Something About Witches (20 page)

She wasn’t sure whose blood was whose, but she’d use it. Bringing her hands together, she screamed out another chant. The braided line of power coiled back up in her hands like an obedient serpent, then melded into an oblong shape. Like bread dough, she kneaded and spread it, a quick alteration of the magic. As she did that, she called out the words to reinforce her shields and recharge the energy, using her blood and the darkness, the scattered shards of Light sparking off the circle. A potluck of things like a magical dirty bomb, many different unpredictable elements combined. Unpredictable was exactly what she needed here.

She flung it outward, like a master pizza chef expertly launching his dough. As it left her hands, it became the snake again, whipping out into a rippling, seething line of Dark and Light fires, a deadly white squall line. Reinforced by the circle’s strength behind her, she moved forward with it, driving it, driving the soul-eaters back toward their rift point.

They snarled, lunged. Then screamed their rage and pain as that line tore shreds out of them, as if they’d stepped into a minefield. They backed off. She kept coming, driving them back like a lion tamer. Two steps forward, one step back as they lunged, dodged, and she parried, ducked shots of flame back at her, thrown punches. They were at close quarters now, less than two or three feet between them, but they were getting more stubborn and brave, the closer they got to that hole. She tasted her own blood on her lips, knew they were getting in some strikes as well. It didn’t matter.

Pain slashed across her back. A cry broke from her lips as she went down hard, but the pain wasn’t the danger. She was trapped beneath the suffocating weight of a fourth soul-eater, one who’d gotten past her guard. How had she missed him in the smoke? Maybe he’d come out behind them. More important, he was completely independent of the rift, no longer tethered to it at all, the chains broken. Corporeal.

Struggling to her back, she punched wet, slimy flesh like sticky Jell-O, a thought that would keep her from eating Bill
Cosby’s favorite dessert ever again. Damn, she really liked those pudding cups, too.

She’d become two creatures, one standing back with oddly rational mind, cracking wiseass remarks and thinking about the next step. Then there was the part of her that was screaming her rage, wanting him off. She was outnumbered. But it didn’t matter. The fight was what mattered. She’d been preparing for this for so long, and suddenly it was here. After that initial moment of fear and hesitation, all she’d thought about was protecting the coven; then rage took away even that much thought. It was all reaction now.

Energy gathered in the pit of her stomach. Up until now, her power had been coming from a combination of will and mind, but this bastard was about to find out what it would feel like to be fried by what she could summon from the darkest part of her psyche. It was darker there than anything these pieces of Underworld garbage knew.

As if sensing the imminent danger, and realizing he was free to leave the party, the soul-eater let her go, tried to make a break for the sky.

She caught him around the throat with that lariat of streaming energy—
Go, Wonder Woman
—and tossed a few more volleys at the others, but the problem with tethering one enemy when others were around was that it made her just as vulnerable, as anchored in one place as he was. And they knew it. She threw up a protection spell as they bore down on her. The weight, the pressure, was incredible, making her snarl out as the air around her decompressed like a plane cabin. She couldn’t hold it. Couldn’t. Damn it, she wasn’t going to let go. He was the only one who was corporeal. She had to have him. Had to take her shot.

A blast shuddered through the ground and blinded her like lightning at close range, a strike that could have come from the hand of God Himself. It crackled through the three soul-eaters, seared them down to their very essence. Shrieks of pain and a god-awful smell filled the
clearing, the electrical energy searing across her nerve endings so she convulsed in its backwash.

It was impossible not to feel a surge of fierce exultation and love. He was here, with her. He’d come back.

The darkness was slashed to ribbons, cut by the enchanted flash of a broadsword’s blade, wielded in Derek’s capable hands. He could change anything to a different weapon, as long as it kept the same properties. She suspected what she was seeing was his switchblade, transmuted for a different purpose. She turned her attention swiftly to their enemy.

They weren’t gone, of course, but they’d been blasted off her. Two were pushed back toward the rift, but they were scrambling to re-form ranks. The fourth soul-eater was still held by her line, and now she sure as hell wasn’t letting go. Managing to struggle to her knees and then to her feet, she started to reel him in.
You’re going to be my guinea pig, you monster.
This was her chance, to test the deadliest weapon she had in her arsenal.

Derek was by her shoulder. At a screech behind them, he shoved her down so they both ducked. The missing third soul-eater swooped over them. It bowled into the other two like a pterodactyl whose radar had gone haywire. It was the deciding moment. They crawled, flapped, and clawed their way to their rift opening, flinging themselves back down into it, conceding defeat.

Unfortunately, that shove had lost her purchase on the fourth one, and he’d come to the same conclusion his companions had. Best to live and fight another day. He dove for the rift, a straight shot down like a pelican dropping out of the sky.

No.
Not that easy, pal.
Muttering the proper chant, feeling the Dark energy uncoil eagerly, she tossed out that powerful lash one more time, but this time it had barbed ends. Those ends caught the fourth soul-eater, latched onto him just as he had his foot in the rift door. Because he was corporeal, it wound around him, using his own Dark energy
against him, but also feeding it back to her. She felt it pumping inside of her, like an answering heartbeat. She knew what he was, what he was made of. She knew the composition of his soul in that connection.

“Ruby.” Derek’s voice, urgent, a command. “Let him go. They’re retreating. We need to seal the rift.”

“No.” Her voice was hoarse, unrecognizable. She’d managed to get to her feet and now took a step away from him, toward the soul-eater, coming out of fire and smoke. She saw fear in the demon’s eyes, and she loved it.
Be afraid, you bastard.

He writhed, the poison and power in those barbs sweeping through him, twisting his body and lifting it in the air, making it contort. His essence was turning sickly green, traces of flame. He screeched. It was an unearthly sound of torment, one she recognized because she’d made it herself, the night everything had changed.

Face the nightmare of what the world truly is, what it will always be for you. Desolation and emptiness. No purpose, no worth.

The energy she was using spilled out a bloodred light that illuminated the night, cast the moon with a red tinge, made the fountain nearby look as if it were a pool of blood. The soul-eater’s body was visible, the winged form, the forearms and legs roped with muscle. Unlike the skeletal shapes of the others, he was a heavyset gargoyle, a thug of the Underworld. However, under the power of her spell, his skin began to break like cracked mud in a desert long after the rain had dried up. Bits of him rained down onto the ground, each one moving, whimpering of its own accord.

Revenge was not bitter. It was glorious, the sweetest thing she’d ever tasted, and all she wanted was more.

S
HE COULD PLUNGE INTO THAT FAULT LINE, KILL THE
other three. Follow the trail to Asmodeus, and she’d bring the fight to him, literally. She could bring this to him. In the Underworld, they were corporeal. So it would work there. She just had to find her way to him.

Then Derek knocked her to the ground, breaking her focus. She snarled at him, fully intending to give him a dose of what she could do against brute physical strength. However, he’d shoved her to her stomach, had a knee in her back as he knelt over her.

“Obliterate.”
The thundered command made the ground shake once more. Forcing her face up, she saw all those little pieces of demon crackle up like paper, roll toward the rift opening and slither back in, like garbage collected and thrown away.

“Now,” Derek shouted. The energy from the circle swept over them. It had Christine’s and Linda’s distinct signatures, and now Derek’s added to it. The purity of it made her body cringe, salt burning in raw wounds. They covered the fault
line like bricklaying, Christine and Linda laying the stone while Derek provided the mortar to strengthen them. Witchcraft used women’s arts; sorcery apparently used men’s. Build, nail, hammer, bind.

But in the end, it was like tossing dirt into a sinkhole, trying to fill up something that was bottomless. As long as Asmodeus, soul-eaters and the whole foul army were still under there, containing them was pointless. It needed to be a grave, not a cage.

“Let me go,” she snarled, fighting him. Since his booted foot was at her shoulder, she hammered at his calf with her fist. “Let me up.”

Derek obliged, yanking her up by the arm hard enough it jarred her shoulder. “Help,” he commanded, his tone brooking no disobedience. He wasn’t her lover right now, but a much more powerful sorcerer who would kick her ass into next week if she didn’t do her job. But she couldn’t. Those two forces warred within her. She was furious at him for interfering, for not letting her finish it. Damn it, he didn’t understand. He couldn’t. And he was keeping her from what she needed to do. Darkness swirled around her, thick and choking as the soul-eaters’ smoke. When he shoved her toward the circle, she whirled on him, energy sparking off her fingertips.

It was a lucky strike, for he hadn’t expected a hit from his own camp. As a result, black exultance surged through her when she knocked him to his knees, but she didn’t linger over it. She ran back toward that weak rift point. She’d stand on top of it, send that barbed energy down like fishing line, get the blood she craved. Go in after it if needed. She wasn’t afraid to go into the Underworld. She belonged there.

It was like being hit by a battering ram. As she hit the ground, she tasted dirt, but that wasn’t what made bitter bile in her throat. Derek had the flat of the sword against her, and she screamed in protest as it stole her strength, drawing it into the metal so that she was limp, helpless. Grimly, he ignored her weak snarls of defiance, keeping his attention
on the job of reinforcing the rift. The Light energy streamed over her.

Yet he was also letting it stream through him, into the hard palm he had against her neck, the knee he had in her back. It flooded her, made the Darkness recoil, made other parts of her writhe in pain, just like that fourth soul-eater. That was the key to it, why her barbed magic had worked. To know how to hurt something, you had to know its pain. The key to destroying evil was stepping into its soul and blowing it up from the inside.

She’d sacrificed parts of
her
soul for that kind of knowledge. So now the Light energy coming from Derek’s hand, soaking into her pores, was scalding acid. She shrieked, clutching at the ground. The fire of it was unbearable. She cursed and fought, aware of nothing but that her blood appeared to be boiling inside her body.

She didn’t know how long it went on, but she was vaguely aware of the rift being sealed, of Linda’s and Christine’s energy levels depleting and Derek taking more of the load. Ruby should be helping. It was that thought that told her she was coming back to herself. That, and the fact the extraordinary pain was ebbing, one last rinse from the Light washing through her, balancing things again. But in a fragile way, like a glass figurine sitting too close to the edge of a shelf.

Things got quieter, the roar of the power flow dying. The worst of the hurricane had passed, down to a few lingering gusts, puffs of random energy. Linda and Christine were still weaving, additional stitching. It was the spell she’d started, now reinforced by their Light and Derek’s as they sealed that rift hole. But she could already tell sealing wasn’t enough. It was like placing a piece of plywood on top of a hole. It wouldn’t change the fact that below that rift point was an empty space, where that boil, what the soul-eaters had dug out, had weakened the fault line, the energy there no longer dense as it needed to be.

The solidity could be restored only by a powerful infusion
of Light, something comparable to a nuclear bomb. That level of power couldn’t be accessed without pulling it from other things that also needed it. The usual way to restore a fault line was to restore it a little at a time, drawing on the necessary power in increments. But in this case, given that this might have been a test run for attack, they might not have that kind of time.

Of course, one way to keep them from coming back in the interim to test what was being rebuilt was to instill terror of what would happen to them if they tried it. She’d had that capability, and Derek had stopped her.

He moved off of her now. The sword was gone, probably folded and back in his jeans pocket, once again the knife. Adrenaline pounding, she scrambled to her feet, throwing herself at him. “You bastard,” she raged. “You had no right to do that. To interfere. You—”