Chapter 7 Out, Away, Begone!

7

Out, Away, Begone!

The shadow titan opened his eyes.

They glowed like spectral searchlights, shedding an unnatural, poisonous green light as they swept over us, narrowing with a menace that made the pit of my stomach bottom out like a sinkhole. Wrong, wrong, wrong , the petrified field mouse part of my brain chittered at me. The part that knew full well that even I still counted as prey to some.

Somewhere in the stupefied crowd, I heard the high, terrified wail of a toddler who knew in their guts that this was some abject nightmare shit, even if the adults in charge still seemed absurdly ambivalent.

"God damn ," a normie beside me exhaled, taking a reverent swig of his IPA as he stared at the entity hovering above us. "That is some fucking epic craftsmanship right there. Check out those details. I mean, that goth angel dude's got fucking toenails, bro. And serious junk."

"Yeah, they're not holding back, are they?" the guy next to him said through a grimace, sounding both stoned and a little repulsed. "Why's he gotta be packing like that, man? There's little kids here. That's messed up."

The other guy shook his head, apparently unfazed. "Kinda reminds me of some BioShock Infinite shit. How'd they even pull this off? It's holographic lasers, must be. But on such a wild scale —"

Then the colossus tossed back its head and roared.

Somehow, we still couldn't hear it, but we sure as the hells could feel the staggering impact of that world-rending bellow. Such an enormous surge of power, a tremendous, silent knell of it, that it nearly brought us all to our knees, normies included. I'd never felt anything like this before—not even with the major arcana demons I'd exorcised, nor from any spell I'd seen cast at the Gauntlet of the Grove or one of our Wheel of the Year ceremonial rites.

Then the canvas of Blackmoore-conjured fog behind it began to tear itself into milky streamers, recoalescing in front of the thing like a sheer curtain rippling in a breeze. The creature— the goth angel dude , I thought, a wild urge to laugh building in my chest—tore into it, shredding at it viciously with his curving claws.

"He's still behind the veil," I said, realization crashing over me. Because that was what the fog was doing—clinging to the invisible veil that separated the other realm from ours, rendering it visible. I'd never seen normal fog do any such thing before, but this was an elemental conjuring by a Thistle Grove Blackmoore, infused with their will. It was possible that it had some special properties, especially given the distorting effect of whatever the hells was going on here. "Close, but not fully manifested in our realm. That's why we can't hear him. Whatever—whoever—is bringing him here hasn't pulled him all the way through."

"You can't let him through, Dasha," Ivy said in a petrified whisper. I glanced over to find her ashen and trembling, beads of sweat tracing the outline of her upper lip. "No matter what, you cannot let him pass ."

Amrita and I both froze, appalled at the sight and sound of her, the way she looked like someone poisoned. "Why?" I asked, gripping her shoulder with my free hand, the one not crushed by hers. "Ivy, why? Do you know what he is?"

"Death," she said simply. "Eater of light. Quencher of flame. The destroyer. The nemesis. He doesn't belong here. Dasha, make him leave ."

Before I could ask her how she knew any of this, the clarion of Elena Avramov's raised voice suddenly pierced the noise of the crowd. "House Avramov! To me! "

The command in her voice was so implacable that both Amrita and I instinctively moved to obey. But then I paused, turned back to Ivy. "Are you going to be okay here on your own?"

She gave a twitch of a nod, gnawing frantically at the inside of her lip even as she unlaced her clammy hand from mine. "I'll be fine. Now go . They're going to need you."

When I hesitated for another moment, she gave me a push, forceful enough that I turned and plunged into the crowd after Amrita. My sister, nurturing as she was, had also never hesitated to throw elbows or hands in her life. She sliced through the crowd for us like a scythe, carving a path to where I could see a knot of Avramovs already tying itself around Elena and the rest of the main line.

As we charged past both bewildered and openly fearful normies, I brushed by Wynter, who darted out a hand to snag my arm.

"Do you fucking see that?" she gasped at me, her face so stricken it bordered on rapture, tears pouring down her cheeks. Her eyes were glassy, likely from that mugwort-and-weed vape that annoyed Amrita so much; I thought I caught a whiff of it on her. She swayed in place, one hand curled against that overwrought bosom, clutching a handful of pendants. "Do you see ?"

For the first time ever, I could identify with her, even if she was likely high as shit. If ever there were a time for "oh fuck" weeping, it was now. Unfortunately, the Avramovs in this crowd didn't have that luxury.

"I do," I assured her. "And don't worry, we're going to take care of it."

"What do you mean?" Beneath the glam witch-queen makeup, her face crumpled with confusion. "But—"

I swept past her in Amrita's wake, no more time for comfort.

By the time we reached Elena, she'd already orchestrated a circle of Avramovs, with herself, Talia, Issa, Adriana, and Micah standing at its epicenter, holding hands. The Avramov main line, surrounded by the rest of the family in a circumscribed circle, one of the most powerful magical configurations.

"In here with us, Daria," she instructed, and even as I moved toward her, I quailed at the sight of her face, the dire gravity of her eyes, the depth of her pallor against the copper blaze of her hair. Even Elena Avramov, dauntless matriarch, was afraid tonight. "We're going to need you to take point. Amrita, you'll join the outer circle."

Issa and Micah parted to make room for me, and somehow their somberness—in such stark opposition to the wild-child partiers I'd known them both to be in the past—shook me even worse than seeing our matriarch so rattled. Even when Talia had been possessed by a horde of rampaging shades several years ago during the Gauntlet of the Grove, Elena had maintained her composure, stoically led us through what had to be done to exorcise them all and save her daughter.

Which meant that whatever the threat here was, it was unfathomably worse than a mass possession of her own scion.

"Inner circle," Elena went on, her clear voice betraying none of the trepidation in her eyes. My gaze strayed over her shoulder to the stage, where the dark titan still tore at the fog-veil in front of him, fury rippling over his colossal face. The milky veil had grown more threadbare, leaving ragged patches like unraveled holes in a shawl. Whatever we were about to do, we needed to do it fast. "We're casting Alyona's Aversion. Outer circle will amplify. Daria, I assume you know the Aversion by heart?"

My insides clenched painfully tight. "Yes," I all but squeaked. "I know it."

Alyona's Aversion was the most powerful banishing spell in our arsenal, so ancient and cataclysmic that it had never been used here in the New World. Because nothing had ever warranted it, not even Talia's possession. I'd only ever learned it because the spellsmith, Alyona herself, had been one of the few other devil eaters in our line. She'd lived centuries and centuries ago, back when we laid claim to stone castles across the seas, presided over craggy mountains black with pine. Learning it felt like forging some deep connection to my own strange blood, knowing that I wasn't the only weird offshoot, some one-off Avramov varietal.

I'd never expected to actually use those barbed incantations in my lifetime. And the fact that it was traditionally cast to repel incursions of what translated from ancient Russian to "the Kings of the Many Hells" didn't exactly help my state of mind.

"You…you think that's what he is?" I asked Elena, knowing she would understand what I meant.

"That, or worse," she replied grimly, jade eyes glowing like witchlight. "But we either show him our bellies or strike as hard as we know how. Daria, you'll lead. Begin now ."

I closed my eyes and drew my will into the finest point I could muster, sharp as a pen nib, even as my heart rioted in my chest. I couldn't remember ever having been this terrified, and yet, there it was again—that coiled hunger that curled at my very center, opening a lazy, slitted eye as it stirred in anticipation. That I'd eaten a revenant demon only a handful of days ago barely mattered to that sleepy inner beast that was never sated. Nor did it care that we were about to try to banish a goth angel dude that dwarfed an entire crowd.

As far as the hunger was concerned, there was always room for one more.

I launched into the first incantation, my voice wobbling like a top before it stabilized, gaining in intensity and power, feeding on the energy funneled to the inner circle by the outer. On the second incantation, the rest of the inner circle joined me, intoning the words and cementing them with will. On the third, the outer circle bolstered us, a harsh choir of voices like the opposite of angels.

I didn't know exactly what the ancient Russian words meant, but I could feel what the language and form of the spell were meant to convey. The intent that crashed like luminous silver waves, an ocean lit by some internal moon swimming in its depths:

OUT, you scourge you plague you otherworldly taint

AWAY, you beast you monster you pestilence

BEGONE, you foulness you curse you nemesis;

OUT by silver, out by light

OUT by the one and endless might

OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT!

As the primary caster, the full strength of the spell stampeded through me with all the force of a natural disaster. An avalanche, a mudslide, a volcanic eruption. A purging cataclysm, something so implacable it would not brook even the notion of opposition. Even if that opposition was a King of the Many Hells.

I knew then why Elena had chosen me to lead, rather than herself or Issa or even Talia, all three of them stronger Avramov witches in most ways that counted.

It was because someone else—someone who hadn't been eating devils since they were seven—might not have survived being this ruthless casting's conduit.

At the final incantation, the spell whipped out of us—or rather, out of me, its focal point. Loops of silver light like chains tore themselves free of my mouth, emerging in a seemingly endless spool of light that burned and burned, a flood of molten metal rising in my throat.

Released, the Aversion whirled itself through the air like a flung lariat, shining so blindingly bright against the night sky and the even deeper darkness of the Witch Woods that the crowd shaded their eyes. It pierced that foggy mimicry of the veil—or what was left of it, after the behemoth's savage attack—as if it wasn't even there.

Singeing right through it, scorching as it looped itself around his body.

Everywhere it touched, that dark ectoplasmic flesh began to hiss and fade, wisping into nothing. The banishment broke down the behemoth's form, boiling it into the nothing from which it had come. Casting it out and away from this realm.

This time when the colossus bellowed in rage and pain, all of us heard the rattling roar of it, all the way down to jellied marrow. Screams erupted in the crowd, a wild surge of movement as true terror finally infiltrated even the normie throng, though the danger had already passed.

But just before he vanished entirely, the creature locked eyes with me, as though he could sense that I'd been the one to channel Alyona's Aversion. As though that lariat of spellbound chains still connected me to him.

And as he huffed out, I felt that familiar tug just beneath my solar plexus.

The sharp fishhook pull that meant I was about to fall into the other side of the veil.