“For the record? Opting for the ‘only way out is through’ plan is a Patrick kind of plan, and it’s abad plan.”
But it was the only one available to them.
One floor up was the gallery with the casting circle and a ghost with a grudge against Takoma that had spanned centuries held by the beginning and end of a family of magic users.
One floor up was a Great Duke of Hell waiting to cross over, and for that to happen, someone needed to die.
A thump on the landing had Spencer looking over at the other end of the gallery, a mageglobe burning at his fingertips that he didn’t throw once he saw who was there. Haitao had blood on his hands and dripping from his mouth, clothes torn in places, but he didn’t appear injured. He held a stolen assault rifle, the muzzle and barrel bloodied in a way that told Spencer the vampire had probably impaled someone on it rather than shot with it.
Or he’d done both. Quite possibly at the same time.
Haitao smiled grimly. “I’ll guard your back.”
Takoma nodded and stepped forward, his hand pressing against the small of Spencer’s back to move him along. Wade took up position on Spencer’s other side, bending down briefly to pet Fatima on her head. They left the gallery behind in favor of the stairs, where frost was forming on the steps, coating each one in crystalline cold. They made it halfway up when the pressure in the air got worse.
Spencer dragged his gaze from the steps to the top of the stairs, sight slipping sideways, and saw the churning center of energy that was the poltergeist coalesce up on the landing into the ghost he’d seen in the forest. Only here, now, John Adler was as sharply defined as the living, and Spencer knew Caitlin was responsible for praying her ancestor into such power.
The ghost of a dead man smiled at Spencer, and he readied himself for a spiritual fight of the worst kind.
CHAPTERTWENTY-SIX
Fatima charged up the stairs,unimpeded by the ice, snarling a threat that John Adler paid no heed to. The poltergeist’s power slammed down the stairwell at them, and Spencer raised a shield to take the hit. Only they weren’t the target—the stairs they stood on were what it was after. The entire stairwell shook until it cracked down the middle, throwing them to their knees. Shields were useless over an open-air drop as the steps started to crumble. Takoma dragged Spencer away from the hole breaking through the steps while Wade held on to the railing.
“Please tell me this is an illusion!” Wade said.
“Does it feel like one?” Spencer asked, teeth clacking together.
“I don’t know! Ghosts are fucking weird.”
Takoma wrapped an arm around Spencer’s waist to steady him, having dug the fingers of his other hand into the wall beside them for support, plaster drifting away from them. “Lower your shield so we can get up there.”
Spencer swore but did as he asked, getting rid of it so they could move. But while Takoma and Spencer made it to the fourth floor with the aid of supernatural speed, the poltergeist focused all its considerable strength and power on Wade. Spencer’s ears popped sharp and loud as wind that shouldn’t have been seen outside a tornado crashed into Wade. He went flying backward down the stairs and crashed through the floor.
“Wade!” Spencer yelled as Takoma carried him past the landing and into the gallery that was the heart of the museum.
“He’ll be fine,” Takoma grunted. “Dragons are tougher than they look.”
Fatima yowled at them when they arrived, crouched low and growling at the scene before them.The Duke is here.
The archway separating the gallery from the landing filled with a latticework of magic that sounded like locks snapping together as the barrier ward fully settled into place. Spencer knew Wade wouldn’t have any problem getting through it; he just had to make it past the poltergeist and back up the stairs. Wade’s dragon fire was deadly and dangerous to everything in the museum, but it couldn’t do anything against a spirit.
The dead had no magic to break, after all.
Spencer was the one who did the breaking for them.
The casting circle filled the entire open floor of the gallery beneath the glass cupola. Rain thundered down above, the sky beyond full of storm clouds rather than stars. The lightning above didn’t feel like a response to a reactionary storm, which was the only silver lining Spencer could see at the moment.
Caitlin stood at the center of the casting circle, her coven arrayed around the pentagram’s burning lines as they channeled their magic together. Bodies lay in the spaces between the pentagram’s lines, the coven pendants around their throats burning bright with blood magic, the sacrifices having acted as a catalyst for the spell to bring the demon over.
Magic flickered on the spellwork like fire, motes of it floating up in shimmering lines of power that formed a cage around them. The focal point of all that magic hovered feet above Caitlin’s head, the Ouroboros Mirror a hideous void to Spencer’s sideways sight. When Spencer looked at the opaque glass, it was as if he were falling through the veil with no way to stop.
And circling the air around the Ouroboros Mirror was the black, formless energy of a powerful demon that had made it out of a hell.
Demons had hierarchies, and whether people knew it or not, they all felt different to someone who knew the intricacies of souls. Andras had been like knives cutting into Spencer’s magic back in London some years back. Exorcising a Great Marquis of Hell was going to seem like a picnic when compared with a Duke.
He conjured up a mageglobe and wrenched his gaze away from the Ouroboros Mirror, meeting Caitlin’s eyes. “All this for revenge?”
“Our ancestors never asked to be murdered by a monster,” Caitlin spat out.
