Page 130 of Soulbound

"Oh, no you don't." He needed to stop this. Somehow.

Summoning his sorcery in a blaze of energy, he turned and sheared through the bottom half of the cross with exquisite skill, honed by Bishop's teaching. It fell backward, Malachi screaming, still pinned to the wood as the cross landed with a soft whump in the snow.

Sebastian skidded to his knees beside the incubus, reaching out to grip the steel spike driven through his palms.

"What are you doing?" Malachi gasped.

"Don't take it personally. It needs you dead. Hence, I'm going to save your life."

He yanked the spike free, and an utterly raw sound poured from Malachi's throat. The second spike was driven too deep. Their eyes met as Sebastian grabbed the bastard's wrist. There was no other way....

"Do it," Malachi panted.

He tore the incubus's hand from the spike, and Malachi screamed, curling into a pained ball on the snow.

"Sebastian," a woman's voice whispered through the bond. "You're going to ruin everything. I can't allow that."

"Cleo?" he rasped, looking around.

A shadow blurred. Bishop, trying again to break through this phenomenal ward. The second he hit the lines of the hexagram, he slammed into invisible walls of pure force that threw him back.

He hit the snow beside Sebastian, sliding several feet, his arm flung out to stop himself. The knife vanished. And then he didn’t move.

"Bishop!" Sebastian sank to his knees beside his brother and shook him.

Glazed eyes met his, blood dripping from his brother’s nose. "G-get… out… of here."

"Like hell." All around them the world spun into chaos as Ianthe and the others joined the fray in order to distract the demon.

Imps erupted from snowdrifts, proving the demon had never had any intention of seeing them leave. Mage globes exploded, and he could hear Lady E cursing under her breath, followed by sharp little detonations that showed she was probably causing the enemy one heck of a headache.

"You have to focus," Sebastian snarled, the words an echo of those his brother once said to him. "Get up. You don’t get to just lie here, not now. Not like this."

But Bishop flopped like a deboned quail.

He couldn’t do this without him. Despair licked along Sebastian's spine, but with it came the memory of lying in the dirt as his brother demanded he get up; a brutal month-long training program, but perhaps now he could understand Bishop’s intention. Kid gloves would only have ended in his death. Bishop had known what was coming.

"If you give up now," Sebastian said coldly, "then Verity dies."

There. There was the spark of fire in his brother’s eyes.

"I won’t save her." Sebastian forced himself to continue. "I cannot save both Cleo and Verity, and if I have to make a choice…."

A fist curled in his collar, and Bishop yanked himself half upright with a snarl. Broken blood vessels in his eyes gave him a demonic appearance. "You little shit. Verity’s the last person who’d bloody need saving."

"Aye." Sebastian winced, and tried to loosen the hold on his collar. "But if she sees you on your back, then she’ll break protocol and she’ll come in here to rescue you. Even if it means taking on the demon by herself. You know that."

It was the first time he’d ever seen his brother look beaten. "I don’t know if I can… get to him."

"You know Drake's wards. You know a way through them."

"I've tried twice."

"Then try again." The problem wasn't in the wards, it was in the intent. Some part of his brother knew getting through those wards meant his father's death. This was the same sabotage Cleo had been doing to herself all month. "He begged you to save him. This is mercy, Bishop, not murder."

Bishop met his gaze. "And will you say the same when it's your black queen you have to put a knife in, and not your wife?"

They all had their weak spots.