Tam was powerful, but he was mortal. His power had limits, and time was not on our side.
The queen and I rolled to a stop as a needle-thin shaft of white light exploded the head of the nearest Volghul. I didn’t move. It didn’t seem smart with skull-piercing lightning bolts flying around.
My mistake. A big one.
The demon queen got her hands around my throat and dug in. I screamed, searing pain following the hot wetness of my own blood running down my neck. I’d been right, her nails hadn’t survived the fight, but broken nails left jagged edges, and they were razor sharp.
A dot of blazing white light appeared in the exact center of the queen’s forehead. The fighting around us immediately stopped. The only sound was Tam’s unbroken stream of incantations and hissing, labored breathing.
The light remained where it was, unwavering.
“Her death will be your doing!” the demon queen shouted into the darkness.
A strong, deep voice came from the shadows just beyond the columns. Mychael’s voice. “Release her or share your guard’s fate.”
Just what I didn’t need-a hostage situation and a standoff all rolled into one.
Mychael’s statement was a warning; his words were raw power given voice. Demanding, compelling, those words gave the demon queen a choice, and one choice only-obey or die.
The queen swayed as if from an unseen breeze, but her hold on me never lessened. Mychael’s voice had gotten to her, and for a brief instant he had controlled her.
Her fiery eyes blazed with renewed rage. “Show yourself, mortal!”
I heard the sharp echo of Mychael’s boots as he stepped up on the stage and into the light, but he didn’t pass between the columns. He knew better. Mychael’s left arm was extended; the light beam coming from his index finger was leveled like the deadly weapon it was, never wavering from its target. In his right hand, his sword blazed with pure, white light. His entire body was surrounded by a glowing nimbus.
When the demon queen saw him, her full lips curved in a satisfied smile. “You. I should have known. Come to me, and I will allow the elfling to live.” Her words had power of their own, not the magical compulsion of a spellsinger, but the smoothly seductive tones of a temptress with millennia of experience.
“Release her and you will not die.” Mychael’s voice was calm, but unyielding.
The seductive smile twisted into a sneer. “You think you can destroy me? I will rule when you are dust. Come closer, paladin.”
“Sir, no!” Vegard shouted.
“I can feel the distortion from the gate,” Mychael assured him, keeping his eyes on the demon queen. “I need not come any farther. And neither do your brothers.”
Backup. Guardian backup. Now that was some much-needed good news.
“More flesh for my children,” the queen said in approval.
“More gifts for me.”
Mychael’s beam flared in intensity, searing a blackened circle into her forehead like a brand. The queen screamed in pain and fury, and her claws contracted. I clenched my teeth against the pain. I wouldn’t scream again.
“My children will feast on you!” she shrieked at him.
“Your children are prisoners.” Mychael’s voice was relentless. “Release her.”
“Impossible, there were hundreds.”
“Now they are captives.”
“You lie!”
“Then where are they?” he asked quietly.
The demon queen didn’t have an answer for that, and neither did I. But I had connected some dots, and I knew she wasn’t going to like the picture it made. When I told her, she’d either let me go or finish the bloody job she’d started. Anything was better than a naked demon queen on top of me.
I tried to speak without moving my throat, which was easier said than done. “You have no Scythe,” I rasped. “Saghred coming here… Guardians already here… Only I can touch the rock.” I swallowed, or at least I tried to. “And you have a beauty mark that’s about to become fatal.”
The demon queen smiled, sure and confident. “Not all of my servants are here.”
Several things happened more or less at once.
The demon queen half jumped-but mostly flew-straight up into the shadowed vaults of the ceiling like she’d been shot from a cannon.
Then she vanished.
It had to be a cloak, one so complete that it left no sign that she still existed. I knew better; she wasn’t leaving without everything she’d come for. If she could cloak, it meant she was outside of the Hellgate distortion.
It also meant that she could do anything magically speaking; and from up there, she could do it to anyone.
I scrambled for the last place I’d seen the Scythe. I was bleeding, but it wasn’t life threatening, at least not until I collapsed from blood loss and woke up on the wrong side of that Hellgate.
Both of Tam’s hands were sunk into the Hellgate membrane on either side of the slit. All around him, forms writhed and pushed against the milky surface-big forms, hulking; one hand trying to press its way through was twice the size of Tam’s head. Tam saw that massive hand and his incantation sounded more like a snarled string of goblin obscenities. There were bigger, meaner, and more dangerous things desperate to get through that Hellgate before it sealed.
If Tam could seal it.
I ran up the stairs to the dais, and to Tam.
“What can I do?”
The demon queen’s voice rang out from the vaulted beams supporting the ceiling. I didn’t know the words, but I knew what it sounded like.
A call to arms.
Volghuls poured like purple tides through four of the five mirrors.
Tam’s black eyes blazed. “Get the Scythe!”
I didn’t want to leave him there.
“Now!”
I jumped over the side of the dais to where the Scythe hopefully still was. There it was, gleaming in the dark, the first thing to go right all day. I snatched it up and a mini-Volghul came with it. I shrieked; I couldn’t help it. The little bastard sunk his teeth up to the gums in my leather sleeve, his claws raking my bare hands.
My shriek gave way to swearing, which led to stabbing. The thing was trying to eat me from the fingers up. The Scythe was a knife, and I used it. A couple slashes and a stab later, one less Volghul was going to reach adulthood.
Mychael and his Guardians were battling the Volghuls coming out of the mirrors. Piaras had joined his soon-to-be brothers. Those mirrors needed to be shattered. Anything thrown through magically linked mirrors would go in one side and out the other. But if something were coming through at the same time, it’d be like two people trying to come through the same door from opposite sides. Except in this case, the thrown object would break the glass.
Broken glass, no more Volghuls.
I desperately looked around for something, anything. The Assembly was a ruin, there had to be chunks of stone, something. I spotted one. It was close to the mirrors, but I had one shot at it, so I needed to be as close as I could get. I scooped up the rock, saw a demon head coming through, and threw it with everything I had.
The mirror shattered, leaving one less demon door, and hopefully a demon with a concussion on the other side.
“Raine!”
It was Phaelan. My cousin was in the safest place a non- magic user could be in a room full of magic-flinging mages and demons-behind Carnades’s stone altar.
You know the saying “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy”? I did, and I wished I didn’t. If Carnades Silvanus wasn’t my worst enemy, he was at least in the top five. I’d have liked nothing more than to have left him right where he was, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t a particularly nice person, but I wasn’t a murderer.
I’d unlock his manacles, but first I’d take what I needed from him.
The Scythe was good and sharp. Carnades’s white linen sacrificial robe was nice and clean. My throat needed a bandage. I grabbed the hem just above the elf mage’s ankles, plunged the blade through the material, and slashed my way around the robe.