Chapter 22

Chapter

Twenty-Two

I was going old school.

Instead of the charms I'd used on the salt circle when the rats summoned discount Mictlantecuhtli, this spell required me to dig out my foundational summoning supplies, the ones I'd been trained on as a girl.

The thought that coven mother-effer Margaux would approve gave me pause. Mom had once told me she was a basic witch who appreciated the old ways of witchcraft. Still, I wasn't doing this for her. I was doing it for Gladys. For the good of the park. For me.

I laid out four clay bowls at equal distances from each other outside the innermost circle, the first at north, the second at east, and so on. Inside each bowl was a representation of an element—dirt for earth, water from a bottle, a small, inflated balloon for air, and a large-wick citronella candle for fire.

Might as well keep the bugs away while I'm at it.

Margaux strode up to me. "What are you doing? This is supposed to be a book exchange. You appear to be summoning something."

I rolled my head around to peer at her. "Get away from me."

"What you're doing here is dangerous. You can't possibly?—"

"Alpha Floyd, do you want this book?"

"You know I do," he said.

"Then put your coven on a leash and let me get to work."

"Leave her alone, Margaux," he commanded, using a bit of alpha power in his voice. Showing off, as usual. "I need that book."

After checking that my circles were unbroken one more time, I went to my knees and chanted over each bowl, over both circles, and over myself. I spent the most time on this part, because if I didn't protect myself, I would be of no use to anyone.

Secure your own oxygen mask before your kid's, so to speak.

When I felt as good about it as I possibly could, given the enormous risk of summoning anything from the otherworlds, I snapped my fingers and brought a silver flame to my palm.

All witches could conjure up a flame if they chose to, not only fire witches. Only a fire witch could manipulate the flame into a fireball and incinerate a target without a spell, though. Being an earth witch, I needed a strong spell to throw even a small amount of fire.

I chanted the only one I knew, blew on my tiny flame, and sent it wafting to the bowl containing the candle. It was less like a fireball than a fire-feather, but it did the trick.

The wick ignited, and my flame winked out.

The dirt Joon had rubbed on my forearms tingled painfully.

Focus .

The atmosphere thinned, and a slit formed in the air above the circle. Smoke bled through the opening, filling the inside of the circle until I couldn't see the ground anymore.

The smoke swirled, taking the shape of a human male. It looked like shadow people I'd seen lurking around historical sites, spirits who appeared to the living world as colorless, humanoid shapes.

"You dare summon me?" His voice carried the booming theatrics of a slow-played bass drum.

Geez, Gnath was laying it on thick.

"Yep." I picked at my fingernails. I desperately needed a manicure. If I survived tonight, I'd be able to afford one. "I dare."

" Lilibet Betty Lennox . The last Lennox witch. Your reputation precedes you." Gnath looked down his smoky nose at me. "I should say the reputation of your family precedes you. Yours is hardly worth talking about."

"Not cool. I've worked hard to ruin my reputation on all planes of existence, thank you very much. My senior yearbook quote was "Get Ur Freak On"—Missy Elliott, for gods' sakes. The girl in the photo next to mine quoted boring Socrates. So, maybe don't be so dismissive."

Lightning flashed inside the smoke figure. A show of anger. I hadn't been aware Gnath could do that. He was putting on quite a performance.

"Uh, Betty?" Ida stepped up behind me.

I waved her back.

"Demon, I have a proposition for you," I said, and stepped into the outer of the two circles.

Lightning flashed again, scorching the soil along the perimeter of the inner circle.

"Betty?" Ida tapped my shoulder. She remained on the outside of the circles and had to stand on her toes and bend over to reach me.

"Ida, don't distract me," I murmured out of the side of my mouth. "I'm trying to make this look good."

"I thought you said you were summoning that punk highway demon," she murmured back.

"I am—did."

She shook her head. "That's not Gnath."

"He's just putting on a show."

" Look at this thing. Whatever this is, it's no low-caste demon, Betty."

"Banish it." Once again, Margaux stormed up beside me. Like Ida, she stayed outside the circles.

Oh, the names I wanted to call her. "Get back, Margaux."

"This isn't what you meant to summon, is it?" the coven mother asked nervously. "There's no way you'd—after Lila—send it back now, before it's too late."

"After Mom what?" I started to turn around, but Ida snapped me back to attention.

"Do not take your eyes off this creature." Her voice held the magic of her necromancer. "I don't like the looks of it."

I refocused on the dark figure, and it on me. Holy smokes, Ida was right. No way was this Gnath. This being had power the former highway demon only dreamed about.

Inside the circle, an explosion was brewing. Thunderclouds formed ten feet above him, sparks showered onto his shoulders, each place it touched turning from black smoke to flesh.

It was changing form.

"Give me your name," I commanded, trying hard to sound bored.

Demons were heavy into showmanship, and it was important to look unimpressed, even if your eyes were bugging out of your head in shock—and I was shocked. I'd dealt with a lot of lower-caste demons in my work and had never seen a trick like that.

Fleshy upper shoulders and half a human face was now visible. The demon was taking on the appearance of a male, his flesh the color of burnt-clay brick, hair the silver of a royal platter.

" I am Belial ." Power thundered through every syllable. Belial was his true name, and though I kept my cool, I was astonished he'd allowed me to learn that. It showed he had no fear of me.

To keep him from noticing how badly my hands were shaking, I made a rolling, "go on" gesture.

"Are you intimating that you do not know my name?" the demon roared as the sparks revealed more of his human form.

"Not ringing a bell," I said.

Another lightning flash.

"Listen, sorry to waste your time, Lyle?—"

" Belial is my name," the creature thundered.

"—but I didn't mean to summon you. I'm looking for a highway demon. So, could you maybe step aside and let him through? I'm trying to wind up a business deal here."

His upper half was human now, from his hips to the top of his head. I had to send him back before the rest of him took shape.

Distantly, I overheard Ronan telling his father that I had everything under control, heard Ida assuring Bronwyn and Margaux of the same.

Everyone was lying. I didn't have this under control. I wasn't sure I could control this creature.

I picked up the sound of a Lexus engine turning over.

That bookseller was no dummy. She'd probably seen something like this before. I couldn't be the only witch who'd tried to use a demon to thwart a book curse.

"Ida." I waved her over without taking my eyes off the demon. "Do you have your phone?"

"Uh-huh." I heard her patting her pockets but didn't dare turn around to see.

"Take a photo of this thing."

"Pretty sure only the top half will show up," Joon said from somewhere to my left.

"That's fine."

The shutter sound went off several times in a row. Ida was quick on the draw with her cell phone. She had over ten thousand followers on her Photogram page and had even had a post go viral once.

"That'll do," I said.

" Do not capture my image ." Belial's words hit like thunder punctuated with explosions.

Okay, then. The creature didn't like having his picture taken.

I could relate. There was nothing worse than being tagged in an unflattering picture on social media. Ida had one of me snort-laughing with my eyes closed on her PG page right now.

Focus . I fisted my hands to stop them from shaking and took a stealthy deep breath. Making sarcastic remarks in my head at a time like this was a sure sign I was walking the razor's edge between smart moves and fear-based reactions.

Lighting smashed against the salt-circle barrier in glowing streaks, a Tesla coil in a dome aquarium. Three quarters of his human form was complete. I was running out of time.

With calculated care, I paced between the circles, my steps carefully spaced apart, and chanted a banishment spell. It was a delicate process—each word had to be spoken distinctly, intention infused in every syllable. This wasn't the spell I'd used for Gnath. This was far more powerful. If Gnath escaped the circle, I could drag his sorry hide back into it. If a demon with the power of Belial escaped, I didn't know if I could get him back.

"No." The slit in the atmosphere from which Belial had poured out widened above his head. "I'll not return." He stretched his mouth open until he looked like a python eating an ostrich egg and screamed until my eyes watered and ears plugged.

I missed a step and backtracked, but continued chanting.

" Watch out ," Ronan, Joon, and Ida yelled.

Belial was now mostly human. He craned his neck to peer down at me, eyes filled with malice. He looked like a silver-headed, red-fleshed caricature of Paul Bunyan, seven feet tall, with arms like redwood branches and shoulders three axe handles across. Only his feet were unformed.

He lowered one massive hand to the ground and pushed a thick finger through the salt line, the digit charring and curling like bacon cooked too long.

Oh no.

In a movement too fast to track, he gripped me by the throat. I picked up my feet as he yanked me into the circle with him, careful not to disturb the salt any more than he already had.

The outer circle with the element bowls wouldn't be so easily breached. It would hold him in and the others out. I'd planned it that way.

Redundancies weren't always redundant.

Ronan snarled. He shifted to wolf and rammed the outer circle, once, twice, and on the third time, he left a bloody smear in the air from his muzzle.

And all the while, through Ronan's bashing, Ida's yelling at him to stop lest he free Belial, Joon's feverish chanting, Floyd's howling about his stupid grimoire, Bronwyn's tears, and Margaux's gasps of horror, I continued chanting the banishment spell.

I was in the presence of a demon so powerful it had broken through a salt circle, but I was also a godsdamned professional. I would not allow this thing to make me look like a fool.

Or kill me, which really should've been the first thing I thought.

"I'm going to kill you slowly," Belial said. "Scramble your brain into liquid the way I did the witch who used to live here."

" What do you know about her ?" I screamed, dropping the threads of the spell.

A too-wide grin split his face in half. "Everything."

His left foot formed. The toes on his right foot.

I tried to find the words of the spell, but they were gone from my head as surely as if the demon really had scrambled my brains.

He backed toward the portal I'd created, the doorway between this realm and Hell. The soil Joon had rubbed on my forearms wriggled up to my neck and glowed like a school of bioluminescent fish. I watched the process with an out-of-body curiosity.

"Let's see how you like being pulled between worlds against your will." He shoved my head through the portal.

The pain was unlike anything I had reference for. Thousands of cuts sliced into my skin. Metal claws scraped the insides of my skull. My teeth were raw nerves, open to freezing wind. My breath, which had stopped the second my head went through, returned with a roaring vengeance, lungs pumping fiberglass air, gouging my alveoli, popping the tiny air sacs—a boot heel grinding bubble wrap.

Belial yanked me back into my world, and the pain was wrenched from me with an excruciating abruptness that rivaled the agony of being pushed through in the first place.

He laughed. "Brittle and frail. You witches always think you're so much better than my kind." With fingers like the gnarled roots of a swamp cypress tree he lifted me by the waistband of my jeans and shoved me through the portal again, this time from the waist up.

Oxygen didn't exist here. My lungs crumpled and my heart caught mid-thump and flopped around in my chest, trying to find a rhythm. Hot pain streaked into my upper arms, shoulders, and jaw.

Heart attack.

Joon's glowing soil skittered from my throat to the spot above my heart. It punched into my chest wall. Was it performing chest compressions ?

Belial dragged me over grass like razorblades, back through the portal opening, and tossed me to the dirt.

His terrible face loomed over me. "Impressive, witch. You've lived through Hell twice."

My shaking fingers prodded my face, prepared for blood, prepared for flesh in ribbons.

There was no damage. Not a single cut. It seemed injuries that happened in Hell stayed in Hell.

"Kind of like Las Vegas," I murmured, and choked out a laugh.

"What do you have to be happy about?" The demon lifted his foot, which was roughly the size of Alpha Floyd's SUV tire, and raised it over my head.

This was going to suck—for the half-second I lived before he crushed my skull into the dirt, which seemed appropriate considering how far I was in over my head.

I chirped a laugh again.

Wasn't it just my luck to be killed in the absolute best location an elemental earth witch could possibly ask for, while also being the absolute worst location this particular elemental earth witch could possibly ask for?

I let my head slump to the side. I stared at my friends and enemies with a disconnected air. Joon's eyes were pressed shut and his mouth was moving. Chanting for me. I wished I could've gotten to know the mage better. I think we might've been friends.

Bronwyn and Margaux both wore the look of a person who could see the train coming but weren't close enough to warn the car stuck on the tracks. Alpha Floyd appeared annoyed. The bookseller was still in her car—most likely with her hand on the gearshift and one Dior pump hovering above the gas, and Mason Hartman hadn't stepped one foot out of the SUV.

Cobarde. Coward.

Ida stood outside the salt line, her hands palm up on the barrier, peering at me like a kid through a rain-streaked window. Horror was written in every line of her sweet face. I wouldn't miss much from this life, but, by the gods, I'd miss my best friend.

Maybe she'd get to walk with me after I died the way she hadn't been able to walk with her beloved Anita. Maybe I could even find Anita and tell her how much Ida had loved her.

Ronan's densely muscled, eight-foot wolf clawed the barrier a few feet down from her. Rags hung from his haunches—remnants of clothing. His fur was a mix of yellow, red, gray, and black. His teeth were twice as long as any wolf I'd ever seen, and right now, they were smeared with his own blood.

Golden eyes locked on mine.

He was beautiful in his ferocity, and I felt lucky that his wolf was the last thing I'd lay eyes on in this world.