Page 169 of Last Gift: Supernatural Battle

“And yet it will be.”

“And yet it will be,” he echoed. “Another curse in a cursed life. So be it, Magus Queen. We fight.”

I sent up a four-affinity barrier around me, and the demon king regarded it before skimming a look across the knolls to Wild. A low hum left the supernatural, but I was too busy peering at a golden spear protruding from his back that reminded me greatly of the tiny one in my heart.

“You have a mate,” I murmured.

Like the bond I shared with Wild, a golden line connected into the spear. I followed the gold line across the knolls and meadow, and up in the alpine forest where I assumed the bond disappeared through a gate to the other realm.

A growl rippled from the demon. A warning.

He was mated, so he’d be stronger.

What was stranger still was that a bond extended from me alongside the golden thread and into the distance. I hadn’t looked for the bond since my demon returned to me. I’d believed so strongly that the bond was the connection between us in different realms.

But the bond still led off into the demon world.

A thought for another time.

I unsheathed my daggers and banished my cloak. I’d summon it if needed against an attack, but the cloak was cumbersome.

The demon king was gathering smoke, and I released smoke of my own to strengthen the barrier I’d erected.

He threw a funnel of red smoke at me so quickly, I barely had time to get out of the way.

Fuck, the demon could draw on his magic as quickly as Julius had moved.

The smoke hit my barrier, and I pushed an image of myself forward, stepping back into a portal to reappear behind the demon king.

I summoned the arrowheads filled with my blood and shot them into the supernatural’s back. He managed to dodge half of them, but his furious bellow told me some were doing the trick.

Hesitation would kill me.

I sprinted forward and ducked under a slicing shard of red smoke to drive my father’s dagger into one of the deeper wounds on his torso.

Darkness stirred in me, and I released the darkness through the blade for an instant before ripping it away to dance back.

I cried out as fire erupted in my calf.

Wild was on the job, and I let him heal me from afar as I pivoted. Summoning from our charm stores, I activated explosions of Rooke’s antidote around the demon king. The mist rose around him in a dome, and his pained grunts could be heard from out here.

A demon was fire.

I blew ice to freeze the ground he stood upon, and the air inside the misty dome of antidote.

The ground began to shake, then boil.

The threads from the midst of my trap disappeared down into the ground, and I watched the ground deep beneath my feet, moving back with it to ensure my position was always between the demon and my mate.

Wild was the obvious target.

“Gu en, bryve!” I shouted. Come out, coward.

The ground in front of me erupted, and I wasted no time slicing my father’s blade across the king’s chest. This time, the blade was caught between the demon’s two hands.

We remained locked there, and I got a sense the demon was drawing parallels between this moment and the moment he’d killed Julius too.

Red smoke built under the surface of the demon’s skin. His scales were out in full force, and they glowed with a hypnotic pulse.

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