Revenge was not bitter. It was glorious, the sweetest thing she’d ever tasted, and all she wanted was more.
Chapter 10
SHE COULD PLUNGE INTO THAT FAULT LINE, KILL THE other three. Follow the trail to Asmodeus, and she’d bring the fight to him, literally. She could bring this to him. In the Underworld, they were corporeal. So it would work there. She just had to find her way to him.
Then Derek knocked her to the ground, breaking her focus. She snarled at him, fully intending to give him a dose of what she could do against brute physical strength. However, he’d shoved her to her stomach, had a knee in her back as he knelt over her.
“Obliterate.” The thundered command made the ground shake once more. Forcing her face up, she saw all those little pieces of demon crackle up like paper, roll toward the rift opening and slither back in, like garbage collected and thrown away.
“Now,” Derek shouted. The energy from the circle swept over them. It had Christine’s and Linda’s distinct signatures, and now Derek’s added to it. The purity of it made her body cringe, salt burning in raw wounds. They covered the fault line like bricklaying, Christine and Linda laying the stone while Derek provided the mortar to strengthen them. Witchcraft used women’s arts; sorcery apparently used men’s. Build, nail, hammer, bind.
But in the end, it was like tossing dirt into a sinkhole, trying to fill up something that was bottomless. As long as Asmodeus, soul-eaters and the whole foul army were still under there, containing them was pointless. It needed to be a grave, not a cage.
“Let me go,” she snarled, fighting him. Since his booted foot was at her shoulder, she hammered at his calf with her fist. “Let me up.”
Derek obliged, yanking her up by the arm hard enough it jarred her shoulder. “Help,” he commanded, his tone brooking no disobedience. He wasn’t her lover right now, but a much more powerful sorcerer who would kick her ass into next week if she didn’t do her job. But she couldn’t. Those two forces warred within her. She was furious at him for interfering, for not letting her finish it. Damn it, he didn’t understand. He couldn’t. And he was keeping her from what she needed to do. Darkness swirled around her, thick and choking as the soul-eaters’ smoke. When he shoved her toward the circle, she whirled on him, energy sparking off her fingertips.
It was a lucky strike, for he hadn’t expected a hit from his own camp. As a result, black exultance surged through her when she knocked him to his knees, but she didn’t linger over it. She ran back toward that weak rift point. She’d stand on top of it, send that barbed energy down like fishing line, get the blood she craved. Go in after it if needed. She wasn’t afraid to go into the Underworld. She belonged there.
It was like being hit by a battering ram. As she hit the ground, she tasted dirt, but that wasn’t what made bitter bile in her throat. Derek had the flat of the sword against her, and she screamed in protest as it stole her strength, drawing it into the metal so that she was limp, helpless. Grimly, he ignored her weak snarls of defiance, keeping his attention on the job of reinforcing the rift. The Light energy streamed over her.
Yet he was also letting it stream through him, into the hard palm he had against her neck, the knee he had in her back. It flooded her, made the Darkness recoil, made other parts of her writhe in pain, just like that fourth soul-eater. That was the key to it, why her barbed magic had worked. To know how to hurt something, you had to know its pain. The key to destroying evil was stepping into its soul and blowing it up from the inside.
She’d sacrificed parts of her soul for that kind of knowledge. So now the Light energy coming from Derek’s hand, soaking into her pores, was scalding acid. She shrieked, clutching at the ground. The fire of it was unbearable. She cursed and fought, aware of nothing but that her blood appeared to be boiling inside her body.
She didn’t know how long it went on, but she was vaguely aware of the rift being sealed, of Linda’s and Christine’s energy levels depleting and Derek taking more of the load. Ruby should be helping. It was that thought that told her she was coming back to herself. That, and the fact the extraordinary pain was ebbing, one last rinse from the Light washing through her, balancing things again. But in a fragile way, like a glass figurine sitting too close to the edge of a shelf.
Things got quieter, the roar of the power flow dying. The worst of the hurricane had passed, down to a few lingering gusts, puffs of random energy. Linda and Christine were still weaving, additional stitching. It was the spell she’d started, now reinforced by their Light and Derek’s as they sealed that rift hole. But she could already tell sealing wasn’t enough. It was like placing a piece of plywood on top of a hole. It wouldn’t change the fact that below that rift point was an empty space, where that boil, what the soul-eaters had dug out, had weakened the fault line, the energy there no longer dense as it needed to be.
The solidity could be restored only by a powerful infusion of Light, something comparable to a nuclear bomb. That level of power couldn’t be accessed without pulling it from other things that also needed it. The usual way to restore a fault line was to restore it a little at a time, drawing on the necessary power in increments. But in this case, given that this might have been a test run for attack, they might not have that kind of time.
Of course, one way to keep them from coming back in the interim to test what was being rebuilt was to instill terror of what would happen to them if they tried it. She’d had that capability, and Derek had stopped her.
He moved off of her now. The sword was gone, probably folded and back in his jeans pocket, once again the knife. Adrenaline pounding, she scrambled to her feet, throwing herself at him. “You bastard,” she raged. “You had no right to do that. To interfere. You—”
His face hard as granite, he ducked under her swing and slung her over his shoulder like a sack of grain. His long arm clamped over her legs and hips, holding her in place as he strode away from the circle. She tore at his back, but was miserably unable to inflict damage. She wanted to bite him, claw the flesh from his bones, make him suffer—
She was airborne for half a second. Then she landed in Linda’s man-made pond with a resounding splash. The temperature was cold enough to drive the breath from her, make her shriek. As she was sure he intended, it knocked her flat on her ass, took her mind away from the heat of battle, from everything but the fact she needed to get the hell out of the water. She struggled to paddle over to the edge of the pond, fear of hypothermia playing tug-of-war with her anger. He was waiting for her on the bank, sitting on his boot heels in a patient squat.
She didn’t want his help, but there was no way she was getting up that steep embankment without him. While some part of her might be willing to drown, it was too fucking cold. She took his hand. Another time, she might have tried to pull him in, a grim and probably futile retaliation, since the bastard was like a granite mountain, but not this time. Fuck, this was cold.
When he hauled her out as if she weighed no more than a spitting cat, she was shaking so badly from cold, fury and the aftermath of her first real demon fight, she couldn’t stand. Despite her less than voluble protest, he picked her up, slinging her over his shoulder again. He called out something to Linda as he passed the circle; then he was headed for the guesthouse. She was so cold. So cold, on so many levels, the frigid waters seeping in to other things. But she’d done it. It had worked.
Catching his belt to anchor herself, she used that hold to turn her head, see the moon. Instead of the pink she’d seen earlier in the week, a tranquil color that had brought her a rare moment of peace when preparing the circle, it now had that bloodred tinge. The pink had made her imagine her baby’s soft skin as she lolled in a hazy, misty world…. as she swam inside the moon. But this, the color of blood…. That reflected Ruby’s true world and true self, far more than that pink.
Derek shoved open the door of the guesthouse, said a sharp, quelling word that sent an anxious Theo folding back down on his bed. Striding to the spacious bathroom, Derek set her on her feet, spun her and shoved her against the sink, forcing her face inches from the mirror. “Look at yourself, Ruby. Look.”
She didn’t want to, but the tone of his voice warned her that the cost of disobeying would be dear. Cursing her cowardice, she lifted her wet lashes, stared into the glass.
Her gray-green eyes were completely dominated by pupil, her face sallow and drawn. She could see the shape of her skull. The feral intensity of her expression was frightening. Blood was on her shirt, her throat, though she didn’t know if it was hers or someone else’s. She looked like something that had crawled out of the Underworld with the soul-eaters. Something that belonged in their ranks, not Derek’s.
She tried to look away, and his hands clamped down on her face like a vise. “Look at what you’re becoming. What you’re letting yourself become.”
She couldn’t let it matter, couldn’t let the rapid pounding of her heart be translated into panic, into recognizing what it meant, that she was losing this fight, just when she was on the cusp of winning it. She’d known from the first it was a game of chicken, to see if her body would succumb to Darkness before she could destroy Darkness itself. And she was still too damn willing to play the game, even if she looked like a soul-eater herself.
Using that thought, she lacquered her insides with a dead calm, stared at that image. Accepted it. She could do that, mostly, but she couldn’t shift her gaze, handle the revulsion she knew would be in his face. “Guess you’ll be sleeping somewhere else now.” Her voice was raw, shaking. Looking down, she saw her palms were black from soul-eater residue and what she’d channeled to fight them. Where had all the blood on her clothes come from? She closed her eyes. Blood hemorrhaging out from between her thighs, blood on her hands as she closed her fingers on inert flesh….
Her knees buckled. She slid down to her butt on the cold floor, still staring at those hands. She wasn’t surprised he didn’t catch her. Wouldn’t be surprised to look up and not find him there at all. He was probably packing her bags, would stick her in the van and send her on her way as soon as she was clean.