I was still running, carving my way toward Sienna. The demons were nothing but an obstacle to cut through. Sienna was the goal. My sword would be at her neck next.
∞
The demon horde stopped us halfway across the beach. I was only aware of the demons in front of me, and Desmond and Kett beside me. If I looked at them too closely, those monsters at my side were even more terrifying than the demons. McGrowly would reach out, snatch a demon, and rip its head off. This wasn’t a clean, simple process. He was coated in demon blood that burned its way through his clothing and seared his skin. If he noticed, it didn’t slow him down.
Kett flitted in and out of my peripheral vision as a seemingly demonic version of himself — though not quite the mess of chaos that had freed itself from Blackwell’s spell in Scotland. This incarnation was graceful and bestowed with deadly claws. Instead of ripping off heads, he sliced them off. Yes, with his bare hands.
The space between Sienna and me was filling with more and more demons impeding my ability to swing my sword and cleanly deliver killing blows. I could see a dozen in front of me alone, with more and more rolling out of the surf behind. How many people had Sienna killed? Was each demon a reanimation of those souls? I pushed this traumatizing thought out of my mind and pressed forward, hoping I was freeing their spirits as I vanquished each demon before me.
The shapeshifters were getting hit hard around us. The witches’ spell offered some protection, but it wasn’t entirely demon proof. Sienna wasn’t able to cast any extra magic through it, though. I’d felt at least three fireblood spells hit the shield and fizzle. So that was a good thing.
I could still feel Kandy, Audrey, and Lara near me, but the witches’ shield spell wasn’t wide enough to block the demons to our left and right.
I tried to ignore the screaming. I tried to ignore the faltering witch magic. I just swung my sword as I inched forward.
“Jade!” Kett yelled.
I had missed the second demon climbing over the shoulder of the one I was currently facing. This demon sprung at me, too close for me to get my sword up and between us. I tumbled backward, knocking Kandy and Audrey aside where both were wrestling their own demons — literally.
The first demon gleefully leaped over the second. For a brief moment — with me pinned underneath them — they tussled over who was going to rip my throat out first. Unable to free my sword, I managed to pull my jade knife out and jammed it into the eye socket of the first demon, just as the second took a swipe and caught my neck with its claws.
I nearly blacked out from the pain. My blood spurted all over the second demon. But instead of lapping it up, it shrieked and reeled back. This shifting of its weight pressed the first demon farther down onto my jade knife. The creature dissolved into sand that flowed around me, mixing with the blood still pumping from whatever artery had been severed in my throat.
I tried to roll to my feet but didn’t make it up. The second demon was still scrambling back from me as others closed in to take its place, ready to finish me off.
Kett stepped in front of me and took the head off the second demon. Then he turned and smiled at me. “I guess that answers that question.” I had no freaking idea what he was talking about. His smile faded as my vision blurred. “Jade?”
Everything went momentarily black. Note to self: Getting my throat gouged out was not a good idea.
I came to and found Kett and Desmond standing over me. I sat up and shakily retrieved my sword. It was covered in blood and sand. That seemed so disrespectful.
I left magic building up behind me …
The necromancers …
“Duck,” I tried to scream, but it came out as a gurgled whisper. I’d stopped bleeding but my throat was still healing.
The necromancers unleashed their spell. It flew across the sand. It flew toward us. It flew toward Kett. Necromancy and vampires didn’t mix.
“Duck,” I screamed for real as I surged to my feet.
Kett flattened himself to the sand in front of me. The necromancers’ spell blew through and around me. And just for a flash, I could taste sugared violets.
“Rusty …” I whispered.
The spell hit the churning well of energy that had built up above Sienna — the power source I couldn’t feel or taste. My sister shrieked and collapsed to her knees.
The demon before me shook its head as if shaking off an invisible leash. Sienna had momentarily lost her hold on the horde.
Another flash of magic flew in from behind — the witches. This spell also blew by me, tasting of fresh-cut grass, lilac, and strawberries. It ignited inches in front of me, burning through every demon in my path.
Before me, the witches’ shield collapsed, but I was already moving. I sheathed my sword and gripped my jade knife. The sand of the disintegrated demons hung suspended all around me … or maybe I was just moving so fast it hadn’t fallen to the ground yet.
I felt my mother fall, her magic so dim I could barely sense it. This was the same spell she’d used against the demon in the Sea Lion Caves. Then, it had been more powerful than I had ever thought her capable of. Now, backed by a half-coven of witches, it was astonishing. And so filled with magic it could be deadly for the caster. I willed myself forward despite the terrified feeling that I might be losing her.
The skinwalkers, who’d been waiting behind the witches, leaped into battle.
The demons broke through the shapeshifter defensive line.
More screams, more dying.
I kept moving forward.
I hit the surf. I leaped over the next wave — and there was no demon within this one. The necromancers had stopped the generation of new demons by freeing the souls, or energy, that had been fueling Sienna’s summoning, but not the already risen horde. At least a dozen demons remained on the beach behind me.
I had left everyone else behind me. I leaped up on the rock. Sienna was still on her knees. She looked up and smiled as I thrust my knife forward into the ward that shielded her from magic.
From magic, but not me.
Except the jade knife met no resistance. Off-balanced by this, I fell forward, stumbling to kneel before Sienna.
She’d opened the protection circle, just for that single breath. It snapped closed behind me.
And I faltered.
Sienna’s magic was too powerful. It was fully unleashed within the circle. It owned the circle. It rejected me, momentarily scrambling my senses.
Then I became aware of a dark burning deep within my gut — and of the seething, terrible magic searing into me.
I looked down. Sienna had stabbed me in the stomach with the sacrificial knife as I fell. A knife that I had created to cut through magic, a knife capable of killing a vampire.
“That’s the third freaking time,” I muttered. I could taste blood in my mouth.
Sienna laughed. “Ah, Jade.” She reached out to stroke my hair. Her hand came away bloody, and she looked for a moment like she was contemplating licking it.
“I wouldn’t do that,” I murmured. I could feel my magic fighting the power of the knife — and claiming it … because it was already my own creation. “The demon didn’t like it much.”
Sienna giggled. “No matter. There are always other ways.”
Then she kissed me. Hand cupping my head, knife twisting into my gut, she kissed me.
I screamed. And screamed.
She was pulling my magic out — somehow dragging it from me through my lips.
I was dimly aware of more screaming outside the circle, followed by a crack of magic as Kett or Desmond tried to break through Sienna’s wards.
But Sienna — who had killed and bound the magic of so many Adepts — was too powerful.
I slumped sideways and she guided me back onto the rocks, still kissing me, still siphoning my magic.
Now she’d be unstoppable. The horde would kill most of the Adepts arrayed against her, and then she’d step out of
the circle and kill the rest. With my magic.
My friends, my family … all dead, just like I’d seen in Chi Wen’s vision.
Except … this wasn’t the cave. And that wasn’t my destiny.
My mouth, clamped shut against Sienna’s assault, was filled with blood.
I spat this mouthful into Sienna’s face.
She screamed and reared backward. As it had been with the demon before her, the magic in my blood was incompatible with Sienna’s black magic — or maybe it was that my dragon magic was the antithesis of demon or dark magic — I didn’t know. But it distracted Sienna for just a moment.
Still barely able to move, I wrapped my hand around the sacrificial knife that was poisoning me with its blood magic and yanked it from my belly. The toxic magic was already in my system, slowing me as I rolled to my side to avoid a spell Sienna half-heartedly tossed at me. This spell — an ice-based variation of her fireblood spell — hit my shoulder and actually helped steady me rather than freezing me in place.
“What have you done?” Sienna shrieked, desperately wiping my blood from her face. But the damage was already spreading. Her veins — filled with black magic — had burst open. These oozing wounds stank of the dark putrescence of that magic.
I wrapped my hand around the hilt of my sword over my shoulder. Sienna hadn’t tried to disarm me — she learned from her mistakes, knowing not to touch anything I might have claimed, such as my jade knife, which had burned her so badly in the past.
I unsheathed my katana with Chi Wen’s vision focused in my mind. I remembered Sienna sprawled dead on the altar in the cave, but with her deadly, intoxicating magic still alive.
“It can’t be destroyed,” I whispered.
I swung the sword around, its tip striking sparks of magic wherever it grazed the inner edge of Sienna’s protection circle.
Sienna screamed and flung up her hands as I brought the sword to her neck.
But I didn’t cut off her head.
No, I reached around her, over her shoulder, and grasped the blade exactly as I shouldn’t. The sword sliced into my hand, my blood coating its razor-sharp edge.
Sienna wrapped her hands around my neck and tried to strangle me. Black dots immediately appeared before my eyes — my throat was still wounded from the demon’s claws.
With the last of my strength, I bent the unbendable blade around Sienna’s neck — smoothing the metal with my magic when it wanted to crack and break — until it encircled her shoulders.
I couldn’t breathe. Sienna’s nails dug into my skin. Her blacked-out eyes were fierce. She was screaming with rage.
Then, remembering the blade’s purpose and how the magic of Blackwell’s circlet worked, I sucked all the magic out of Sienna and into the sword.
Well, it wasn’t quite that easy.
At first, her screams turned from rage to pain. She let go of my neck and brought her hands up to the blade in an attempt to push it off over her head. She severely sliced her hands doing so, which only served to intensify the magic I was trying to work. My blood and her blood mingled. I smoothed this combined magic out over the entire sword, and pulled and pulled and pulled all of Sienna’s magic after it.
I fell to my knees, unable to support myself and work such a terrible alchemy.
And it was terrible. It was a terrible, terrible thing to do to another person. A fate worse than death for any Adept.
The veins on Sienna’s face split wider as the magic drained out of her.
She stopped screaming.
Her eyes cleared and returned to their normal cappuccino brown. “What have you done?” she whispered through cracked, black-bleeding lips.
I kept pulling, even as I felt my own magic faltering … I guess even I had limits.
The black magic drained from Sienna’s veins. Her face began to heal.
“Stop, Jade … Jade …” she begged.
I didn’t stop. I knew I couldn’t stop. I went beyond the blood magic, beyond the black magic. I took her witch magic — the familiar taste of it made me weep. I took the binding powers, because if I didn’t, the cycle would just start again.
“Stop … Stop …” Sienna was crying now, sobbing.
I didn’t stop until I fell. The magic of the protective circle crashed down around us, and I dropped to the rock with Sienna across me.
I’d given it my all.
On the beach, and through the forest beyond, the demons were winning.
I couldn’t do anything about it.
∞
Portal magic washed over me as a doorway opened on the rock behind me. This was the treasure keeper’s magic. Pulou was the only one of the guardian dragons who could open doorways that weren’t permanent.
I felt, rather than saw, Yazi step through this doorway and lean down over me. My father brushed his fingers lightly on my cheek, and said, “She’s alive.” I’d never heard him sound so serious. Normally, his magic was an intense experience for me, especially when he touched me. Now I could barely taste it blended among the magic of the portal and Pulou.
“Of course she is,” Pulou said. He was somewhere above and behind me, but I still couldn’t open my eyes.
“Will the healer come?” Yazi asked.
“To kiss your daughter again? I imagine so.”
Yazi straightened. I imagined he was surveying the massacre on the beach. “Will you ask him to attend us, treasure keeper?”
Pulou huffed out a sigh. “I’m to be your errand boy today, I see.”
Yazi laughed, but the sound carried none of his usual exuberance. “Who else am I to ask? Drake is still sequestered. I figure it will be fifty years before the fire breather loosens her reins again.”
“The fledgling is far too clever for that,” Pulou said. He was chuckling.
I held on to the residual touch of dragon magic — my father’s magic — that he’d left on my skin. This wasn’t healing magic, of course, but if I could just get my own magic to mirror his, maybe I could remind my body how to heal itself.
I opened my eyes.
My father was standing over me, fully armored in some sort of hard-shell samurai gear. His face was utterly serious as he gazed toward the beach. The breeze tousled his sun-kissed curls around his ears. Supposedly, I was a feminine replica of him, but I doubt I could ever look so fierce … or golden godlike.
The door shut behind us as Pulou stepped back into the dragon nexus, or so I assumed.
“Hey, dad,” I whispered.
Yazi glanced down at me sprawled across the rock at his feet. He smiled. His face looked more natural this way.
“Is this the black witch?” he asked.
Sienna laid utterly limp across my torso. “Yeah,” I said. “Well, not anymore.”
“Yes, I see. Good. Shall we have some fun then?”
Um, I could open my eyes and move my mouth to talk, but I wasn’t actually moving any substantial part of my body. “Sure,” I answered, a bit faintly. I hated to say no to anyone, and I really couldn’t say no to my newly discovered father.
Yazi drew his sword out of thin air. The golden magic of it hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest. This I could thankfully still feel, even though everything else was deadened around me. The magic was a spicy chocolate that was fresh and potent. It was an intense incarnation of the warrior’s power, unique to my father.
The warrior turned to face the beach. Slowly, painfully, I rotated my head to see what he was seeing.
The shapeshifters — at least the ones still standing — and a couple of skinwalkers were still fighting. I could see Kett and taste witch magic, so not all the witches were dead yet.
Yazi bellowed. The noise actually flattened the waves as they crashed before him. It stirred the sand and ruffled the trees beyond.
Everyone on the beach stopped fighting, including the demons.
Yazi bellowed a second time, sounding a little pissed now.
The rock
vibrated painfully under my head, so I lurched up just in time to see and hear every demon on the beach and in the forest shriek an answer to Yazi’s challenge. Then the demons charged … right toward me. And I couldn’t fully lift my arms yet.
Yazi laughed and took one step off the rock into the rolling ocean. He brought his gold broadsword around — no fancy moves or anything — and cleanly lopped off the heads of the first three demons.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
Yazi took another step. He was knee deep in the ocean now — the waves didn’t even budge him — and lopped off three more demon heads.
The portal magic bloomed behind me as the remaining dozen demons realized they’d made a mistake accepting Yazi’s challenge and turned to flee.
Kett and the remaining shapeshifters threw themselves after the demons, chasing the creatures across the beach as they scattered into the forest. Yazi entered the fray. The witches — not including Gran or Scarlett as far as I could see — immediately ran to the fallen on the beach.
Pulou stepped out from the open portal and looked down at me. A bear of a man, his girth was only emphasized by the full-length fur coat I never saw him without. He spoke with a British accent, though his territory was Antarctica. Yeah, that was odd, but I guessed one of the guardians needed to oversee it.
I met Pulou’s gaze. Then his eyes flicked to Sienna, who lay across my lap now. Specifically, he was looking at the sword still twisted around her neck. Then he looked back at me.
The ruined katana glowed, tasting of all the magic Sienna had stolen, as well as her own. It was impossible to distinguish any one taste over another.
“I’ve made something,” I said.
“I see.” Pulou didn’t sound judgmental, but I knew an object of great and terrible power when I created it.
“Will you keep it for me?” I asked.
“That would be wise.”
I gently pulled the twisted sword off Sienna’s neck and held it up to Pulou. He took it carefully, holding it just by the tips of his fingers as he slowly rotated it. Different colors of magic swirled in the folded steel.
Treasures, Demons, and Other Black Magic (Dowser Series) Page 26