“Don’t hurt my pack members,” Brooke warned.
“Not my plan.”
“Then we’ll deal with the vampires.”
The one outside the shields laughed at that statement, waving at them in a mocking manner. “Whenever you’re ready to die.”
Spencer leveled him an unimpressed look. “You’re real fucking annoying.”
Then he exploded a mageglobe right in front of the asshole’s face. Supernatural speed meant the vampire’s head wasn’t blown off, but the furious cry that echoed through the air told Spencer he’d at least been hurt.
The discomforting sound of a shift reached his ears. A quick glance showed Brooke and Isaac changing forms, the clothes they’d been wearing tearing to pieces. It took over a minute for Brooke to shift into a red-furred werewolf and for Isaac to become a mountain lion. Spencer blinked at the latter’s form, not expecting such a heavy hitter but glad just the same.
“Vampires are yours. Don’t die because I can’t resurrect you,” Spencer said right before he momentarily dropped his shield and thrust one arm forward to send raw magic exploding outward in a concussive wave. The attack cleared the immediate area, knocking over a couple of headstones, and the trio of werecreatures followed in its wake with lethal intent.
Spencer reset his shields and turned his attention toward the casting circle. The demons hadn’t fled, but both had forced their hosts to shift forms, and now they flanked the sorceress, their eyes pitch-black and staring right at him. A jolt of recognition shot through him as he stared at the sorceress—she’d been by Caitlin’s side at the gala. Fatima darted forward, the demons eyeing her less as a snack and more like a threat, but he knew they wouldn’t be able to catch her.
“You had no right to enslave those werecreatures,” Spencer said.
The sorceress shrugged, magic curling at her fingertips. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Do you really think you stand a chance against demons?”
Spencer conjured up a mageglobe, staring at her like she was stupid. “Actually, yeah. I’m a soulbreaker. It’s what I do.”
His kind of magic didn’t have the same instant notoriety among society as a necromancer, but demons knew him for what he was. Fatima was a dead giveaway of his position the demons couldn’t overlook. The two possessed werecreatures charged but ended up scattering when Fatima opened her mouth and the power of her spiritual event horizon packed into a tiny, mortal-shaped form spilled out in a threatening way.
Spencer blinked his sight sideways, ignoring the brightness of the sorceress’ soul in favor of the demons. Their darkness was easy enough to track as they skirted around the fluctuating power that was Fatima. Spencer couldn’t keep attention on both of them and the sorceress at the same time, so Fatima dodged left, chasing after the darker-colored werewolf.
I will herd them, she said.
“Have at it.” He conjured up another mageglobe and got eyes on the sorceress. Her casting circle had changed, the spellwork there startlingly familiar. The layout in its making was a pattern only taught to magic users in the Caster Corps. “You were military.”
She responded to his statement not with words but with a strike spell that was illegal in civilian areas. It burned across his shields with a targeted ferocity. The ground shook from the impact, her daffodil yellow–colored magic shearing over his shields. Spencer drew more power from the ley line to brace them, fingers pressed against the almost too-warm shape of his defense.
He knew hunter groups routinely recruited from the military and law enforcement, and so he shouldn’t have been surprised. It was just jarring to have to take a stand against a spell sanctioned for a battlefield, not for use in a rural Washington State town. But Spencer had spent most of his adult life in uniform or working as a special agent, and no matter what the sorceress’ background was, she didn’t have his depth of power. He just had to be careful about how he used his own magic in defense. He didn’t want to risk the government deciding he’d overreached for any reason.
Spencer sent a mageglobe streaking her way, filling it with enough raw magic it left a small crater in the ground when it exploded, ripping up part of her casting circle in the process. The sorceress’ own shield held up well enough, most likely thanks to her military training, but he could see the scattered fissures across it that spoke of a hard hit not easily patched.
Spencer!Fatima shouted.
He jerked his head around, catching sight of Fatima running full tilt at one of the demon-possessed werecreatures. It pushed them parallel to Spencer’s position, and he reacted without thinking, the spell already filling a mageglobe that he sent toward the demon to cage it in. He watched as fault lines burst into existence throughout the roiling darkness obscuring the werecreature’s stolen soul, showing the demarcation between the two.
“I cast you out,” he snarled.
The demon howled furiously, throwing up the werecreature’s massive head in protest as Spencer’s magic pinned them in place. Fatima skidded to a stop in front of the werecreature, jaw opening wide, a cold breeze picking up that he couldn’t blame on the rising storm. Spencer’s magic burrowed through the demon and the original soul, tracing out the fault lines with familiar ease.
“I cast you out.”
His magic flowed out of him to cut into the fault lines, ripping deep as the demon roared, the sound nothing like a human or animal would make. An answering roar was drowned out by the repercussions of a blast that hit his shields hard enough to send him stumbling backward. His attention split, some magic pouring into his shields and the rest focused on exorcising the demon. His magic held, the exorcism spell still building.
Spencer curled his fingers into a fist and jerked his arm back. “I cast youout.”
With a scream, the demon exploded from the werecreature, Spencer’s magic clawing it free of the mortal soul it sought to cling to. The flash of negative light looked oddly bright to him in his slipped sideways sight as the demon erupted from the werecreature, drawn by Spencer’s magic and Fatima’s gravitational pull back to the other side where it belonged. Fatima leaped into the air and bit down on the demon’s incorporeal form, swallowing it until there was nothing left of it on this plane.
The werecreature who’d been possessed collapsed to the ground, unmoving, and Spencer ran toward them. He shoved his shield over their prone form right as a vampire blurred to a stop next to them. Spencer swore andyankedhis shield low, letting it pass through him and the vampire in order to protect the unconscious werecreature. He blinked rain out of his eyes, glaring at the vampire, who snarled back, sharp nails that were more like talons raking uselessly against Spencer’s defenses.
