He crept toward the wall, staying low, and chanced a quick look through the entryway at the space beyond. Three souls burned in his second sight, and he pulled back quickly, another mageglobe forming at his fingertips. He filled it with a shockwave spell, then snapped his arm around in an arc and sent it careening into the other room.
The ensuing eruption shook the mansion like an earthquake. Spencer was already moving before the last tremor faded away, looking to neutralize the three hunters who struggled to get to their feet. They’d been hit with something like the magical equivalent of a flash-bang mixed with a bomb, and recovering from that wasn’t easy.
Spencer didn’t let them.
He slammed a binding spell on all three, pinning them to the floor with ropes of magic. Approaching the closest hunter, he picked up the assault rifle where it lay inches from their fingertips. Spencer adjusted his grip on it—not the make he’d carried in the Mage Corps, but good enough—before blindly switching the safety on, then used it to knock out all three hunters with blows to the head from the buttstock.
More hunters are coming, Fatima warned him.
Spencer didn’t know how much time he had, but he spared a few seconds to eject the high-capacity magazines on the other two weapons. He pocketed those and took cover low to the ground, out of sight of the hallway. He clicked the safety off, the weight of the assault rifle in his hands familiar after carrying one for most of his adult life.
The binding wards provided some light, a glow that was readily eclipsed by the souls in his second sight coming down the hallway, led by the shadowed mess of the other mage’s possessed one.
“Soulbreaker,” the demon hissed, the woman’s voice mangled into something monstrous as it spoke. “You are a complication my Duke is displeased with.”
Spencer breathed through his nose and didn’t answer with words but with bullets. He pulled the trigger and held it as he aimed down the hallway. The mage was shielded, bullets sending ripples of magic across her form in his sight, but the hunters weren’t so lucky. Screams filled his ears as Spencer cut them down, the demon having not provided them with cover.
Pressure made his ears pop, and Spencer strengthened his shield against the raw magic that slammed into him. His defenses held, but her magic erupted into flames around him, crawling across the floor and furniture. Spencer swore as he cast an elemental spell, knowing he couldn’t let it spread becausefuck, that would kill everyone in the mansion. He was shit at that kind of magic though, and the flames were taking their sweet time to shrink.
“I’ll burn this house down around you,” the demon hissed.
“You’re getting a one-way ticket back to the hell you crawled out of,” Spencer shot back.
Movement behind the demon had Spencer jerking in surprise as, between one blink and the next, Wade appeared in the hallway in a blur of speed. “Hey, asshole. Do you know how rude it is to set someone’s home on fire?”
A veritable vortex of fire erupted behind the demon, ripping through them with a roar that wasn’t remotely human. The scream they let out was pure human agony, the demon unable to override the sheer pain of the burns scored into the back of their borrowed body. For all the demon’s access to magic, it clearly hadn’t tapped into the woman’s training and had only been shielding in the front.
The demon threw its host to the floor, rolling to try to put out the flames as the ones it had summoned with magic were abruptly snuffed out, and not by Spencer. The searing brightness of Wade’s soul had Spencer blinking his sight back to normal so he didn’t blind himself when the younger man stepped into the room, fire flickering around his teeth.
“What are you doing here?” Spencer asked.
“Haitao said last night he’d taken you here. William offered to drive me over this morning. He’s stuck outside your cage, along with the werecreatures who came with us.” Wade slammed his foot down on the burning mage’s chest, pinning her to the floor. The sound she made was like someone dying, but it wasn’t enough for the demon to leave her. Spencer changed that.
“I cast you out,” he snarled, risking momentary blindness as he slid his sight sideways again. Fatima jumped between them, planting her paws wide as she readied herself to guide the demon back to hell. The violent swirl of the demon in the woman’s soul expanded furiously as it fought against the containment Spencer had them in. “I cast you out.”
The demarcation of the soul flared up bright in his sight, some of the lines overshadowed by Wade’s much brighter soul. It didn’t matter because Spencer would know how to break apart a soul even if he was blind.
“I cast youout.”
He slammed his magic through her soul with surgical precision, splitting it apart and breaking her free of the demon. The insidious evil that had taken a joyride in her body exploded out of her in a flash of negative light that had nowhere to go but where Fatima led it. She swallowed the demon whole, snarling as it fought her, but it wasn’t going anywhere except straight back to the hell it’d crawled out of.
The woman’s soul flickered, her aura taking over the space the demon had stolen. She was herself again, but that was no guarantee she was innocent. Spencer straightened up and conjured another mageglobe, blinking his sight back to normal. Wade hadn’t moved, and his boot on the woman’s back was probably making her burns worse, not that he seemed to care.
“Can you break your cage so the others can get through? I can still hear hunters on this floor,” Wade said.
Spencer tugged on the magic feeding his distant shields, relieved to sense they were still standing. “I didn’t feel you cross it.”
Wade shrugged. “No one ever does. Look, the backup will be useful. I don’t think Takoma would appreciate me charring his walls as a new interior design scheme.”
“They used Alyona to get inside. She’s possessed by a demon. I don’t want her harmed, and I don’t want the demon in her to get out.”
Wade made a face before removing his foot off the woman’s back. “I’ll go corral her. You let the others through. Give me, eh, three minutes.”
Wade ran off before Spencer could protest. He hissed a curse between clenched teeth, sparing a couple of seconds to set a binding ward on the mage and a containment spell to keep her magic in check. Not that she was really in any condition to fight, but he wasn’t about to take any chances.
He pressed the buttstock of the assault rifle against his shoulder and used his mageglobe to guide him. He stalked silently down the hallway toward the foyer, careful to step over the growing pools of blood from the dead hunters he’d shot. Fatima stayed beside him, tail lashing back and forth as she kept pace. Then a roar ripped through the mansion, rattling the windows behind their metal shutters. The snarled sound wasn’t made by a demon but came from something far larger.
Spencer scowled. “He better not be shifting mass.”
