Page 36

“Pritkin!”Rosier’s panicked, enhanced voice trembled the ground under my feet, and damn, he even used the right name, I thought, right beforehe attacked a god.It happened just as I looked up and saw him striking it with some kind of energy bolt before being batted the length of a football field away by a massive hand.

And then we skidded to a stop around the suddenly abandoned cage because the guards were smarter than us and had already left.

“That...was amazing!”Butch Cut screamed, sounding out of breath.

“The cage!”

“What?”

“The cage!I don’t have anything left!”

She stared at me and then zapped it, drawing a tendril of pink magic from the towering conflagration threatening to immolate us barely a house length away.It was pulling in the scaffold now, ripping it apart to feed its insatiable appetite, and suddenly looking less like a column than a fiery tornado.But it gave her plenty of magic to work with, and she used it.

Unlike the Circle, which acted as if wild magic was the most dangerous stuff around, witches rode that insanity all the time.They loved it, and it loved them back, and as a result, the ward on the bars ended up fried in seconds, sizzling out with a green flash and a smell like burning sandalwood.And I burned myself jerking the doors open, but there was no time to waste.

“Give me your skin!”I yelled.

She stared at me.“What?”

“Yourskin!Yourskin!” She finally understood and flung off the cloak.And we put it on Caleb, who looked up with a different face.“Come on!”I told him, but he didn’t move.

“I knew it was you,” he whispered.“Iknew.Not even John…”

He passed out, and Butch Cut and I stared at each other for a second before she started looking around frantically.“A platform!”she screamed.“I can levitate him if I have a platform!”

But there were no platforms.There were, however, a couple of passing imps, which I grabbed and had my palms burned for my trouble.“Pritkin wants you to help us!”I yelled.“You know, Prince Emrys?”

They looked at me blankly, and I smacked my ear a few times to get the damned translation spell working, hoping it spoke whatever language they did.And then repeated my request while they stared at me.And then at Caleb.And then at each other.

“Hurry up!”I screamed.“And be careful!Don’t burn him!”

I didn’t know if they understood, and they didn’t say anything back.But the vibrant red of their hands and arms, which had resembled molten lava a second ago, suddenly changed to a crusty black.Something I decided to count as a win.

“Yes!Yes!Now grab him and come with me!”

I got under one of Caleb’s arms and pantomimed lifting him because there was no way I could do it for real, and Alphonse was AWOL, probably cowering under something to get out of the fire that had just set my hair alight.I cursed and beat it out, and the demons finally got with the program and dragged Caleb out of the cage, putting a hand under each butt cheek and an arm around his back, anddamn.They were stronger than they looked, I thought, as they hoisted him up.

They took off, fleeing across the now merrily burning churchyard, possibly because we were out of freaking time.I looked up at the night sky, and what had been a dreary ceiling with low, rumbling clouds and flashes of lightning was now a vibrant candy-colored wash of flame, except for the massive, dark shapes heading for us at a lumbering run.And I do meanshapesbecause there were two more giant-sized, ravenous dark outlines coming at us like furious mountains and—

I just wanted a little help, I thought blankly, staring at them.I wouldn’t have even bothered if Pritkin had told me about the imps.And now—

“Fuck!”Butch Cut screamed in my face, and yeah.Summed it up.

“Run!”I told her, and we tore after the sprites and their awkward load, whose head and arms were flopping all over the place because Caleb was still out cold.

But they were flopping fast because the little demons were picking them up and putting them down alongside everyone else.The entire area had been packed with what must have been thousands of furious mages a minute before because some of them had been bent on fighting rather than fleeing.But now it emptied like someone had taken a stopper out of a drain, almost faster than I could believe.

And many of them were headed to the same place we were.

“No!No!We have to go back!”I yelled at the sprites.“We have to—”

But I didn’t even get a chance to finish the sentence before we were swallowed up by a mob of terrified dark mages, all crowding into the small cave-like opening Jonas had come out of as if their lives depended on it.Which they pretty much did.I threw one short, terrified glance over my shoulder when another great bellow echoed around the skies, close enough almost to deafen me, and saw mages getting snatched up in hands the size of cars and stuffed down gaping black maws.

The “gods” looked like Eldritch horrors, with long, greasy, dark hair, faces that weren’t remotely human, and eyes glowing ever brighter as they consumed and consumed and—

And then the cave opening abruptly sank back into the earth, and we were gone.

???