Page 173 of Last Gift: Supernatural Battle

Dark storm clouds rolled in, and lightning struck at the ground in warning of what was to come.

Magus, Vissimo, Luther, and demon alike paused in their fighting. Their faces, turned upward to me, were awash with fear and hope and despair and pain.

I saw their faces. I saw what could be.

I saw what was needed.

More than one hundred demons remained. One hundred and seventy-three, I corrected myself, feeling the number of tendrils probing at my senses. I let the roaring power fill me and felt my shaking arms rise. Wild was pouring everything he had into me.

My head tipped back against his shoulder, and then my head whipped forward as a roaring scream ripped from my very being. Power erupted from me as my scream continued, and my shaking was far more a convulsion as one hundred and seventy-three black ropes of magic lashed from me.

I held onto them for dear life—for the lives of all those I loved and was responsible for. I held on until the scream and roar died from my lips and the convulsions faded to shaking, which then faded to stillness.

Utter stillness.

But not calm.

My knees were on the ground. The labored sound of my panting filled my ears. My magic was hooked into nearly two hundred demons.

I opened my eyes and blinked sweat away.

The demon army was frozen but aware. Panic trickled from them as they watched me.

“Help me up,” I said in a voice shredded and raw.

Wild lifted me to my feet, and we both staggered afterward. He’d nearly drained himself dry lending me power. I’d nearly drained myself.

I regarded the demons and didn’t bother speaking in their tongue. “You attacked our lands and our people. You have harmed those I care for. You get no mercy from me or anyone here.”

I already knew what to do. If death was my fate, then I would have died when unleashing the explosion of magic to trap them in my power.

Compared to that, this was the easy part.

I repeated what I’d done for Sven and Rooke on a larger scale. I shot each demon’s threads into the demons surrounding them. Their shrieks and cries filled the knolls as their poison began to work on each other. The remainder of the army was connected, and they’d do all the dirty work for us.

Slowly.

Certainly.

First the yellow demons dropped. Another minute and the orange demons followed them.

Greens.

Blues.

Purples.

Browns.

The first of the red-scaled began to fall, and I walked forward to one in particular. One female remained standing, silent and determined not to meet the fate of the others.

And she wouldn’t.

Though she’d be close to death, she might slowly recover if given the chance. Not that I’d let her.

“Iy wun trey lyv hr,” she spat, her face tightening with pain.

You failed to kill him.

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