Forthill suddenly blinked and looked up at the highly decorated, intricately painted ceiling of the chapel. “Oh,” he said. “Oh my. The canon and the bishop aren’t going to be happy about this.”
“If they’d stayed in town when things got bad, they could complain,” I consoled him.
“But the smoke,” Forthill said plaintively.
“We’ll put it out the moment we don’t need it anymore,” Michael assured him.
I turned to Dr. Brazell and said, “He’s going to thrash around. Last guy I did this to had to be handcuffed to the bed. Hold him down if you have to.”
“Got it,” the burly doctor said.
I nodded, closed my eyes, and held out both hands over poor Robert as he started to groan.
I picked up on the black magic immediately, winding and binding him in pain and misery. I took a deep breath, stabilizing my thoughts and the images in my head I was using to combat the dark spell, and suddenly snapped my hands down as if seizing a snake behind its head before it could bite me.
I felt the curse begin to strain against me, whipping back and forth like a serpent, but I gave it no opportunity to escape. I kept my hands and my thoughts closed around it—and my mind was a hell of a lot stronger than it had been fifteen years ago. Fifteen years of pain and loss, of joy and victory, of steady work and desperate innovation had given my will steel and character that simply had not been possible when I was younger.
The curse was stronger.
But so was I.
I could feel the energy in my hands, see it in imagery in my head, the curse shaped like a coiling line of barbed wire. It struggled against me like a frenzied snake, and I suppressed it with my mind more than my hands. I moved deliberately, extracting one end of the wire from Robert’s neck, moving slowly and carefully to avoid damaging his nonmaterial self, whether you wanted to call it his energy field, the flow of his chakras, or his immortal soul. The wire would tear apart his sanity as it left him if I wasn’t careful. So I extracted it carefully and began to unwind it from his body with slow, deliberate caution.
Time went away while I focused, eyes closed, wholly and entirely centered on my wizard’s senses. I could hear voices talking in the distance, caught a faint whiff of woodsmoke, and with a roll of my hands and arms, I began gathering the writhing tendril of barbed wire into my grasp, feeling the curse lash back and forth, seeking a new victim.
“Michael,” I said, my voice strained.
“It’s ready,” he said.
I took a slow breath. Then with a last slow, firm pull, I withdrew the far end of the barbed wire from Robert’s hip, and the thing went mad in my hands. I fought to hold it contained, turning slowly, and opening my eyes to see a fire blazing in the broad shield.
“Get clear!” I snarled, and lurched toward it on my knees, thrusting out my hands and with it the dark curse, sending the dark energy into the purifying fire.
The fire roared up with a hissing scream that sounded even more charming than nails on a chalkboard, and I winced in discomfort as it hit—and then the fire suddenly surged, brightening, burning pure silver-white, and the wail of the dying curse became frantic and then suddenly vanished. The holy flame surged ten feet up, causing the Brotherhood to shield their eyes against the sudden illumination, and then abruptly died down to a very normal, very nonmagical fire that made the shattered wood of the basement pews crackle and pop and produce a considerable cloud of smoke.
I sagged in place, falling forward onto my hands, breathing hard.
Okay, so. It hadn’t been a fight, precisely.
But I’d done it.
I breathed out a long, slow sigh of relief.
I heard Michael and Forthill using a large wet blanket to smother the fire, sending out even more gouts of smoke, much to Forthill’s chagrin.
I was exhausted, but I started cackling a little. Which is a wizard’s prerogative.
—
Michael and I walked slowly to his truck and got in. We sat quietly for a moment. I wanted nothing so much as to go to bed.
“Harry,” he said gently. “The Brotherhood has been attacked by practitioners of magic.”
“Yeah. I noticed.”
“Poor Robert.” Michael sighed. “Is he going to recover?”
“Sure,” I said. “Little at a time. He’s lucky he’s younger. Mickey Malone couldn’t do the job anymore after that curse hit him.”
