It’s Amanda. Her throat has been slit, and a flap of skin hangs down, crusted with blood and stuck to the top of her chest. The crystal radiates bright, yellow light, illuminating everything around us. Xavier draws his fangs and snarls, moving in front of me before charging at the demon possessing Amanda’s body.
But he only makes it a few steps before the demon throws out her arm, sending a pulse of dark magic through the air, knocking Xavier right off his feet.
Chapter
Thirty-Three
Two can play this game, bitch.
Xavier is back on his feet in seconds and I send a blast of energy through the air, hitting the demon. It doesn’t do much, but bump her shoulder back.
“Get out of here, Wren,” Xavier says, growling and going after the demon again. This time, it doesn’t react but simply stands there. Xavier punches his hand through her torso, right under her ribcage. He jerks his hand back, ripping her spine through her body, tearing her in half.
The demon looks at him curiously, inked over eyes expressionless. Amanda’s body, unable to stand on its own anymore, falls to the ground and the demon vacates the body in a whoosh that blows my hair back.
Xavier steps back, flicking blood and body parts onto the ground.
“Where is it?” Devon asks, holding up the fire poker again. “Is it dead?”
“No,” I tell him. It was using the body, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to kill it.”
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. A demon who commands spirits and stood here unfazed isn’t going to go down easily, that’s for fucking sure. My hands wrap around the hilt of my dagger when suddenly Xavier grabs me and jumps to the side. Only a second later, a body comes crashing down onto the forest floor.
“Oh fuck,” Devon breathes, looking up.
My eyes widen in terror, seeing bodies strung up, hanging above us. “I think we found most of the missing counselors.”
Xavier has one arm around me and he pulls me to him. I look around the area we were just standing in. The ground is dead and rotten, and the bodies hang in a circle above. Right in the center, the dirt has been disturbed. Something bigger and darker than I ever imagined is taking place, and the feeling that the world is going to crumble apart and burn makes me feel like I’m going to throw up.
“It’s a ritual,” I exclaim. It’s so fucking obvious now I don’t know how I missed it before. Why else would we be out here in the woods? There were five bodies hanging, and each was equally spaced—like the points of a star.
I move out of Xavier’s embrace and throw out a hand, yanking down another body. It crashes down with a sickening thud, followed by the crunch of broken bones. It’s the body of a woman, and her eyes are open and lifeless. She also has had her throat slit in a ritualistic way.
The sound of metal scraping on metal echoes through the woods and we whirl around, unable to tell where it’s coming from. I turn, putting a hand on Xavier’s arm. He has dirt on his elbow from being thrown by the demon. Even though it doesn’t matter, I brush it off of him. In doing so, the smell of sulfur becomes stronger. I bring my hand to my face and sniff the dirt on my fingers.
Sulfur.
And then I realize that the demon hadn’t thrown Xavier aside just to keep him from attacking. It threw him right into the middle of the circle, where something has been dug up or buried or?—
“It’s trying to access a Ley line,” I say as it comes to me.
“Ley line?” Devon asks.
“Earth’s energy grid,” I summarize. “If you can tap into them, you can access a shit town of power. Demons and monsters and anyone willing to participate in a really risky form of magic have been trying to access them as long as they’ve been known.”
“If a demon gets power from the Ley line…” Devon starts, trailing off so I can finish.
“It wouldn’t be good. They’d be almost unstoppable.” I bite my lip and inhale. “That’s why it didn’t want me to do the locator spell. It wasn’t done with the ritual. Which means we still have time to stop it before it does tap into an infinite source of magical energy.”
“Can you pull the rest of the bodies down?” Xavier asks, knowing using magic drains me.
“Yeah,” I say but before I can, the rest fall from the trees. I flinch and he pulls me close to him again, using his own body to protect me. This time, spirits rise from the bodies. I watch, transfixed in horror, as the spirit of a young, male counselor steps out of his body and turns around.
“No,” he cries, voice echoing through my head. He falls to his knees, sobbing, and each cry hurts, like a vice digging into my brain. His despair is palpable and his emotion and fear spirals around me. The spirits of the others do the same, each one realizing they’re dead.
Their pain becomes mine and I clutch at my chest, heart shattering in two. All the pain I’ve felt before bubbles to the surface and I pitch forward, tears in my eyes.
