Chapter Nineteen #3
Angie was tiring. Quivering. Her breath was shallow, harsh, fast, her chest shaking.
With a soft note activating all the healing amulets on him, EJ sent healing into her, shunting the cold away. But unless the demons were nearly gone, it wasn’t going to be enough. And…
Something is coming. For the first time, their magics entwined, he felt it through Angie’s precog.
“This is why the vessel is so effing big,” he whispered to her.
Over comms, he heard Walter scream.
“Ojos. Show me Walter,” EJ said. A view opened on his face shield.
A close-up of Walter’s face. Beneath him was a rug, deep reds and blues and greens.
The rug at the foot of Walter’s bed. The view pulled back enough for EJ to see a stake in his belly.
He should be paralyzed, yet he moved, ungainly, like a puppet in the hands of a novice, struggling.
With his magics tied to Angie’s, EJ saw the brand on Walter’s face the way she might. The initials on fire, burning, burning, burning, black, red, and orange. A curse in his flesh, branded for running away. Walter roared, fangs down, eyes open, fully vamped out.
Someone stepped in front of Walter, a booted foot obscuring his face. Legs standing over him. The clash of steel clanged into the silence. Blood splattered across Walter.
Over comms, a gun sounded. Three shots, fast, no hesitation. Three more.
Angie
My brother’s power seeped, and then flowed into me, yellow, pure light. Tears flooded my eyes, falling down my cheeks as I was able to take a breath.
“Ohhhh,” I said softly, a note of grief in the word. “Little Evan. What did you do…?”
But I knew. I remembered the moment I had unwrapped our parents’ bindings, the magical bindings that had tied our unexpected, premature, and exceptionally strong magical energies into the bones of our bodies, so we didn’t hurt ourselves or others.
I had unwrapped the bindings, pulled them away, and created a shield to protect us from attack.
I wove the raw magic so I could get help for Mama and Daddy and find a way to stop the magical attack from up the hill.
So I could call Edmund, my Dark Knight, the vampire who was blood-bound to protect me for as long as I lived.
The vampire who later went on to become Edmund the First. The Emperor of Europe.
And he had come. Family had come. He and my aunts had saved us.
But somehow, when I twisted EJ’s energies together with my own and my angel’s, they had…stuck?
Standing in the winter storm, EJ’s hands on my shoulders, his healing amulets directed into my flesh, breathing became easier. But the pain in my hands was intense even with the gloves and Mama’s amulets to protect all but my fingertips. Freezing.
Demons poured up the tip of my staff. Imps, sprites, chorts. So very many. A Bes was sucked toward me, filth and horror and all the colors of hell sliding up from the tip of the staff. Screaming, icy, it disappeared beneath the blue tigereye.
Some imps got away. I knew that. I saw when their energies split off from the river of power pouring at us and flashed black light into the night.
I could only hope the containment vessel brought by Villetti was able to capture them.
And that I wouldn’t have to kill Peg and capture a demon who possessed him. Or one of the others. Villetti.
Time passed. My frozen fingers transferred the cold through my hands, into my arms.
EJ’s magic thrust through me, driving against the hypothermia, the frostbite, trying to reverse the damage, warming me.
He sang a soft note and his healing amulets sent more power into me, power I let heal me as much as it could.
Power I twisted and sent into my arms as strength for exhausted muscles, and into my numb, screaming-in-pain trigger finger.
Agony, bone-deep, permeated my left hand.
My hands ached with each heartbeat, as if someone hammered them with a maul.
If pain had a purity, a single existential truth, this was it, penetrating, piercing, stabbing pressure, heat like a thousand needles beaten into me.
Ice. The frozen depths of a glacier within my flesh and bones.
Tears froze in the icy night air.
EJ shoved back with his power and the cold lessened. Humming a soft note, he activated the last of the healing amulets on his body.
But unless the demons were nearly gone, it wasn’t going to be enough. And…
Something is coming.
The knowing strengthened. We had never been touching, never linked magics, when I felt the possibilities.
“This is why the vessel is so effing big,” he whispered to me.
“I don’t know if the staff is enough,” I said. “Not for a leviathan.”
I felt his disbelieving reaction through the link.
“Call Daddy,” I said. “If we have to, open us to the coven.”
“Angie—”
“Do it. You know they’re sitting in a circle. You know it. I know it.”
EJ
EJ tapped his ear-patch. Before he could say a word, his father said, “I’m here, son. Alex warned us. Your mother and I are sitting with Cassey, your aunts Cia and Liz, at our circle in the main room of the queen’s winter residence. Molly is at north.”
“It’s a hell of a long way for a coven to work,” EJ said.
“Chattanooga sits on the same bedrock as Asheville. Lizzie secured an arc through a ley line when we set the apartment’s wards in place.”
“Woulda been nice to know,” EJ spat.
Drooping against him, flagging, Angie gasped, “Less talk, more action.”
The old country song was there, full-blown, in EJ’s mind.
Still in Delta Mode he sang the title line that wound through the old lyrics.
“A little less talk and a lot more action!” With the power of his voice and their magic, he reached out to the wards in the apartment and down, through the energies, into the bedrock. He sang the line again.
The demon erupted from the vessel.
Linked to Angie, he could see it as well as hear it.
The leviathan was blacker than the deeps of space.
Dark as the seventh circle of hell. The stench of death and burned bones and brimstone filled the street, whipped by the wind.
The sound of prison camps and the wails of torture filled the night.
Clashing notes, cacophonous, dissonant, grinding along his nerves, pounding into his bones, reverberating in his brain.
Somewhere, closer than he had expected, a ley line sang, silver bells ringing, trilling, gonging in perfect harmony.
EJ gripped the ley line. Sank into it. Hooked his a little less talk and a lot more action into the power, and dragged the power to them.
Trying to keep a distance from the coven he had left behind because…
because he had orders. Classified orders.
He could never let anyone know what he had done, what he had become in the war.
Delta Mode. No one could ever know about Delta Mode.
But there were no secrets about magical power in a full family coven, one bound by blood, love, and power. So, he and Angie had to do this alone.
“A little less talk and a lot more action!” he sang, the notes ringing. Delta Mode turned the phrase into a wyrd of power. Ley line magic powered up, blasting through the notes, into him.
Brimstone filled his nostrils. His lungs.
He coughed, and his song stopped. But with the full-coven energies meshed, he stepped to the side of Angie and wrapped his hands around hers. He shoved the power of the ley line, of the coven, into her hands, through their looped magics.
The demon was free of the collection vessel, filling the street. Raucous. And it sang.
My name is…Leviathan.
The notes clashed, words a landslide of broken stone grinding upon tortured souls, the avalanche slammed upon them, wrapping around their bodies. EJ shook as if he were being Tasered.
Angie wept aloud, her eyes closed, her head turned into his shoulder.
EJ, who seldom saw magic except for a hint of color, saw the demon.
The demon looked at him.
And the demon saw him. Looked into him. Gazed upon his soul. And through him, it saw Angie.
Mine, it sang.
EJ angled the staff toward the demon. The empty universe within the wood, the place-non-place that pulled all energies inside it, yawned open.
The demon contemplated the place within the staff.
Place of other. Leviathan will not go.
Its power smashed into him. Crushed him down. EJ dropped, hit his knees. Pulling Angie down with him. The staff wavered a moment.
In that moment of freedom, it turned its attention away. Looked up.
“EJ. Cut me,” Angie whispered.
He didn’t argue. He braced the wide, glowing end of the staff against Angie’s belly.
With his left hand he released the staff and reached into a pocket.
Removed a tiny folding knife, snapped the two-inch blade open with a flick of his wrist. Angie’s hands were gloved and what he could see of her fingertips were bloodless and dead.
Holy hell. He shoved against her sleeve, exposing a line of living skin.
He pricked her and flicked the blood into the ice.
Angie said something, a wyrd he didn’t quite understand, but he heard the magic open around them, like taps of steel on steel, rapping smartly.
Her blood gauntlet hedge strengthened around them.
EJ looked up to make sure the staff tip was free of the hedge, but Ange was too smart to make that kind of mistake.