My heart stutters. A witch could easily be confused with a demon.
Asmo goes rigid. “What do you mean?” I’ve heard this tone from him before. Violence followed soon after.
The man slams the deadbolt, locking the door. “Block the doors with whatever you can find.”
“We need to leave,” Asmo mutters to Luca.
A woman and her son—the same ones from the market—bang on the door. “Please!” she cries. But the man keeps piling tables and chairs in front of the door.
“Hey!” someone yells. “Let them in!”
“Are you crazy?” he fires back. “There are other places they can go.”
Heat flushes through me, and I stalk toward him. “Let them in. Now.”
The man looks over my shoulder. “Control her, man.”
Asmo’s deep chuckle comes from behind me. I shove past the man and start dismantling the barrier of chairs. He yells at me to stop, but I ignore him and toss more chairs out of the way. That is, until his clammy hand wraps around my wrist. He opens his mouth to say something I’m sure he would regret, but he freezes as the room darkens.
“You have two seconds to remove that hand from her.” The man’s chest heaves as he stares at me, but Asmo’s next words have him dropping my hand like it’s on fire. “Or I will show you exactly what it’s like to face a demon.”
I bare my teeth at him and he skitters off. “Anyone else?” I call to the group of men who were content to let a woman and child be left in the street. They all back away. I shove the last table out of the way and fling the door open. They stumble in, tear tracks staining the boy’s face.
“Thankyou,” the woman gasps, shutting the door firmly behind her and flipping the deadbolt.
“What’s going on out there?” I ask. She shakes her head frantically, her gaze wild and unfocused. I place my hands on her shoulders and force her to look at me. “Please.”
Her light blue eyes meet mine. “I don’t know—I’ve never seen them before. But they had black…” She trails off, hand circling in the air as she searches for the right word.
“Black auras around them?” I supply.
She nods quickly. “Yes. There were these…ghost animals with them.” I freeze. Cambions and osseri I know. But…ghost animals? “Dead animals, but they were alive,” she clarifies. “That’s the best way I know how to describe what I saw. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
As if on cue, shadows begin to fill the street.
“Princess, away from the door, please.”
I back away slowly, stopping when I bump into Asmo.
“We should never have stopped here,” Luca grumbles.
“Not helpful,” I fire back. “What do we do?” I ask Asmo.
He stares out the window intently, his body rigid. “Keep our cover if we can.” He turns to Luca. “Get everyone into the back and hide. We can throw up a sound and protective barrier.” His voice is a hurried whisper.
Luca nods and begins ushering people into the back. Without a thought, I twirl my hand and summon the protective barrier, casting it as a wall between us and the storefront. Asmo summons the sound barrier.
“You’ve gotten good at that,” he whispers, gesturing toward the barrier that hides us from whatever is roaming the streets.
“I should hope so. I’ve had nothing else to do except practice my magic for the last two weeks.”
In fact, that’s all I’ve been able to do, and I’ve been happy to do it. In the week after Cora nearly killed me, my magic lay dormant. Asmo thinks it was because it was all going toward healing me. But it didn’t take long for it to come back in a rush. Since then, it’s been dying to be let out. Some days, it feels like my body is a dam holding it back. Practicing has been the only thing that has helped keep it tame.
“Shit,” Asmo whispers.
I look back to the window. My stomach drops all the way to my feet.
The woman was right.
