It was as if they’d been shocked by a live wire, Caitlin and her coven crashing to the ground as one, bodies seizing all around the pentagram. With no power to sustain it, the Ouroboros Mirror fell to the floor and shattered, the sound like a glacier breaking apart. A cold wind whipped through the gallery, and Spencer would’ve been shoved back if Wade wasn’t there to brace him.
“Sorry I’m late. I didn’t think Takoma would appreciate me letting some possessed hunters murder his vampires. Can you even murder a vampire if they’re undead?” Wade said. Red scales had crawled up his neck and over his jaw, spreading across his cheeks and hairline. His molten gold eyes with their reptilian pupils didn’t blink.
“I need you to break the barrier ward while I deal with Astaroth,” Spencer said.
“You know where the anchor point is?”
“No.”
“Right. Killing the makers, it is.”
Spencer would deal with that mess after he got Takoma back.
Fatima positioned herself between Spencer and Astaroth, a bridge to the other side just like the Ouroboros Mirror. Her presence steadied him, and Spencer swallowed the blood lingering on his tongue. His cage was still intact, glowing bright when he looked for it, a sharp contrast to the demonic presence in Takoma.
Spencer could not let a Great Duke of Hell walk out of the museum. The SOA would want him to do everything possible to send the demon back to its hell, no matter the cost. That it would mean a true death for Takoma would simply be a means to an end Spencer wanted no part of.
But while Spencer had no soul to break the demon free of, he did have a psychopomp.
“Fatima?” Spencer asked.
She didn’t look away from the demon, the brush of her thoughts against his almost soothing in a way.I will guide you.
He’d trusted her from the moment she appeared to him as a child. There was no world where he wouldn’t. So when Fatima streaked toward Takoma, Spencer followed with his magic, sinking into the focus it would take to cast out a Great Duke of Hell.
“You can’t unmake me,” Astaroth sneered.
“I cast you out,” Spencer spat back.
Astaroth tried to use Takoma’s speed to escape, but between Spencer’s magic and Wade’s dragon fire encircling the casting circle as he incinerated what remained of the Cascade Coven, the Duke had nowhere to go.
And Fatima was not one to be dissuaded from her duty.
She lunged for Takoma and the otherworldly wrongness he carried, sinking her metaphysical claws into the poltergeist that was John Adler. Fatima disappeared in a swirl of sparks, the glow of her bright and beautiful as she bridged the divide inside Takoma for him.
Spencer followed where she led, retracting the cage to settle it around Takoma’s body in moments. Astaroth railed against the prison, the demon’s depth of power shredding through one layer, and then the next, forcing Spencer to open his soul wider to the ley line and its power. Distantly, he could feel himself shiver from a soul-burning cold erupting in the gallery, the freezing temperature raging against the warmth from Wade’s dragon fire.
“I cast youout!”
Bit by bit, Fatima clawed the poltergeist into her, the lightness of her being twisting around the shadowed darkness inside the void Takoma carried that wasn’t meant to hold anything. The blood magic that sustained Takoma’s body buckled beneath the metaphysical fight happening inside him, and he fell to his knees despite Astaroth’s determination to stay standing.
If the demon’s attempt at possession didn’t hand Takoma a true death, then his unmaking certainly would.
But Spencer couldn’t think about that right now as he fought to keep a Great Duke of Hell contained. He hooked his magic into Astaroth’s incorporeal self andpulledwith everything he had.
“I cast you out!”
Magic ripped through Spencer’s soul as the cage forcibly expanded from Astaroth’s explosion of power. It felt like that moment in London, when he’d sought to contain Andras at the auction. He hadn’t expected the depth of power from the Great Marquis of Hell, and Spencer’s cage had cracked back then, letting the demon flee.
He wasn’t going to let that happen here. Spencer desperately struggled to keep the cage intact as Astaroth fought for freedom from the way home found within Fatima’s metaphysical teeth. His magic slammed against the remnants of the barrier ward coming down, crashing through the glass cupola from the force of Astaroth’s power. The Great Duke of Hell fled the disintegrating poltergeist in favor of a freedom Spencer would deny the demon with everything he had.
The rule of three held true, as did his cage, leaving Astaroth nowhere to go but back where the demon had been summoned from.
Fatima fled Takoma’s void, the remnants of the poltergeist shining between her teeth when she reformed in the center of the blackened and ruined pentagram, amidst the shards of the broken Ouroboros Mirror. Her head tipped back, mouth opening wider and wider, the edge of the veil she existed in unspooling inside her.
You do not belong here, Fatima said again.
The demon’s power ripped so hard at the cage it was as if it were ripping apart Spencer’s soul. Everything burned, but Spencer never wavered from dragging Astaroth back to hell. The storm of magic and demonic power swirling around them spun tighter and tighter until the impossible-to-escape gravity well that was Fatima won out.
