Demon Magic and a Martini: The Guild Codex: Spellbound / Four

by Marie, Annette

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Wintry cold swept over the room. Darkness sucked at the artifact Burke and Fenton had left glowing on the mezzanine. Frost reformed over every surface.

  And the demon slammed into Ezra.

  It drove him into a stack of pallets with crushing force. Wood splintered and crunched. Ezra slashed with his sword, but the demon didn’t flinch when the blade parted its flesh. It had many injuries, none of which bothered it. Hadn’t Ezra told me himself? Demons could take a lot of damage.

  Crimson light spiraled around the demon—magic no longer chained by the demon’s contract. Instead of fighting a slow, witless, magic-less demon controlled by a distractible human, Ezra now battled a fully powered, fully autonomous demon that could wield more magic than the demon mage.

  All because of me.

  I spun in a wild circle. A dozen feet away, Burke was crawling blindly, searching for an escape. My gorge rose at the sight of his face. The demon could have immobilized him with magic, but instead, it had blinded him—a far more vicious way of keeping its former master from escaping.

  With an explosive roar, power erupted. Thrown backward, Ezra slammed into the central pillar supporting the mezzanine. Metal groaned under the impact, and he slumped, legs sprawled, his torso held up by the pillar. Without it, he would’ve been flat on the ground.

  His short sword spun across the concrete and slid to a stop at my feet.

  The demon stalked toward Ezra, its claws uncurling. He lifted his head, his left eye gleaming with faint red light. Blood ran from his mouth and dripped off his chin. He didn’t make any move to stand as the demon approached.

  I looked down at the sword.

  The demon stopped in front of Ezra, smiling malevolently. Four yards away, on my other side, Burke was inching along the concrete with soft grunts of pain and panic.

  I had to stop the demon. I had to save Ezra.

  The demon lifted its arm, thick claws glinting in the faint light as it took aim at the exhausted, injured, defenseless mage. Seconds. In seconds, Ezra would die. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to stop this, no matter what it took. I had to act.

  Seconds. No time. Go! Go now!

  I snatched the sword off the ground and sprinted. A scream burst from my throat—a tearing outcry of panic, of denial, of desperation. I raised the blade over my head, the deadly point gleaming.

  And I slammed it down into Burke’s back.

  The foot-long steel drove between his ribs. The edges scraped against bone. The hilt hit his body and he collapsed without a sound, his weight pulling the sword out of my hands.

  My breath came in fast, urgent pants. I stared at him, at what I had done, then I raised my head. Crouched over Ezra, the demon gazed at me, its cold, harsh features unreadable.

  Then it tore its claws out of Ezra’s chest.

  The force pulled him upward before the claws came free from his body. He fell back into the pillar, limp, slumped, head lolling, blood running down his chest. My throat spasmed, another scream fighting to escape, but I’d forgotten how to make a sound.

  Cackling softly, the demon opened its other hand. The amulet fell to the ground with a clink, then light swept over the beast’s body. Dissolving into a luminous blur, the crimson spirit hurtled toward me.

  I stumbled back as the demonic spirit plunged into Burke, claimed his dying soul, then faded out of this world.

  A sob crawled up my throat and made my lungs heave. I burst into an unsteady run, racing to Ezra’s side. Hands outstretched, I dropped to my knees beside him.

  This close, he looked even worse—clothes torn, cuts and lacerations leaking blood, blue-black bruises darkening his skin. But it was the three piercing wounds in the right side of his chest that had me shaking so hard I couldn’t breathe. The demon had driven its claws in deep, and blood flowed steadily from the punctures.

  Wet, ragged breaths trembled through his lungs. His head twitched, then his eyes cracked open.

  “Tori,” he rasped. His left eye shone with a hint of red.

  “Ezra!” I reached for his arm but hesitated, terrified that even the gentlest touch would hurt him more. “Ezra, I—”

  His hand fumbled for my wrist, and his fingers closed in a surprisingly powerful grip. “Tori, get away.”

  “What?”

  “Get away. Run away.”

  “The demons are gone, Ezra.”

  He sucked in a horrible, gurgling breath. “Get away.”

  His eyes rolled back, and his fingers slipped off my wrist. His hand thudded lifelessly on the floor.

  “Ezra!”

  He was still breathing—barely. More blood than air filled his lungs. He drew in another tremoring gasp. His eyelids flickered, showing nothing but the blank whites of his eyes, then closed.

  For a long moment, he didn’t move. Didn’t even breathe. Then his eyes snapped open—and both irises were consumed by glowing crimson that deepened to near black in their centers. Two circles of hellish, inhuman magma.

  The temperature plunged. Ice coated everything nearby. The heat left my body in a trembling wave and I fell backward out of my crouch, my butt landing on a lumpy fragment of debris. My whole body quaked with violent shivers. The light vanished, and only Ezra’s demonic eyes, glowing with power, existed in the consuming darkness.

  More crimson light sparked—runes appearing on his chest. Lines spread from them, coiling over his torso and sinking into his body. A luminescent circle flashed to life under him, filled with runes. I shoved myself backward, away from the glow.

  Scarlet light brightened and deepened, burning black at its core. His red eyes were wide and staring, but concentration tightened his face.

  Then he spoke—and his voice was a guttural growl, deep and rough. The words rose and fell in an unbroken stream, and I recognized the cadence of an incantation. The magic he had conjured blazed brighter, then drew inward like water flowing down a drain—except the magic was draining into the punctures in his chest.

  Ezra arched off the pillar, hands clenched and teeth bared in agony. He shuddered violently as the final wisps of power melted into his flesh. With a gasp, he slumped again, head falling forward, limbs sagging to his sides. The frigid cold lessened and the blanket of unnatural darkness lifted, allowing the faint light from the artifact on the mezzanine to illuminate the loading bay again.

  “Ezra?” I whispered.

  The mysterious spell was gone—as were the punctures in his chest. The three marks from the demon’s claws no longer wept blood. They no longer looked like gory holes.

  “Ezra?” I tried again.

  He didn’t react, his chest rising and falling with slow, smooth breaths. Barely daring to hope, I inched closer. Beneath smears of blood, the deep punctures had transformed into three jagged-edged scars.

  Shivering from lost body heat, I hesitantly peeled apart the blood-soaked tears in his shirt. Not only was his chest whole again, but the other slices and claw marks had healed, leaving fainter scars, and the bruising had faded to reveal unmarked bronze skin.

  In awe, I lightly touched a new scar. The speed of the healing eclipsed anything I’d seen the Crow and Hammer healers accomplish. My stare dipped to the old scars that raked up his side and stomach, then I sat back.

  That hard fragment poked my backside again. I slid my hand under my butt, searching for the debris to toss it away.

  Ezra’s chest rose in a deep inhalation. His shoulders went back, his spine straightening, and he raised his head. His eyes opened—and his irises glowed like crimson fire.

  My empty lungs froze. His gaze slid over the bay, touching first on Fenton’s body, then Burke’s, then lingering on the demon amulet lying on the ground a yard away. Finally, his stare turned to me. My hand closed around the small object I’d sat on.

  The demon inside Ezra smiled. Crimson power flared over his hands and raced up his arms in snaking veins.

  He lunged for me.

  I flung my hand out and mashed the
ruby artifact into his face. “Ori decidas!”

  The screamed incantation left my lips as his claws grazed my throat. He crumpled under the spell, his muscles slack. I kept the crystal pressed to his face as he hit the ground, limbs splayed and body immobilized.

  I panted, terror weakening my muscles. With my free hand, I gingerly touched my neck. Stinging cuts marred my throat and trickled blood, but since the wounds weren’t spurting, my jugular must be intact. What was it with everyone going for my throat tonight?

  Under my hand, the ruby artifact glinted against his cheek. Once, an irritatingly wise druid had told me that the world was rife with mysterious magical forces that may or may not be sentient. If those forces could indeed influence a human’s puny life, then I owed them a big favor. Either that, or I was one hell of a lucky girl to have found my fall spell—dropped while grappling with Fenton on the mezzanine—right when I needed it most.

  Keeping the precious artifact in place, I met Ezra’s gaze.

  His demon looked back at me. Even without the crimson eyes, I would’ve known this was not Ezra. Never could he have looked at me with such primal loathing. Never had bloodlust and viciousness contorted his face like that. There was nothing of Ezra in this cruel monster that had taken over his body.

  Kai’s passing comment, his unintentional warning, repeated in my head. I had to hit him hard. If Ezra had lost consciousness but the demon hadn’t …

  Ezra had tried to warn me. Get away—not from our defeated foes, but from him.

  The demon twisted Ezra’s lips into a cold mockery of a smile. “Such disgust on your face, payilas.”

  I shuddered. Ezra didn’t sound like that—his voice was too deep, too growly, the words sharpened by an alien accent.

  “Shut up,” I told the demon, proud that my voice was steady. “You aren’t supposed to talk, especially not with Ezra’s mouth.”

  A soft, hissing laugh. “This body is mine. He will give it to me … soon.”

  I tried to ignore the demon, but seeing the beast behind Ezra’s familiar face twisted something inside me in the most painful way.

  “They did not tell you.”

  “Didn’t tell me what?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “His fate,” the demon taunted. The glowing power in his eyes didn’t seem as bright as before. “He is mine. His body and his soul.”

  My throat tightened. I pressed the crystal harder into his cheek.

  “But you can save him.” Magma eyes blazed again. “Give me Vhʾalyir’s imailatē vīsh and he will be free.”

  My gaze darted to the dark amulet lying a mere three feet away on the ground.

  “Do you not wish to save him, payilas talūk?” Another laugh hissed from Ezra’s throat. The gleam in his eyes was fading rapidly. His face was slackening. “Either way … he will be mine.”

  With those final whispered words, the red glow disappeared, revealing Ezra’s human eyes—one pale and the other warm brown. His eyelids drooped over his glazed, empty stare. I waited, scarcely breathing, as seconds stretched into minutes, but he was well and truly unconscious—the human and the demon.

  Above me on the mezzanine, the soft light from the Keys’ glowing artifact flickered. It dimmed. Then it went out, plunging the room into darkness.

  Rain pattered on the roof and leaked through cracks, dripping onto the floor. In the cessation of the life-and-death battle, the drumming filled my ears. I stared at the invisible mezzanine, my breath coming faster and faster. Why couldn’t the spell have lasted just a few minutes more?

  Fingers trembling, I carefully settled the spell crystal in the hollow of Ezra’s throat where it couldn’t slip off. Then I sat back, my butt thumping on the ground, and buried my face in my bloody hands. As my adrenaline faded, pain grew—my palm full of glass, my burned and scraped neck, my broken wrist, my sliced upper arm, my strained and bruised muscles, and more aches than I could identify. I sat unmoving, fighting the pressure building in my chest.

  A whimper slipped from my throat—and the dam broke. Sobs shook my body. I couldn’t stop myself. I wept from the terror, from the horror, from the dread and panic and pain.

  I cried because it was so much, too much, but it wasn’t over. Somehow, I had to find the strength to stand. I had to find a way out of this building in the pitch darkness. I had to make my way back to Aaron, and I had to figure out how to get Kai out of the pit. I had to somehow move Ezra, even though I was weak and hurt, because Aaron and Kai had sustained far worse injuries.

  I couldn’t do it. It was too much.

  A scrape of metal against metal snapped me back to the present. I lifted my tear-streaked face and squinted through the darkness. I couldn’t see anything, and suddenly, I was terrifyingly aware of the two dead bodies so close and now unseen.

  The darkness lifted.

  I stared in confusion. The room had brightened, but it wasn’t light as I’d ever seen light before. There was no spell, no lamp, no flare or glow or beam. The darkness simply … lightened. The source-less luminescence came from everywhere and nowhere, as omnipresent as the darkness had been before.

  A man stood just inside a gap in one of the overhead doors, his hand raised, palm upturned as though he had physically lifted the darkness and cast it away. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Surely I was hallucinating.

  “Darius?” I whispered.

  He strode forward. The ground crunched reassuringly under his feet, the splashing puddles proving he wasn’t a figment of my imagination. Sweeping to my side, he knelt and leaned over Ezra, two fingers finding the pulse in his neck. Then Darius’s solemn gray eyes turned to me and his warm, solid hand settled on my shoulder.

  A dozen questions spun through my head, but I couldn’t speak. My voice had disappeared along with the darkness—darkness the guild master, the rare luminamage, had banished.

  But I didn’t need to speak. My questions didn’t matter. We were safe now.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I sat in the passenger seat of Darius’s SUV and listened to the rain.

  Behind me, the guild master was arranging a blanket across Kai. The electramage was slumped in the seat, already buckled in, his broken leg splinted and wrapped in tensor bandages. Darius had fed him a healing draft, and he’d dozed off within seconds of finishing it.

  In the middle was Aaron. Darius and Alistair had given the pyromage the initial round of first aid, and he was also comatose from a powerful healing potion. Ezra was tucked in the third seat, still deeply unconscious. He wouldn’t be waking, either, because Darius had dosed him with that same yellow sleeping potion mythics kept shooting at me in paintballs. I couldn’t fault Darius’s logic; it wouldn’t be good for Ezra to wake up trapped in the back seat of a vehicle with no idea where he was.

  I looked down at my wrist, splinted and tied against my chest in a makeshift sling. My hand and arm were tightly wrapped in gauze and tape, bandages pulled on the skin of my neck, and a cooling salve was slathered over my burns. It was nice that I wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the first aid treatment had done nothing to dull my pain.

  Crunching gravel mixed with the sound of the downpour. Darius tucked in the last corner of the blanket, ensuring all three mages were covered, then straightened.

  “I found it.” Alistair’s deep, gravelly voice carried through the open door of the vehicle. “Scratched up but seems to be working just fine.”

  I craned to look through the open door. The sturdy volcanomage, his leather jacket zipped tight and the collar turned up against the cold, wet breeze, stood beside Kai’s recovered motorcycle.

  “Can you ride it?” Darius asked.

  Alistair grunted, but it sounded more amused than grumpy. “I’d prefer my Harley, but I can make do with this little crotch rocket.”

  “Good. Let’s get moving, then.”

  Closing Kai’s door, Darius got into the driver’s seat. The engine was already running, and heat pumped from the vents. He unbuckled the weapons belt around hi
s waist and tucked the sheathed daggers under his seat, then turned on the window wipers and shifted into drive.

  Kai’s bike snarled to life, its headlight flaring, and Alistair pulled out first. The SUV rolled out of the lot after it, gravel grinding noisily under the tires. As we pulled onto the secondary highway, I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see the road again, not when my last view of it had ended in such disaster.

  If Darius and Alistair hadn’t shown up, I didn’t know what I would’ve done. Kai, it turned out, had called for help after the Keys had driven him off the road. Darius and Alistair had come to our rescue, but it had taken them almost an hour to reach us. Still, I wasn’t complaining.

  “How are you doing, Tori?” Darius asked softly.

  I reluctantly opened my eyes. We were approaching an intersection, and Alistair had just turned Kai’s bike onto a new road—the area where Aaron had taken a wrong turn. If we hadn’t gotten lost in the town, would any of this have happened?

  “I’m okay,” I whispered.

  “Tell me about it,” Darius said. The words weren’t a command, but a gentle suggestion.

  We turned onto the Sea to Sky Highway, the high beams sweeping across glistening pavement, and our speed picked up significantly. What did the darkness look like to Darius’s eyes? As a luminamage, was anything ever too dark to see? I swallowed against the dry soreness in my throat and adjusted the nearest vents to blow hot air into my face. Hoshi, back in orb form, was nestled in my lap.

  “Do you know?” I asked abruptly.

  “About Ezra?” Darius didn’t look away from the road. “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since the very beginning. He told me during our interview for his membership.”

  My eyes widened. From everything I’d seen, Ezra guarded his secrets more carefully than his life. But he’d straight up told Darius? And Darius, knowing the truth, had allowed Ezra into the guild?

  “But …” I protested in disbelief. “But Ezra is …”