Page 7 of Take You Home (Redwater Demons #3)

H eat and pressure blast into Obie like an oncoming train, forcing his rift closed and sending him sprawling onto the blacktop. He rolls once and bolts back up to his feet, rage clouding over his vision.

That was a binding spell. That was a goddamn binding spell, just like the one that was used on him all those millennia ago, just like the one that left him helpless to protect the people he loved??—

He’ll be damned if he lets that happen a second time. JJ will be sad about his best friend’s untimely demise, but Obie is sure he’ll get over it. “Wrong move, hunter,” he snarls, and he brings his wrists together, aims a magic offensive at where Locke is gasping for breath on the pavement??—

Obie’s magic dies just past his fingers, vanishing like it was never there in the first place.

His stomach drops. “What the hell?” he stammers, stumbling backward.

Hastily, he aims another magic strike at a nearby tree, but this one doesn’t falter, slamming into the trunk and leaving singed bark in its wake .

That doesn’t make sense. Locke’s binding spell didn’t sound like the same one that summoners use to enslave newly summoned demons, so there shouldn’t be anything preventing Obie from lighting Locke on fire and leaving him to burn as an offering to the bowling gods, wherever they might be.

So why didn’t Obie’s magic work against him?

No time to think about that now. Locke is staggering to his feet, an escrima stick appearing in his hand. “Tell me where JJ and Roma are,” he snaps, his voice ringing with cold authority.

Obie tenses, waiting for the command to roil through him and force him to betray his friends against his will, but to his surprise, he feels nothing. No inexplicable urge to obey, no internal struggle of will.

Nothing except raw fury. “Wrong number. Looks like you’ll have to try your call again,” he sneers, stalking forward.

It’s fine if his magic doesn’t work. He can end this the old-fashioned way.

Eyes widening, Locke scrambles away, his escrima still held protectively in front of him.

“What the?—why didn’t it work?” he hisses, glaring down at his forearm.

Obie sees spell work scrawled on Locke’s skin?—the spell to make Obie his puppet?—and bites back a fresh wave of anger. “Why didn’t it??—??”

“Sucks to suck, Locke,” Obie says, and he blocks Locke’s haphazard escrima strike with his arm before decking the hunter in the face.

Or he tries to, at least. Locke’s escrima stick shudders to a halt an inch before it connects with Obie’s skin, and Obie’s punch stalls out like he’s moving through molasses, torturously slow. By the time his knuckles touch Locke’s cheek, it’s more of a gentle pat than anything else.

Obie and Locke jerk away from each other at the same time. Obie’s heart is roaring in his chest, and Locke’s eyes are wild as he looks from the pre-cast spell to Obie and back again, and something about that spell prevents Obie from physically injuring Locke??—

But it somehow prevents Locke from physically injuring Obie, too. “What the hell kind of binding spell did you use?” he demands, keeping a healthy distance between them. “I’ve been bound before, lackey. This isn’t it, but you clearly did something.”

“It’s?—?” Locke looks down at his forearm again, his breathing sharp and shaky. “It’s just a binding spell, Smith. From Magic-Weaver’s.”

Obie almost chokes. “From Magic-Weaver’s?” he repeats, not sure whether to be aghast or impressed at Locke’s sheer stupidity. “You used that godforsaken spell book again?”

“The spells used different magic bases and were written by different authors,” Locke bites out. “Just because they were both in the same spell book doesn’t mean they’d both destabilize the Deep. And it was the same spell the first hunters used to bind you fifteen thousand years ago, so??—?”

This time, an entirely different fear spikes through Obie. “Okay, first of all,” he snaps, taking a step forward, “how the fuck did you figure out that I’m Nostringvadha?”

For a split second, Locke’s panic disappears. His smirk gleams under the flickering streetlights. “So you admit it?”

“There isn’t anything to admit, lackey,” Obie fires back. “I don’t have anything to hide. I just don’t bring it up in polite company.”

And that’s a bald-faced lie, but Locke doesn’t need to know that. In reality, Obie goes out of his way to hide that he’s Nostringvadha, keeping his extensive powers hidden and his real true form carefully concealed and his stories meticulously edited for any incriminating details .

Especially from his friends. Generally speaking, gods don’t get to have friends. They have adherents, followers, worshippers.

And Obie doesn’t want anyone to pray to him or worship him. He never really wanted that, not even back in Tamaros. Not like the other gods did.

Sometimes, part of him thinks he pissed them off on purpose, just to get away from them.

Locke’s jaw twitches. “Like you said, Nostringvadha, you were in my head. If you were a regular demon, you wouldn’t have been able to do that?—not without my consent, at least. After all, they don’t call you the Memory-Keeper for nothing.”

The words catch on a sticking point in Obie’s brain. “How did you even know that’s one of my names?”

Actually, how does he know any of what he’s deduced about Obie? His real name, his other titles, his powers??—

The fact that he’s vulnerable to binding spells.

Locke’s face is expressionless. “Research. And I talk to a lot of demons. They speak of you often.”

Fury boils behind Obie’s sternum. He takes a deep breath to force it down.

Right. Chester Locke is an interrogator, one of the hunters who tortures demons and dissidents down in the Sanctum’s basement prison. He’s probably cut open dozens of demons, hundreds of demons??—

Demons who probably spent their last breaths begging for Nostringvadha to save them. Nausea licks up Obie’s throat. He doesn’t hear prayers on Earth, but his heart still aches for all the demons who truly believed Obie would rescue them.

Not to mention that Locke tortured JJ, too?—he saw that in JJ’s own memories. Honestly, the only reason Obie didn’t kill Locke a few months ago when they broke Cass out of the Sanctum’s prison is because he knew JJ would’ve been upset, and they didn’t have time to waste on distractions like that.

Just like he doesn’t have time to waste tonight.

“Right,” Obie says, squaring his shoulders.

“Well, good luck getting anyone else to believe you. In the meantime, I’m out of here.

You’d better hope that anti-violence side effect is still active the next time I see you, Locke, because you just made yourself a very dangerous enemy. ”

Locke stiffens, but he doesn’t answer. Scowling, Obie snaps open a rift behind him and backs up towards it, keeping his eyes on the hunter.

He’ll have to do some research to figure out what Locke’s botched spell actually did to them, but after that, Ez and Roma can probably help him break it, and??—

He’s just stepped through the rift to a neutral location across town when pain splinters through his skull. Gasping, he stumbles forward, the rift fizzling out as his legs give way beneath him. His knees hit the blacktop hard, the impact rattling all the way up to his pounding head.

He hears a retching sound and looks up, his eyes watering. Locke is on his hands and knees ten feet away, dry-heaving like his stomach is trying to force its way up his throat, and??—

And then, suddenly, Locke sucks in a sharp breath, his shoulders relaxing like the incident never happened. Obie’s splitting headache vanishes just as quickly as it appeared, leaving nothing but the memory of pain in its wake.

When Locke speaks next, his voice is a rasp. “What was that?”

A horrifying suspicion creeps through Obie’s mind. “Locke,” he says slowly, pushing himself to his feet. “Locke, let me see your arm.”

Locke tenses, clutching his arm to his chest as he clambers upright. “Go to hell.”

“Oh, give it a rest, hunter,” Obie snaps, striding towards him. Locke brandishes his escrima stick, but Obie ignores it, grabbing Locke’s arm and yanking it forward to analyze the pre-cast incantation. Looks like he can still be rough with Locke, even if he can’t be physically violent.

And, belatedly, Obie realizes that his “punch” earlier didn’t burn his knuckles. No pain in the fingers currently wrapped around Locke’s wrist, either. Locke’s bizarre binding spell must have blocked the corrosion enchantment that makes hunters’ skin physically caustic to demons, too.

Small victories.

“So?” Locke asks grudgingly. His shoulders are still tense, but he seems more resigned than anything else. “What went wrong?”

Obie skims over the words, looking for anything out of place. Abruptly, his eyes widen. “You made it bidirectional.”

Locke squints at him. “What?”

“You made it bidirectional, lackey,” Obie bites out, jabbing a finger at the offending phrase. “You made the binding spell bidirectional instead of unidirectional.”

Locke stills. “So it backfired?”

Obie laughs humorlessly, releasing Locke’s arm. The hunter snatches it back to his side. “No, it worked exactly as written?—exactly as you pre-cast it. Instead of binding me to you, it bound the two of us together.”

“But what does that mean?” Locke demands. “We clearly can’t control each other, so?—so what did it actually do?”

“Well, we obviously can’t injure each other,” Obie says, splaying out his unburned fingers as evidence. “And since we both had very visceral reactions when I tried to rift away, I’m guessing that we need to be within a certain range of each other, too.”

Locke’s eyes widen. “What?”

Obie’s stomach churns. “Stay there,” he orders, and he starts backing up, keeping his glare fixed on Locke .