Pain held off for a moment, but my breath was gone.
I hadn’t dropped the Glob. The demon darkness was still being sucked into its pocket universe. The demon screamed. From the altar, Mainet reached for me. With one taloned hand, he picked me up. Pulled me close to his vamped-out face, fangs and eyes the black of hell. He laughed. “You thought to steal the dark one from me. He is mine. I am the true Heir. The Heir of Darkness.”
His power was a tornado of energies tearing through the room. The Glob was not going to be enough. Not enough to bind and capture the demon and destroy the Heir and free the angel.
But. He was still lying across Lachish. There was still time.
Even as I thought that, Mainet threw me up into the ceiling. I hit the broken beam. My clavicle broke, my ribs displacing even more. The pain hit now. Time slowed almost to a stop. From above, I could see all the strands of power, each different, unique, but each just energy, despite how it manifested.
Dying, I pulled it all in, all into the Glob.Le breloqueadded its might, its purpose.
Gravity began to drop me to the floor.
As I fell, I held on to the Glob. Somehow. The crucifix burned into me. Power of a different kind. I wove it all together. It still wasn’t too late.
To the demon, on my last breath, I whispered, “Be gone.”
Wailing, the last of the demon vanished into the Glob.
Mainet caught me and threw me back up. High. I slapped against the dome above.
Fell. The floor of the church rushing toward me as time sped back to normal.
I tried to maneuver my broken body to land feet downward.
Landed badly. My lower leg snapped. Body whiplashed headfirst into the floor.
Everything went black.
In the night of near unconsciousness, gunfire sounded.
The stink of death magics hung on the air. Eli’s heart drummed steady, hard.
I opened my eyes. Cheek to the floor in a puddle of blood. The pain was... the pain was everything. I vomited on the floor as the agony took over.
Beast shoved her strength into me, her ability to ignore pain for a moment or two.
When I could focus my eyes, I saw Grandmother. She was dead, her body eaten away by death energies, burned by the taste of demon flesh she had tried to steal, her skinwalker energies taken with the demon into the Glob. There was nothing left of her but a blackened shell, her bones carbonized.
Ka was breathing, her eyes open, staring at the ceiling overhead. One round had entered her skull, two rounds in her chest. And still she breathed.
The pain spiked through Beast’s ability to hold it at bay, the pain of broken bones, all-encompassing pain.
Beast thought,Bone pain. Taste of dandelion flowers and rotten skunk meat. Is the color of smoke and the flesh of starved prey.
Yeah. That.I looked down at my body. My right leg was bent at a nasty angle a few inches above the ankle.
I gagged, the motion juddering my chest and the broken ribs. The taste bitter. I was bleeding across my chest and belly as if I’d been scored by giant claws. Oh. Right. The demon’s claws had cut through my armor. And Longfellow’s claws. I was bleeding inside the clothes. Probably pretty badly. I managed one breath, my ribs not moving properly, multiple breaks on each side, and the musclesthat stretched between my ruined ribs were torn.Flail chest.The term came back from my EMT studies. Fat lot of good it did me.
I was dying. I couldn’t fight. I hadn’t shifted.
But Mainet had discarded me. For now, I was alive.
The storm of the remaining death magics blew and spun around the room, the Glob still drinking them in. Lightning cracked outside, visible through the broken dome overhead. Rain slashed in and pelted the statues off to the side.
The prophecy of the blade had saved me. So far. I had seen parts of this.
Without moving my head, I looked up and back at the balcony.
