He crawled around the side of the cage, using the bars as a guide, toward the knot of magic that shimmered in the air just ahead. It crackled and sparked in his mental eye, lighting up the mages almost as well as if he’d been wearing night vision goggles. That was especially true around one at the edge of the group, with magic lacing his fingers because he was about to release another spell.
Which he did, just after John leapt up, grabbed him and turned him on his friends.
John heard a bunch of bodies drop, but he wasn’t sure he’d gotten them all. And he didn’t have time to find out. Because the mage he’d grabbed was fighting him and fighting hard, and the vampire guards were suddenly all over the place, probably drawn by the sound of combat.
He dropped the man with a savage blow to the neck just as a bunch of fanged horrors sprang at him, looking like the reverse of the mages in his mind’s eye. They were dark instead of bright, blacker-than-black outlines against the background of John’s spell. They were cooler, too, like deep wells of shadow on a hot day. He realized that, if he concentrated, he could detect them with some accuracy.
But the reverse did not appear to be the case.
John jerked back out of their reach, into the thick of the crowd, while they fumbled and stumbled about. They should have been able to locate him by scent alone, which was as much a primary sense for their kind as sight was for his. But the panicked sweat of the crowd, some of which were humans, the smell of singed hair and burning meat, and the general chaos of a mass of screaming people all trying to reach the exits at once, seemed to have disoriented them.
It wasn’t doing John a lot of good, either, who took an elbow to the head and a blow to his already sore back, and was then almost run down. Which might explain why the guards weren’t attempting to follow him. After a moment, they turned and went back to the cages, taking up positions all around them.
Because, John realized with a lurch, they knew the corpsmen were his target, and that he was unlikely to leave without them. They were waiting for him to come to them. And that was basically worst-case scenario.
Portals only had so much capacity. If this one was to take a few hundred men out of here, and from so far away, it couldn’t afford to have an army of vamps crawling all over it, too! He was going to have to lighten the payload.
He cursed silently, having planned to go along for the ride, since there wasn’t much more he could do here in his condition. But there was one thing, he thought grimly. And then he was cursing out loud, screaming his fury and pain and hopelessness at the guards.
A second later, John found himself surrounded. And a second after that, he was staggered by the power drain as his blood started to flow out of him in particles too small to see. A master’s power was impressive enough all on its own, and if these vamps were still standing and functional, they definitely fit into that category. But all of them together . . .
Was like a punch to the gut.
And although his shields could slow the process down, they couldn’t stop it. Mages caught in the middle of a group of vamps either got help, fought free, or died where they stood. There were no other options.
Which was . . . less than optimal . . . since only one of those choices was currently available to him.
John dropped to his knees, already feeling dizzy, disoriented and seriously unwell. And then he felt something else. Something worse. Something that twisted noticeably under his gut, in a sickening motion that made him want to vomit.
Goddamn it! He couldn’t even die in peace!
But you don’t have to die, the thought whispered seductively from somewhere inside him. Your shields could be better. Your shields could be perfect.
John shuddered, feeling the loathsome presence of his demon, the legacy from his father that he’d never been able completely to excise.
He felt it uncurl from beneath his ribcage, like a snake coiled around his spine. It made his skin crawl, and not just from revulsion. It was fear that clouded his mind, trembled his hands, clogged his throat. And made concentration nearly impossible just when he needed it the most!
Because he wasn’t the only one who had been energized lately.
He felt his arms start to shake from the effort of holding two spells, and all the while he could hear his demon whispering to him, as it hadn’t in centuries. A siren’s song promising anything and everything, if only John would give in and use its power. And it had power.
In fact, it had almost all of it.
Because what he’d been experiencing lately, both the accidents at the hotel and the huge amount of magic that he’d channeled today, had been merely the spill over from that night in Wales, the small amount that his human side had been able to absorb. But the majority of that massive torrent hadn’t gone to him. It had gone to the creature now flexing and expanding in a way that it had never been able to before.
It had gone to his demon.
Don’t you want to know what you can really do? it whispered. Don’t you want to try?
And, of course, he did. He felt the well of unused power thrumming inside him, like a second heartbeat. He knew it was potent; knew it was vast. But he also knew something else: it was treacherous.
If he ever had any doubts about that, the memory of his wife’s body, crumbling like burnt charcoal in his arms, slapped him back to reality. Because it hadn’t been disease or age or a freak accident that had killed her. It had been him.
Or, to be more precise, it had been the thing inside him.
And all the caveats in the world didn’t change that. Yes, she’d started it, initiating the feedback loop of power that came with demon sex despite being far too weak to properly participate in it, and thus being drained before she could receive anything back. Yes, his father had known what she planned and hadn’t warned him, hoping that a newly powerful, part demon wife would help to lure his son back to the hells. And yes, John himself had been to blame for not having interacted with his father’s people more, and thus not understood what his wife was doing or how to stop it.
But while all three of them had played a part in the tragedy, they hadn’t actually caused it.
His demon had.
Inside him was a creature with the same hunger that had motivated his wife, despite knowing that she risked her life. It was the same obsession that had led his father to try to force John into a life of prostitution, of sleeping with powerful demons in order to generate the energy needed to shore up Rosier’s rickety throne. It was the same fixation that drove all demon kind, for the only thing they really understood was power.
And giving it to them rarely ended well.
John felt the usual creeping horror of what he was come over him, before savagely shoving it away. He didn’t need his demon side—he never had! Even less so now. Allowing it the freedom to maneuver, to get those inky black claws into him, to possibly take control—
No! He’d die before he did that!
And you just might, it whispered, right before the ground began to shake.
At first John thought it was him, the tremors in his arms having spread to his legs. But then the rafters began sifting down a century’s worth of dust, the floor started bucking wildly enough to cause the stones to crack under his knees, and a new sound cut through the din, the familiar whub, whub, whub of a portal. It was powerful enough to raise the hair on his arms, what the Circle’s weapon hadn’t already burnt off, and to bring an exhausted grin to his face.