Page 166 of Last Gift: Supernatural Battle

Our forces below were keeping the demons contained. Those at the center had now portaled to join those pressing inward as planned. I winced as a magus tether withered to dust. A Luther tether recoiled and dropped to the stone.

It didn’t matter which side won down there.

What mattered was who won out here.

If the demon king slaughtered us now, then there was little hope for the future of my coven.

And I saw the future roll out before me like a carpet of liquid black.

The demon king would rule all three supernatural territories if we lost this day. Magus would only be the start.

Because the most powerful beings in the territories were right here, and even as that was our strength, it was our weakness because we could have just provided our heads on a silver platter for this powerful supernatural.

My mind tightened and pulsed at the pace of change in the threads whipping and curling and withering. I panted, trying to regain clarity.

Wild was pulling in my magic in an attempt to help. “Focus on one part,” he whispered urgently in my ear.

I shook my head. Not in refusal, but in a bid to do as he’d suggested. I needed to see if we could help King Julius. That was why I’d opened myself fully to the quipu.

Hands clawing in the dirt and grass, I pulled in the lens of my mind’s eye inch by inch. Doing so didn’t block out everything else, but the threads within my lens brightened.

“That’s it,” Wild said low. “Keep drawing it in.”

I was either projecting the vision before me, or he could feel my magic tightening.

Sweat poured from me by the time I managed to narrow the quipu to the battle before me.

I looked ahead at the two kings. The demon king’s torso was a mess of gouges that I could blame Julius’s claws for, but Julius wasn’t free of injury. Blood poured freely from a shoulder wound, and others I couldn’t see—not even in my mind’s eye.

He’d slowed.

The demon king’s magic was curbed too.

“I can’t see that we’re meant to be helping,” I said, but part of that was because Julius’s threads weren’t playing the game and were stubbornly curled in on each other still.

“You know there is only one way to kill me,” Julius said suddenly.

Kyros grunted, and Basilia gripped his arm tight.

“Tey dslyk ths.” The demon king spat out a reply in his tongue, too far in the instinct of battle to be thinking in ours.

“You’d like that,” I said for the benefit of everyone else.

My body was shaking from the onslaught it just endured, and Wild seemed to sense I couldn’t stand, opting to remain crouched beside me.

“I would,” King Julius purred.

He was before the evil king in a flash I hadn’t tracked.

The red smoke was sucked in from the knolls and back into the demon king’s body.

“Yes,” Andie whispered.

Julius’s arm was through the demon’s body. Sticking-out-the-back through. The demon king hadn’t uttered a sound. In fact, the two kings were in a strange sort of silent exchange, neither seeming particularly bothered by their current situation.

Where he hadn’t been able to before, the demon king bizarrely spoke our tongue now. “And so you have chosen your fate.”

“The fate was mine,” Julius replied. “I meet it with all the pride and dignity I have gathered in life, knowing I leave that pride and dignity behind in my children.” His gaze flickered to Kyros, then back to the demon. “I meet this fate in a way you no longer can, demon king. Yours is a fate far worse, and I only pity my executioner at the end.”

---