Kharon clutches at his neck, and even from this distance I can see the blood—dark and glistening—pouring between his fingers. His wife is screaming something, reaching for him, but Abaddon holds her back.
And meanwhile the circle?—
Oh shit.
The circle?—
The baby twister inside the orbit of burning runes has become a full cyclone. The wind screams now, a living thing that tears at the courtyard. Loose stones skitter across the ground. One of the fire pits tips over, coals scattering.
“They’re coming!” Phoenix’s shout cuts through the chaos, and her voice carries notes of triumph and terror in equal measure. “I’ve opened the portal!”
My head swings back and forth between Kharon—still clutching his bleeding neck—and the increasingly wild tornado contained in the circle. Lightning crashes. Once. Twice. Three times in rapid succession, each bolt slamming into the ground inside the circle with enough force to make the cobblestones shake under my feet.
The light is blinding. Blue-white and electric, burning afterimages into my vision.
Sabra is suddenly lifted off her feet. She doesn’t float gracefully like Phoenix. She’sflung, her body tumbling through the air like a leaf caught in a hurricane.
She hits the cobblestones hard near me, the impact making me wince in sympathy. Her grunt of pain is audible even over the wind.
Then Layden’s body comes flying out next, toppling end over end, limbs flailing. He crashes down further away, rolling across the stones.
This is going wrong. This is going so wrong.
I don’t think—just react. I drop to my knees beside the woman, reaching for her. “Are you okay?”
She clutches her head with both hands, and when she looks up at me, her eyes are wide with shock. Dazed. Maybe concussed. She stares back at the cyclone with an expression that can only be described as dread.
Pure, undiluted dread.
“Are you okay?” I shout again, louder this time, trying to cut through whatever fog of shock she’s in.
She just keeps shaking her head, over and over, like a broken record. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.” Her voice is thin, breathless. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“What wasn’t supposed to happen?” I grip her shoulder, trying to ground her. Trying to get her tofocusbecause whatever’s happening in that circle is getting worse by the second.
But she doesn’t answer. Just keeps crab-walking backward, away from the circle, her eyes locked on it in horror. Like she’s watching a car crash in slow motion and can’t look away.
I follow her gaze back to the circle and immediately understand her terror.
Phoenix is still rising. Higher and higher into the sky. The dark funnel cloud lifts with her, stretching up like a finger pointing at the heavens. Or like something reaching down from the sky toward us.
She’s so high now she’s barely more than a speck against the gray clouds. A small, dark figure suspended in the center of an impossible storm.
Layden appears beside us, limping slightly. There’s a cut on his forehead, blood trickling down into his eye. He wipes at it absently, his attention moving back and forth between Sabra and Phoenix. “What happened?!”
“I don’t know.” Her voice shakes. She’s still staring at the cyclone, and I notice her hands are trembling. “One second, we were at a standstill, and then?—”
She gestures helplessly at the chaos in front of us. At Phoenix disappearing into the sky. At the lightning still crashing down. At the wind that’s starting to pull at even those of us outside the circle now.
Layden looks around, clearly trying to piece together what went wrong. Abaddon has fled back to his wife and daughter, using his massive body to shield them against the courtyard wall. Remus still hovers over Vlad where Kharon tossed him, and the vampire isn’t moving.
Did Kharon kill him? Can you even kill something that old? That powerful?
“Vlad just went nuts.” The words tumble out of me as I put my hands on my head, a useless gesture that does nothing to help but makes me feel slightly less helpless. “He said something about giving her the power she needed and went and attacked Kharon. Just— Just launched himself at him and bit him.”
Layden and Sabra exchange a look that’s loaded with meaning I don’t understand.
“How did he find out?” Layden asks Sabra, his voice tight.
