeds power to my affinity.
My spirit magic is running low.
My atmospheric magic is still there, but is pulling hard on something central. I swipe at the warmth on my face, and my arm comes back smeared with blood.
When did that happen?
A claw finds my side, and I hiss, spinning toward the darkness that surrounds me. I don't see the demon that hooked me, but it tore through the fabric of my shirt and has opened a hot line across my left ribs.
I force down the pain, but the world tilts sideways. I plant my feet and don't fall, but the damage is done.
"Poppy." Wylder's voice is close.
"I'm good."
"You're not."
"Fine, I’m not, but I'm still standing."
He steps into my periphery, covered in dirt, and with a cut above his eye. He pulls me against his chest and slides a hand through the tattered remains of my shirt. A rush of warm, healing energy spreads from the palm he presses flat against my ribs, and my eyes roll closed.
The relief is incredible.
Not that we have time for me to be drifting away during a healing.
I open my eyes again and startle at the open doorway. For the first time since this battle began, Tharuzel isn't blocking the door. "Asher, get the wounded to the passageway."
Tharuzel stomps over the debris of what used to be the altar table with an unhurried ease, and the demons between us part like curtains. The space he occupies is practically its own weather system—dark, hollow, and with the air hanging heavy and reeking of death and rot.
The rune script under his skin pulses hot red, the names of the stolen dead shifting in slow procession across the blackened leather of his arms.
The vertical mouth opens.
"You will burn, little witch." The chorus of stolen voices is almost gentle. "Every last one of you."
Dae-Jung is still fighting, but the light around his hands has gone dim with exhaustion. Freya can barely hold her arms up. Sebastian can barely see for all the blood in his eyes. And I don't even know where the others are.
I told Asher to move the injured out. Maybe we're all that's left.
At least the shield Asher placed over the rune circle is still in place.
At least Tharuzel can't—
The demon nightmare throws out his freakishly long arms and hammers his clawed fists at the wall along the roofline.
The chamber ceiling groans, and chunks of stone drop, smashing on the floor. Dust and debris rain steadily from the damage, and then he punches through the holes above the rune circle and starts heaving.
"That fucker be crazy," Asher says. "Is this a demon tantrum?"
My mind tries to piece together what's happening, and then my stomach drops. "No. He can't get to the rune circle, so he's going to pull the whole wall down."
"But that will bring down the entire cave!" Asher's words are swallowed by a thunderous crack of stone as Tharuzel not only brings down the rune circle wall, but the ceiling of the chamber.
Panic grips me as I launch to grab Wylder at the same time Asher grabs for me.
The three of us crash to the floor as the world goes dark…