After another couple of frantic turns and I’m close enough to blast through the dried cornstalk rows. With my arms up, I duck my face and plow through the papery walls.
It doesn’t take long before I slide to a stop in the clearing that marks the center of the maze.
My heart pounds inside my ribs as my mind tries to catch up with the bizarre scene. “What the hell?”
A woman is writhing on the hard, frosted ground as a spidery silhouette stretches and contorts over her. Another figure—herhusband maybe—is flat on his back, fighting off the attack of another demon minion.
The part that’s really throwing me for a loop is that these two aren’t wispy, iridescent soul-siphoning predators. These two are corporeal.
They are visible and physically attacking these people.
My hands fly up as I access the wisdom of my ancestors, searching for the right spell to stop this attack. But before I can even utter the first syllable, the demons melt into the bodies of their prey, and the couple falls still.
“What the fuck just happened?” Orion asks.
“Possession.” Sebastian joins us, raising his hands as he hurriedly traces sigils in the air. “They likely saw that we were containing the others and are taking another tack.”
“Can the blue bottles pull them out of those people?” I reach into my pocket, my fingers closing over one of my remaining spelled vessels.
The possessed man goes from lying deathly still on his back to flipping into the air and landing like a disjointed zombie in a superhero crouch.
“Fuck me,” Asher gasps, rejoining us. “Now that sleeping ever again has been removed from my future plans, what do we do?”
The man telegraphs his intention to bolt, and Sebastian throws up both his hands, a ring of spirit fire encircling the two demons. “Nice try, asshole. You’re not going anywhere until you return that body.”
The woman twitches and twists until she’s on her feet, but it’s obvious the two of them are having mobility issues getting used to their host bodies.
“Are the people still inside them?” I ask, searching the faces of the others. “Are they aware, or is their consciousness pushed down like in the movies?”
“They’re still in there,” Sebastian assures us. “And if we do our job right, we can save them.”
The thought of people trapped in their own bodies being possessed by usurper demons makes me both furious and terrified.
If we get this wrong, what happens to them? These people have families. They live here and know people we all know. How do we explain this if it goes wrong?
“Poppy?” Asher is at my side looking worried. “Back in the game, baby girl. You zoned out there for a second.”
I blink and give myself an inward shake. “Yeah, sorry. It’s just a lot.”
“It is, but you’ve got this. You’re part of the paranormal dream team, remember?”
Right. I suppose that’s true. It wasn’t anything we planned, but the six of us are the only thing standing between Emberwood and a major demon incursion.
I snap back to the moment at hand and take in the others working to contain the possessed couple and rid them of their unwanted counterparts.
“Okay. Six against two. Those odds aren’t so bad.” But the moment I say the words, the cornstalks at the edge of the clearing begin to sway, and more figures emerge.
Six. Eight. A dozen. Some are in demon forms, and some are human, their movements jerky and wrong, their arms twitching, their heads tilted at unnatural angles.
Shit. “That is totally on me. I jinxed us. My bad.”
Calling on the wisdom of my ancestors, I allow my instincts to take charge. Power bursts from me in a conflagration of spirit fire, and I focus on two of the demons that haven’t taken a human host.
The attack is quick and lethal, sending the screeching and burning beings recoiling as they dissolve into a heap of embers and ash.
I’m rewarded with a moment of burgeoning hope until movement in the corner of my eye draws my attention to a panicked kid running smack into the middle of our battle.
I’m not the only who notices him. A stick-bug demon with spindly, jointed arms turns and moves. The kid is on the other side of the clearing…
