Chapter Twenty-Seven #3
Walter slid to the side, his body sluggish, his injured leg across Willim’s torso.
For an instant, Walter’s brand glowed red hot. The smell of burned vamp flesh mixed into the stench of death and brimstone and filth.
His former owner’s head rolled away.
Shiloh’s power accepted mine. Electrocuted me, and battered my hand like a sledgehammer, all at once. I sobbed silently, tears streaking my face.
EJ took a second breath. Valuable seconds stolen to break the barrier.
My battle magics seized Shiloh’s power.
More gunshots sounded, slow roars. The ululation of a vampire dying.
Walter raised up, sliding Willim’s sword out of his own body.
Sat down hard. Crossed his legs, one knee touching Willim’s arm.
The floor beneath them was soaked with blood.
He grabbed Willim’s head by the hair and settled it in front of his crossed legs, upright on the stub of its neck. The vamp’s eyes were glazed open.
Walter was still holding the bloody shortsword. A small gobbet of Willim’s flesh rested on the tip.
Walter dropped the blade to the cement floor with a faint clatter and wiped his hand on Willim’s hair.
The head tilted and rocked before settling.
With slightly cleaner fingers, Walter withdrew a short-bladed throwing knife from his armor and with his other hand he gripped his own brand, pinching it between his thumb and index finger.
Walter sliced the branded, scarred flesh from his cheek. Leaving a hole.
Green sprites flowed from Willim’s bleeding stump.
A voice screamed, “No!”
Nyoka.
Her eye color flowed into natural emerald green.
The demon energies pulsed out of Willim.
If it took Walter, he could control it. He had drank the elixir.
EJ hadn’t. He hadn’t been branded. Hadn’t been spelled. But the branding iron was ready.
Shiloh said, “Angie. We’re connected.” Our hands rippled through the witch circle. “Reach for the ley line, little cuz. Find it! Reach for it, you little wimp. Use that thread twined with your brother’s power.”
Shiloh knew about that thin band of our power.
Cousin Wacko had to have opened a seeing working.
Eyes still on Walter, I spun the yellow line of EJ’s magic into Shiloh’s and mine and reached with our knotted and twisted power.
Shoving the braided lines of Everhart magic deep into the earth, for the ley line.
On the floor, Walter saw the demon streaming from Willim toward EJ.
The demon light flaming in her eyes, Nyoka bent over EJ.
Ripped open his pockets until she found his palillos. The witch-vampire activated a set and dropped it into Willim’s blood.
Everything stopped. The sprite stopped, frozen in place.
I looked around. EJ out. Walter bemused. Nyoka staring at my brother. The unit were all in protected positions, firing, throwing amulets.
Nothing was settled, finished, or safe.
Time was changing again, speeding. What had been milliseconds became half seconds. My head thrummed with each heartbeat. Perhaps ninety seconds since we came through the door.
Forever.
Shiloh screamed, “Ley line!”
I closed my eyes. Envisioned the deep earth, through the stone heart of the mountains that made up Chattanooga. My thread of magic pierced into the rock, along the energy pathway carved by the Everhart coven when they warded our building with ley line power.
When I found it, when I channeled the power there, it might burn me out, rip away my mind, cauterize my soul. Working the raw power of a ley line without the assistance of a full coven was utter idiocy.
I pulled on the pain, used it. Shoved through bedrock. Deeper. My blue-white magic, powered with Shiloh’s and EJ’s magic reached, as if it had a mind of its own. Lanced the glowing energies of the ley line.
Power. Clear, bright, translucent as melting glaciers. Frigid, icy as the far reaches of space. Heated as the center of the Earth’s core. All the power of the Earth. All power. All power. I touched it with that single bright strand of my magic.
Fast as the speed of light, ley line power rammed up, into my body. Into Shiloh.
She whimpered. Her legs gave way. I gripped her hand.
Following her descent to the floor, I slid down, sitting. Landed on my staff. When did I drop it?
EJ was looking at me, groggy and dazed. His magic wove with mine, doing something…weird. Something slow. Something different from the way time changed when I looked at potential futures. This was…dreamy. Time slowed. Magic/not magic. Dreams and moonbows.
With a small, cordoned-off part of the braided magics, I placed my right hand onto the null staff.
Numb fingers sought the trigger. My mind, my magic, buoyed by Shiloh, by the unimaginable power of the ley line, moved faster.
Beneath the blue tigereye, buried in the staff’s wood, I saw the tiny nugget of other that I had stolen as a child, that small bit of queen’s magic, of The Glob, inside my staff.
The place of the other looked different, suspended between the staff and the ley line.
It was an opening. Not a different place itself, but an opening into such a place.
A tunnel of nothingness. At the end was a universe of emptiness.
No energy existed there. No matter. Not even space as I understood it.
Except at the entrance, where EEBs—demons—waited, trapped. Entombed, wailing and gnashing their teeth.
The sickly orange mist of demons in the physical room with us, in the battle, shrieked.
Dark energies ripped away, claws tearing, teeth gnashing, leaving my soul bleeding.
Leaving EJ. Leaving Nyoka’s leg. My hand burned, froze, dying.
Every energy that was free suffused the room with light and darkness.
EEBs wailed. Demons were yanked, traveling along my staff, into the interdimensional nothingness.
Orange and green and the foul stain of old blood I could see even with my eyes closed.
The screaming of EEBs softened. Stuttered.
With a last long wailing screech, it ended.
Silence covered me. Shiloh was still holding one hand, our power braided with EJ’s.
I opened my eyes, blinked, my eyeballs dry as desert sands. Focused on my white, frozen, blood-smeared hands. I gasped, hyperventilating. My head sagged. Blackness crowded the edges of my vision.
Fainting would mean death.
I took a breath. Another. Relief and desperation wheezed in my lungs.
Through the silence, Shiloh panted, her fingers quivering in mine. She was lying on the smooth painted concrete. I hadn’t known or realized it, but the floor was baby blue.
Beside my staff lay EJ. My eyes followed a blood trail from where he had lain, to here. He had crawled to me. Now he lay in streaks of his own blood, at my feet, joints sagging.
My bell-shaped hedge died, dripping sparks.
Beneath me, I sensed the magics of the tainted demon circle carved into the floor, the alien and powerful EEBs the witches had struggled to claim and control. Blood and death and darkness. The ley line blazed through me.
So much power. Raw power.
If I dropped the staff, I’d die. I knew that fact as surely as if a prophet stood in front of me. The magic was knotted, braided, twisted, into a latticelike net, opposing raw powers meshed, waiting.
I threw the netted energies over the possessed people and bodies all around me. Light flowed from them like illuminated liquid. Rotated, tightened, and plunged into the net. Into the place-no-place of emptiness.
Energy rebounded through me.
Shiloh freed my hand. EJ rotated away.
I focused on the magic in the room. The EEBs were gone, leaving behind trails of reds and greens and the blackness of utter emptiness.
I released the trigger on the staff.
Where light and darkness touched the death magic circle, fire flashed, lighting up the room, blinding flames. It coursed around the circle once, and was gone. The stench of blood cooked into ash once again blended with the reek of brimstone and death. The bloody, broken circle deactivated entirely.
A wind came from the open doors and swept its stench away.
With my seeing gift, my precog fully activated, and my human sight working together, I looked around the room. Turned to the back door, the one I had come through, that led to the parking area. Where the vans were. Vans that were full of containment vessels.
“Holy hell,” I croaked.
Someone was opening a containment vessel. A big one.