Than was not with me. I glanced back, and he was walking this way, but with every step, the world seemed to pull away backward, as if he were trying to walk up a down escalator. He was making progress, but it was slow. Very, very slow.
Bathin was braced in a stance that made it look like he was holding up an invisible wall with his palms. One leg locked behind him, one leg bent, every muscle in his heavy, strong body straining, sweat slicking his thick, black hair, running down his face.
“Run,” he said. I heard it, in my head, clearly, and with my ears as a buzzy, distant thing. “He…he’ll kill you, Myra. He’ll kill everyone.”
I wasn’t going to run. But I did look into that vortex.
And immediately wished I hadn’t.
The man—no, creature—in that swirling mass of blackness was now easily twelve feet tall. Made of whips of gold lighting and squirming flesh, he was in human form, but warped, stretched, and burning. Screaming mouths opened and closed, bubbling up to the surface of his flesh before drowning in flames. Hands reached out of his chest, his arms, fingers eaten down to bare bone scrabbling against the fleshy prison.
It would have been horrifying, I supposed, to someone who hadn’t grown up in Ordinary and teethed on bedtime stories read out of Necronomicons.
I’d seen all sorts of horrors in my life, and some of them even made pretty good neighbors.
What was on the outside did not always match what was on the inside. Ordinary had taught me that young. But this thing, this demon creature, was either showing me his true form, or was just trying to scare me.
“I will chew your bones and burn your soul on a spit,” the uncle demon intoned.
Yawn.
“This is god-chosen land,” I said, planting myself right beside Bathin, one hand on my hip, the other in my bag. If this plan was going to work, Bathin couldn’t see it coming. Couldn’t guess I would have brought the scissors here. Now. “You will not enter.”
I was close enough to stab the scissors in Bathin’s back, close enough to release Delaney’s soul.
Than wouldn’t let Delaney’s soul be taken by another demon, I was betting on that. Banking on it. He might act cool and removed, but he had a thing for my sister.
He wasn’t going to let her soul get sucked into the vortex. He wouldn’t allow her soul to be destroyed.
As soon as I released her soul, I’d shove Bathin through that vortex. A snap of my fingers while crumbling one very rare flower, would finish the job.
With any luck, it would blow up the vortex. And everything in it.
“You are not welcome here, demon.” I drew the scissors out of my bag, and held them in my palm, a knife ready for stabbing. “Leave. Now.”
“Myra,” Bathin shouted. “Run! I can’t hold him back for long.”
The demon tipped his horned head toward me. Two yellow eyes stared back, caught like hooks in my brain.
“Your weapon is useless,” he rumbled.
That was when Bathin noticed what was in my hands. His eyes widened and he straightened, drawing his palms away from whatever invisible force he had been fighting.
I braced for something to explode now that he had stepped back, but if anything, the vortex appeared less violent.
“You dare—” the demon inside the vortex said.
Bathin held his hand over his shoulder. Dismissive. Nonchalant. Except I knew him. He was tight under all that swagger. A wire stretched and thin. A trigger squeezed tight.
“Hold,” he commanded.
Uncle demon crossed his massive arms over his chest, the screaming mouths nothing more than black-hearted flames now. “This Reed sister? Really? She is…”
“Fire,” Bathin agreed. “Myra, what are you doing with those scissors?”
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, my mouth dry, my heart pounding, but my words steady. “An awful lot of people have told me I can’t use them to free Delaney’s soul. All of those people have been demons.”
“Who else would know the truth of it?” He was watching my hand, or really, he was watching the scissors.
