Nicholas!Sadie’s mental presence flooded the battleground that his mind had become.You can’t have him, demon.
I already have him, telepath. You can’t stop me now.
Despite what the demon claimed, it didn’t have full access to Nicholas’s mind or body. It couldn’t truly possess him.
“Sadie,” Unsure how much she could understand among the chaos in his mind, Nicholas spoke aloud. “The potion is working. It can’t take me over. It’s lying.”
Sadie’s presence in his mind cleared some of the fog the demon had caused and energized Nicholas. He began layering ward after ward through his mind, starting from the core of his thoughts and radiating out. Nicholas approached the demon. He pretended it was a thought he wanted to share and pushed.
Sadie was right there with him, shoving at the intruder in his mind.
They heaved. The demon sank mental claws in.
Sadie hesitated, but Nicholas didn’t. “Don’t stop. We can do it.”
She threw her power behind him once more.
“Directly at the portal.” Nicholas panted.
Sadie rubbed her thumb over the sapphire in her ring, then her presence in his mind shifted. She was no longer pushing alongside him, but pulling the demon.
She stumbled backward, and Nicholas cast physical wards to keep her upright as she staggered toward the portal sitting so incongruously under a hydrangea, the demon caught in her mental grip.
Suddenly, the pressure in his mind disappeared, the demon sucked away.
???
“Now,” Sadie shoutedthe moment she felt the demon disappear completely into the portal. She wanted to sag to the ground, but they couldn’t stop yet. Getting rid of the demon meant nothing if it could come back the moment it recovered.
Nicholas was at her side a second later, cutting the final line in a large glyph-stone he had been preparing for days and had carried out here only an hour earlier.
Beatrice’s readings had suggested that a demon couldn’t easily traverse a portal into the human world. That it took time and energy. That a demon that had just been banished couldn’t jump right back through.
But they didn’t know how much time they had.
They didn’t know if any other demons lurked on the other side of the portal, waiting for a suitable host to wander by.
Nicholas finished carving, but didn’t lift his tool from the stone. “Sadie, I can feel the portal draining the power of the glyph. It’s not going to be enough. It won’t hold long at all.”
It was the glyph his ancestor had used. The one that might have failed, but not for nearly two hundred years.
The glyph they had decided to trust in place of the one they didn’t fully understand.
“Add the glyph from my amulet.” Sadie stared at the stone. She couldn’t feel the magic through earth, but she could see the worry in the way Nicholas kept his tool ready to carve.
“I don’t have it memorized.”
Sadie no longer wore the necklace, trusting instead to the ring. But she had traced that glyph thousands of times. She crouched, smoothed out a patch of dirt, and began to draw, her finger dragging through the soil.
Nicholas didn’t wait for her to finish, carving the first line seconds after she started. He etched the entire glyph onto the stone lightly first, then went back and deepened the grooves. His shoulders relaxed as he added power to the glyph. “It’s working.”
Sadie let out a relieved breath. “We did it?”
“We did it.” He went over the glyph one last time, then stood, offering a hand to Sadie to pull her to her feet with him. “That glyph is strong enough to seal the portal closed, but it will burn through magic quickly. I’ll need to make a siphon of some sort to power it.”
“That’s possible?”
“Yes, but it only works on a large scale. Ultimately, we’ll probably have to place a boulder out here, and I’ll have to cover the entire thing in magic-absorption glyphs. But once that is done, the boulder will absorb magic forever, and the glyph locking the portal will feed off of that power and never fade.”
