“Reflection spell is up!” Cassandra yelled, racing toward the house.
“Keep them inside it and kill them!” Cian’s voice rang out.
Relief washed over Amaliya now that she didn’t have to hide from the view of the neighbors. The reflection spell would give a peaceful appearance to Samantha’s house even as they waged battle. Amaliya burned more blood, healing the wounds inflicted on her by her earlier fights as the demon stalked her.
“How do we kill it?” Amaliya called out.
“We vanquish it,” the witch answered. “Don’t let it close to you!”
“Amaliya, watch out!” It was Cian.
Twisting about, Amaliya was startled to see another demon slink out of the darkness. It had a somewhat human appearance, but its face was somehow wrong. The eyes were too close together, the mouth too flat, the nose ill-defined. Lifting flaming hands, it lurched toward her. Amaliya twisted away, but it managed to briefly touch her arm. Amaliya screamed in agony as flames licked up her arm. Cian vaulted across the front yard, landed, and snatched her away from the demon before hurling her away to safety. She landed with a painful thud, her arm a mass of scorched flesh.
Aimee stood on the front walk hurling white orbs of light at the demons. The creatures dodged her attacks, their lithe bodies more shadow than form. Cassandra tackled a vampire creeping around the corner of the house that Amaliya hadn’t even seen, while Cian circled behind the first demon.
“Fuck me,” Amaliya gasped. Her arm was useless, dangling at her side. Climbing to her feet, she growled in frustration.
It was difficult not to be distracted by Cian and the first demon squaring off against each other. In Cian’s hand was a glowing orb of some kind. Each time he took a swipe, the demon recoiled in horror. Yet, it wasn’t backing down, its flaming hands casting plumes of fire at Cian, which the vampire deftly avoided. The demon concentrating on Amaliya was thinner, faster, and incredibly tall.
Aimee’s orbs of magic smashed into a vampire leaping off the roof, rendering it into a figure of ash that exploded into a gray cloud on impact with the ground. Somewhere nearby Cassandra was swearing in time with the sound of hearty thwacks against flesh.
The demons moved even faster than vampires, skipping out of the range of Aimee’s attacks, and easily outmaneuvering Cian and Amaliya. While Cian was on the offensive, Amaliya was definitely on the defensive. Burning as much blood as she could, she tried to heal her arm. The skin and muscle refused to knit together, the pain nearly blinding. The fire erupting from the demon’s hand formed into a sword as it flashed a cruel smirk in her direction. It swept the flaming weapon toward her. Amaliya barely dodged out of the way, but the burning blade still left a swath of scorched skin along her back despite the near miss.
Amaliya stumbled, then felt someone grab her about the waist. The smell of Cian’s cologne and shampoo filled her nostrils. Arm around her waist, he kept the magical sphere in his hand between them and the two demons.
Chaos filled the world. Aimee battled a black witch that the ghosts had missed, purple and white orbs of magic flashing through the night. Jeff hacked at a vampire with an ax. Samantha stood in the doorway of her house wielding a pink gun and firing at something big and furry charging toward her. Alexia was tossing spell bags at the were and vampires while her brother rushed to help Jeff.
Anger welled up inside of Amaliya. Everything was out of control. Jerking free of Cian, she plunged her necromancy into the ground, but immediately felt resistance.
“What the fuck?”
Seconds later the yard lurched upward as stone spikes burst out of the grass. A stalagmite impaled one of the demons, and Cian took advantage of the moment to ram the glowing orb into its chest. Instantly, the demon was enveloped in white flames, then vanished in an agonized howl. The second demon retreated toward the remaining black witch. Aimee summoned a huge wave of white energy and hurtled it at both of them. The demon grabbed the witch, wrapping her in shadow, and vanished just before the magic hit them. The were-creature finally went down, its claws landing near Samantha’s bare feet.
The sudden silence was startling.
“Where’s the witch and demon?” Amaliya demanded, clutching her burned arm.
“Gone,” Aimee answered sounding disappointed.
Cian cast a worried look at Amaliya. “Are you okay?”
“Burned, but fine. And pissed. Something blocked my powers. And who the hell made those?” She gestured to the stone spikes.
“How am I going to explain them to the neighbors?” Samantha frowned, kicking the dead were-creature.
“Sorry about that,” a voice said from behind Amaliya.
The ground trembled and the stalagmites sank into the lawn leaving two blemishes of upturned earth.
Amaliya whipped about to see a tall, handsome black man with a clean-shaven head and well-groomed goatee. Wearing black slacks and a maroon shirt that matched his eyes, he looked vaguely familiar.
“The elemagus,” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“Baptiste. Rachoń sent me.” He extended a hand.
“I couldn’t bring my dead because of you,” Amaliya said irritably ignoring his proffered handshake. Her arm was a mass of burned flesh and the pain was nearly unbearable.
“Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to block you,” he said apologetically.
Samantha jumped over the dead were-creature and hurried over to Jeff. Meanwhile, Cassandra strolled over to her girlfriend, wincing as she walked with a slight limp.
“Let me see your arm.” Cian stepped closer to Amaliya, pocketing the glowing orb. Holding out his hand, he waited.
It bothered her how well he could read her moods. Amaliya had felt ineffectual toward the end of the battle and it made her angry. Cian seemed to sense it, or maybe he was reading her thoughts. Grumpily, she rested her hand in his. With gentle motions, he moved her arm about, surveying the damage.
“Aimee, how long will it take to heal?” Cian called out.
Aimee and Cassandra looked up from their embrace.
“That’s going to take a lot of blood. Demon fire is serious black magic.” Disengaging from her girlfriend, Aimee strode over to Amaliya. Leaning forward to examine the scorched skin, she winced. “Maybe two or three days of feeding.”
“Great.” Amaliya hated being in pain. It made her cranky and she detested how she kept shifting from one foot to the other in a fruitless effort to somehow diminish it. Cian stood close to her, but didn’t touch her. Again, she was impressed and annoyed with how well he knew her. She loathed being coddled.
“Is anyone else concerned that the black witches are missing?” Benchley asked. He stood near the spot where the witches had fallen after Samantha’s ghosts had pelted them with the spell bags.
“Where the hell is the ward?” Aimee asked, looking more than a little worried. Hands on her hips, she peered upward.
“I kinda broke it,” Amaliya confessed.
“You what?” Samantha’s eyes widened. “Is that why they got in?”
Amaliya shrugged. “Oops.”
“How?” Aimee demanded. “That was a hardcore spell. If you can break it, The Summoner will be able to.”
“I don’t know! I was trying to stop my fall when I landed on top of it after being ambushed by a stupid vampire.”
“You landed on it?” Aimee’s eyes narrowed. “You landed on it?”
“It’s only supposed to keep out the bad guys,” Benchley said in a low voice.
“I jumped through it once with no problem,” Amaliya said defensively. “And I was bleeding and fighting for my life when I fell on it the second time. I was trying to stop my fall, dug in my fingers, and then it wasn’t there and...how the fuck am I supposed to know? You’re the witch!” Amaliya frowned, irritably staring at her arm. “Fuck, this hurts.”
At last, Cian put his arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him. “It’ll heal. Aimee, can you get another ward up?”
Crossing her arms ove
r her breasts, Aimee shook her head. “No, I don’t have the stuff for it.”
“It was broken anyway,” Benchley sniffed. “We couldn’t defend ourselves. Sam and Amaliya’s magic was deflected off it. We were trapped.”
“Dammit,” Aimee muttered. “I’ll have to come up with a new version of it. That could take a few days.”
“You can do it, babe,” Cassandra said, giving the witch’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
“We need to leave now,” Jeff decided. “Samantha, get Beatrice. We’re going. The ward is down and I’m not waiting around for a second attack.”
“I agree.” Baptiste moved toward the were-creature. “But we need to take care of this.”
Amaliya sent her power into the earth, felt the dead answer, and asked them to take one of their own. The were-creature vanished into the earth before Baptiste reached it.
Tilting his head in her direction, Baptiste said, “I see.”
“You and I have to share territory. We need to work on that.” Amaliya tried not to sound as pissed off as she felt.
Samantha and Jeff vanished inside her house while Benchley and Alexia grabbed their stuff from the living room. After pressing a quick kiss to Cian’s lips, Amaliya hurried through the house to claim her shoes. Cassandra, Aimee, Baptiste, and Cian kept watch outside. She found the Louboutins in the kitchen where she had left them. They were dirty, but not ruined. Leaning over to pick them up, she grunted at the agonizing burning of her arm. No matter how much of her power she directed into her limb, it was healing at a snail’s pace.
Straightening, Amaliya was shocked to see Bianca standing before her, and took a hard step back, reaching out to brace herself against the counter. The blonde’s dark fringed blue eyes gazed at her with desperation in their depths. It took a second for Amaliya to realize Bianca was translucent. The ghostly aspect of the girl was unexpected and sent her mind whirling.
“Bianca,” she whispered.
“I’m not dead,” the girl answered, her voice imploring Amaliya to believe her. “I’m not dead. I’m still here.”
Beatrice scampered into the kitchen, Samantha right behind her. “Bad kitty, Beatrice!”
Amaliya glanced away from Bianca for a scant moment, but when she looked back the apparition was gone. With one quick movement, Amaliya snatched up the hissing cat and handed her over to Samantha.
“Little bitch, we need to go now,” Amaliya said, grabbing Samantha by the arm and pushing her into the living room.
“I had to get my cat!” Samantha protested, but shoved Beatrice into a fancy pink cat carrier.
“Let’s go now. We got her,” Jeff said, grabbing the carrier. Over his shoulder were two bags. “And I got your overnight stuff.”
Samantha held out her hand toward the depths of the house. “I can’t just go!”
“Yes, you can,” Jeff answered.
Amaliya understood Samantha recognized the truth of the situation, but was reluctant to admit that she was about to lose a part of her life. It reminded Amaliya vividly of the moment she had stood in her dorm room and realized her life as she knew it was over. She wrapped her fingers around Samantha’s outstretched hand and pulled her out of the house. The blonde phasmagus came willingly, but her sadness was tangible. Cian and Cassandra fell in behind them as they walked to the cars.
“Nothing stirring,” Aimee said. Her long bronze-colored hair rippled around her making her look even witchier.
“Let’s get out of here before they regroup,” Jeff said.
The group split between Cian, Jeff and Samantha’s vehicles. Amaliya was relieved that she and Cian were riding to Jeff’s home alone. She didn’t want to tell the others what she had seen. At least, not yet.
Grabbing her unburned hand, Cian kissed it while he drove out of the darkened neighborhood trailing behind the red lights of Jeff’s Land Rover. “You did good back there even if you don’t think you did.”
“I failed. I could have brought the dead up, but I got blocked. And I ruined the ward.”
“Baptiste was just trying to help,” Cian said, continuing to hold her hand against his lips.
“Yeah, well, fuck him. I could have taken everything out with a good zombie rising,” Amaliya said, scowling.
“But we survived without that happening. You’re not always going to be the rescuer of everyone, Amaliya.”
Tilting her head, Amaliya gazed at Cian’s profile. There was no doubt in her mind that she loved him, but he didn’t fully understand yet what she felt inside.
“That you have to win this war alone against him?” Cian said, smirking.
“Oh, fuck you. This mind reading thing is going to be annoying.” Amaliya withdrew her hand from his grip, but only to rest on his thigh.
“Yes, you’re both very powerful vampires and necromancers, but you have a strong group of people around you. Samantha killed the were-bear-”
“Was that what it was? Gross!”
“-and Baptiste helped vanquish the demon. Aimee and Cassandra killed several vampires. We held our own.” Cian slid the small glowing orb out of his pocket and tossed it onto her lap. “One very trapped demon right there. Courtesy of me.”
Amaliya picked up the sphere to see it was a crystal that had been shaped into a ball. The heat pulsing inside of it was disconcerting. “Can it get out?”
Cian shook his head. “No. Not on its own. Maybe a black witch could do it, but not without a lot of trouble. Aimee gave me that just in case there were demons about.”
“We weren’t ready, Cian,” Amaliya said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We’ve been talking about this shit for weeks now and we weren’t ready.”
“I know.”
The sedan sped up to follow the other two vehicles on to Interstate 35. The black smoke from the burning building was a haze against the moon. Sirens still sounded in the distance. Amaliya wondered if the blaze was under control yet.
“He came for Samantha. Not me. Her. She’s dangerous to him. She can’t go home.”
“I agree. She’ll stay with Jeff. Next to our house, his place is the most fortified magically and otherwise.” Cian reclaimed the orb and shoved it in his pocket. “We’ll figure it out.”
Amaliya swept her hair back from her face, keeping it off the burns on her arm. What she was about to say was not going to make Cian happy.
“Why not?” Cian asked.
She frowned at him. “Now you’re just showing off.”
“You’re actually projecting your thoughts quite loudly.”
Staring out at downtown Austin as they made their way to the Travis Heights area where Jeff lived, Amaliya felt unexpected tears in her eyes. “I saw Bianca.”
“The Summoner? At Sam’s?”
“No. I saw Bianca. Not The Summoner. I think she was astral projecting. Something I totally need to learn to do, by the way.” Amaliya peered up a side road toward her old home. The road was clogged with emergency vehicles. “Anyway, Bianca appeared to me in Sam’s kitchen. I know it was Bianca, not The Summoner.”
The silence from the vampire beside her lasted much longer than she anticipated. Glancing over at Cian, she saw his eyebrows were drawn downward over his hazel eyes. At last he said, “All right, but what does that mean?”
“I think she’s trapped inside her own body. The Summoner may be controlling it, but she’s in there. I...uh...have talked to her in my dreams. Each time she begs me to find her. I talked to Benchley about it. About possession. He’s doing some research for me. So I can rescue her.”
Another long stretch of quiet filled the air between them as Cian switched lanes to follow Jeff’s vehicle across the bridge out of the downtown area.
“Cian?”
“Your grandmother saw Bianca and ended up dead. It was a trap, remember?”
The memory of her grandmother’s death at the hands of The Summoner hit her like a bullet. It was too fresh, too new, to fully accept as truth. She kept forgetting Innocente was gone. “Right.”
“But what would be the point?” Amaliya asked. “We know it’s a ploy, a possible trap, so why try it again?”
“Because you wouldn’t believe he would do the same thing twice?” Cian glanced at her briefly, then slowed the car to stop for a red light.
Cian had a point and Amaliya resented that fact. It hurt deep within her to realize that she had so much in common with the tiny blonde, yet had never connected with her, never truly spoken to her. All her life Amaliya had been adrift, looking for an anchor, trying to understand who she was. As a child she had told her mother she heard voices and sometimes saw people who weren’t really there, but she had been told it was just her imagination. Now, in retrospect, Amaliya knew better. Those old memories were surfacing more and more now that she felt strong enough to actually look into her past for the truth about her existence. The Summoner had killed and transformed Bianca and Amaliya because they were the descendants of powerful mediums. He had managed to make two more of his kind, but Amaliya hadn’t known that when she had first risen. By the time it had been revealed, it was too late. Bianca was possessed by The Summoner and Innocente and Pete were dead.
“Pete isn’t your fault,” Cian assured her, his fingers tracing over her ear lightly.
“He loved me. He wanted me to be human so we could have a life together. He never realized that isn’t what I would have chosen for myself. He died for nothing.”
The sedan was now making its way up a heavily lined street toward the big Victorian hidden at the top of a hill surrounded by trees. The road wasn’t very wide and cars parked along the road made the passage very narrow. It made Amaliya nervous, wondering if The Summoner would dare attack here. The ward shimmered along the property line, extending far into the sky above. It was huge and beautiful. The sedan slipped through the magic and started up the long drive to the Victorian. The outside motion lights flicked on at the approach of the vehicles illuminating the dark green house edged in light yellow and red paint. The big house was in quite good condition considering its age.
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