The demon crashed into thehedge of thorns. But with the moon overhead, even with singed tree cover, Cia was megapowerful.
Liz drank half the water. It was wonderful. “I couldn’t get through to the line. There was a thick layer of clay and... I couldn’t get through it. I could only go six inches between rocks.”
“Why only six inches? That doesn’t make sense. You’ve gone farther through dirt before. Oh. Wait. Whoever bound the demon tied the bindings into the line. Maybe a form of ahedgein the ground and it bound with the clay. Got it. Except—” Cia stopped, her expression thoughtful and faintly puzzled. “How did the demon get free? And in that form?”
Outside thehedge of thorns, Jane whirled away, backhanding a cut. It swiped through the demon’s mud body, slowing as the blade met bones and whatever else the demon had incorporated to create its shape. The vamp-killer hung there. Jane had put her entire body weight into the strike. The blade was wrenched out of her hand. She was in midair, spinning.
The mud demon reared and struck her in the head. Jane went down. Mud crawled all over her face and covered her nose and mouth. Jane squeaked. Began fighting at the mud, tearing at it with her knobby fingers. Unable to breathe. Fighting to get her airways clear. Watching Jane fight, Liz’s mind began to clear too.
The demon turned away from Jane to thehedgeagain.
Jane’s hands stopped peeling away the mud, searching on her belt.
Liz’s memories were fuzzy, like an out-of-focus camera vision, part memory, part sensation.Mud.Unable to breathe. “Drink,” Cia demanded.
Liz finished the bottle and wished for more. Her sister slapped a full bottle into her hand. Twin-bond. Mind reader. “There was a mud puddle and a skeleton in the cave,” Liz said as she twisted open the bottle. “It used that. And it wants to possess a witch body. I don’t know how to send back a demon who already has a makeshift body.”
Cia said, “We can rebind it.”
Eli rushed out of the dark and tore a vial of holy water off Jane’s belt. Upended it over her face. The mud boiled up and slid off. Jane rolled over, coughing. Gagging.
Liz remembered. Like being slammed in the head with the memories, all the memories, all at once. She crawled into the cave behind the narrow falls. The phosphorescent moss was everywhere. Except on the skeleton. The skeleton had been sacrificed for some great cause, or murdered, killed with a copper-age ax, the ax head left embedded in the skull. She had gotten power-drunk from the ley line energies. She had gotten close to the skeleton. She touched the ax. Her foot touched the mud puddle. Power-drunk and not thinking about consequences.
Liz pulled up her knees and put her head on them, letting the final memories flood through her. The ley line energies had opened up pathways through all her magic. The energies in the demon-binding had used the blood-curse taint to get into her. And she had let it. And the demon...The demon had tried to possess her. Twice. Both times by sliming mud into her airways. It had nearly succeeded.
She raised her head and turned her attention to the mud demon. She had touched the ax head that had held it in place for thousands of years. “The demon was bound with copper from up north, around two thousand years ago. When I fought it, I caught a glimpse of all the copper chain and the ax head, and the human skull used in the binding, and then it did that ‘mud-to-the-airways’ thing to me that it just tried with Jane. I didn’t have holy water, but I got away.” She remembered her own short fights in the dank, green cave beneath the falls. Remembered falling back and down, through the waterfall, into the pool of water. The pool had washed away the mud. The pool water that ran through stones attuned to the ley line, and at that time, to her amulets. Right. Okay. She had the timeline. And from that she could come up with better geometry than she had on her own.
“Good,” Cia said. “We can use the binding material to draw it back. Did it get access to your blood?”
No recriminations, no unnecessary questions. Simple acceptance and pushing forward, as always between them.
Liz rolled up her pants and looked at her knee. She had barked it on the rocks when she was getting out of the cave. She touched her head, which still hurt in a mushy, bruised kind of way. “Yeah. Not much, but enough.”
Cia held out one hand. Liz took it. “I’ll keep open thehedgeand theseeingworking,” Cia said. “You try to reach the ley line. See if the magic can be repaired to rebind the demon. If not, we’ll figure out an alternative plan.” They placed their hands together on the ground of the firepit, and Liz reached into the earth for the ley line. With her twin’s power backing her up, she spotted it instantly even through the layer of clay. It was easier to jump from rock to rock, closer to the ley line. The demon had escaped, and the connection binding the demon to the ley line had frayed in the last hours, freeing much of the power. As she edged closer, energy flooded into her exhausted mind and body. Thehedgearound them strengthened.
The demon backed away and grabbed Jane, wrapping its magic around her.
Jane screamed in pain. Her scream was cut off.
Liz shut away the sounds of fighting and concentrated on the demon’s magic trail underground, rock to rock, boulder to shattered stone. The trail was a pale light glimmering softly. The cave was just ahead, a beacon she hadn’t been able to reach before. But now, her skin heated, following the trajectory of the demon. The skin on her arms ached and burned. She gasped, and heard herself moan, back on the surface. Whatever the demon had done to her in the fight, it was exacting a painful price. On the surface, her sister did something, and the burning eased like a wash of moonlight.
She slid her magic into the cave. It was no longer brightly lit with the energy of the living moss, the phosphorescence glowing in herseeingworking. Instead it was dark. The gases and the presence of evil had killed all the moss. Where the mud had been was a dark hole about four feet deep, its bottom muddy. In the very center, a deeper hole went down. And down. Noxious gases streamed up from it, filling the cave. At the back of the four-foot depression was the skull, the ax head, and the copper chain coiled around small bones and bone fragments. From the copper ran a single trail of binding up to the surface. Into the clearing where she sat. Geometry. A very messy triangle, from cave overland to the demon, from the firepit to the cave.
“The demon is still connected to the original binding,” Liz murmured. “Copper ax head, copper chain. The skull.”
“Probably not a sacrifice. Probably the skull of the man or woman it had possessed,” Cia said. “We need some of the binding items here, in order to trap it. Then we can force it back there.”
“It’s got a tether. It can’t get much farther away from the pit it was in than it is now. Its maximum distance is the clearing.”
“Or is its maximum distance you?” Cia asked.
“Oh jeez.” She studied the final binding. She looked back with her witch gifts and inspected her own skin. “You may be right.”
“Guilt it up later. What can you tell about the site where it used to be bound?”
With her magic, Liz explored the rocks at the entrance. “The entrance is visible now from the front of the waterfall. I think when I hit my head, I took some rocks with me. We need to get back there and get the original binding material.”
“Not us. We’re the bait. We keep the demon here while Eli goes.”
