Page 26 of Muddled Magic

A moment later, when one of the diamond-pane windows shattered as a creature of smoke and ember crashed inside the library, rain splashing against the hardwood floors and sizzling into steam on the creature’s hide, it seemed the Green Mother had given Grandmother the answer she’d sought too.

“Demon!” Grandmother Iris shouted.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I think I fainted.

Maybe.

But if I did, it was only for a fraction of a second. Just enough for my vision to darken into nothingness, my mind to wipe itself of thought, my body to lose control of itself.

I found myself swaying when I seemingly regained consciousness, and I caught myself with a backward step before I truly lost my balance. Then my fists were up, my knees bent into a fighting stance, as the library beyond my little gap in the doors erupted into pandemonium.

The demon wasn’t fully corporeal—it flashed across the library in wisps of smoke and cinders before becoming “flesh” once more—my family was shouting, sparks were flying from activated cuffs, and the raging of the storm was drowning out the beastly snarls and battle cries.

This is it, Meadow. This is your chance! Go, already. Go! Why are you—

Rooted to the spot? I was frozen, hardly daring to breathe, from… the shock? From the wonder that whatever Marten had done while he’d been away had earned the wrath of something like that? Something from a nightmare?

The demon launched itself after Marten, leonine jaws snapping. He managed to slap its maw away with a magic-infused hand before the creature spun, whipping its flame-tufted tail like a wrecking ball into my brother’s chest and sending him careening over the table.

Otter hurled a pillar of ivy-green magic into the demon’s side, knocking it off-balance and straight into Aunt Eranthis and Grandmother’s clutches. They had their ivy-green vines around it then, encircling its middle and seizing its legs, and yanked it away from the overturned table.

Gouges appeared in the hardwood floors were it dug its claws in to keep upright, the planks groaning as it attempted to spring into the air.

“Stab it in the heart,” Grandmother instructed, voice strained. “Or behead it!”

Just as Aunt Eranthis’s vines tightened into a supersized version of her favorite instrument—a needle—to do just that, Buck hauled Marten upright beyond the table, and the demon went wild at the sight of its target. The cinders flowing around its body condensed around its neck, a mane of flame flaring into a fiery halo, burning through its bindings. The vines superheated and burst, green sap sizzling wherever it splattered on the demon’s hide.

Grandmother’s eyes began to glow with power and rage.

“Tracked you all the way—” Otter’s words were cut off as he tackled Buck and baby Stoat out of the way as the demon broke free of Grandmother’s net. It was after Marten. Always after Marten. The rest of the Hawthornes were just a nuisance.

But he was wounded and weak, the magic of whatever had injured him reducing his reaction time and making his movements sluggish. Rain and sweat had plastered his wavy brown locks to his forehead and neck, and his handsome, arrogant face was pale with an emotion I’d never seen there before. Fear.

MOVE, Meadow! my body screamed. That’s your brother fighting for his life! Get in there!

But I’d never seen a demon before. Had never encountered something so deadly, so full of hate that it filled the room with an oppressive aura like a smothering fog. My cuffs still blazed, but the wrists they encased shook with fear.

The demon flashed to the right, body-checking Aunt Eranthis in the gut. As she careened into a padded chair, the demon vanished in a cloud of smoke, reappearing with a whipping tail aimed straight at Grandmother’s head. She caught the flaming tuft in her fist, the runes on her blazing cuffs glowing as fiercely as her eyes, and she used the demon’s own momentum to hurl it across the room. It slammed into a bookshelf, sending such vibrations through the walls and floors that I felt them beneath my own bare feet in the hall.

“Get Marten out—”

“It’ll kill every one of us just to get to him,” Otter shouted, forcing himself upright and hauling Buck up after him.

Grandmother’s assault had only dazed the creature, and it charged across the library with its smoldering gaze locked on Marten—

Until it heard the shriek of baby Stoat.

No longer safe in his harness strapped to his father’s chest, he was now held by the back of his onesie and thrust forward as an offering. No demon could resist innocent flesh. It whipped around, abandoning Marten as its ember-like eyes widened with crazed delight. Shadow-like claws reached for my nephew, and when Stoat squalled in terror, my legs unlocked.

Tears blinded me as I bolted, not into the library, but down the hall to the spell book’s closet.

There was nothing I could do for Stoat, not when he was being deliberately offered like bait, not with how fast that demon moved. That my own family would sacrifice a baby to lure a demon off its hunt to save a robed elder—it was unthinkable. Impossible.

It was the curse on the grimoire. That parasitic thing inside that emerald—it was making them act irrationally. It was turning them into monsters.

While I couldn’t help Stoat, I could help the rest of them. Release them. Free them of ever having to do such a thing again.

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