Page 9 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

The demon fell utterly silent and motionless, its gaze transfixed by the light I had conjured. Something relaxed in its body, as if the tension was being drained out of it with each recitation of my spell. Through the shimmering wall of golden protection Poppy had cast, the creature looked almost peaceful.

I changed the pitch of my incantation, going from forceful to soft and singsong in a single repetition. Plaintive. Like it broke my poor little warlock heart that the big bad monster didn’t want to obey me. That it didn’t desire with all of its being to do exactly what I told it to do.

The creature twitched.

The spell I was casting wasn’t technically even a banishment, strictly speaking. That requires opening a rift between worlds and then shoving the demon through it. But that wasn’t practical here. After all, there’s an upper limit to what a single witch or warlock can do. And opening interdimensional tears between worlds was definitely beyond that, no matter how powerful you were.

No, this spell was meant to first to capture the will of the demon, then to force it to return to whence it came of its own power.

The same way that Bryan’s will was captured by Giles. The way he had been forced to do what Giles had wanted.

The thought came to me unbidden and I shoved it away with force, before it could cause my spell to wobble. Bryan had been an innocent person, forced to do awful things. This demon was far from innocent, and I was stopping it from doing awful things. It wasn’t the same thing at all.

I took a deep breath and refocused. I repeated the incantation, causing my spell to stabilize again.

Now for the tricky part.

I steeled myself, then reached through the protective wall of golden light with both hands, still intoning my spell. I intended to press the energy I had conjured directly into the demon’s body.

In the instant where my spell crossed the walls of Poppy’s protective bubble, the light blended seamlessly with the ward and the demon broke free of my compulsion.

The creature snarled in rage and immediately seized me by the wrists with both sets of its claws, clearly intending to yank me out of the protection spell. And after that, probably chow down on my soul or something.

I had half-expected this, so I didn’t stop my casting, but instead kept repeating the spell, keeping my voice light and cajoling. I put as much of my will and conviction into my words as I could manage. Will and conviction alone don’t do much, but if you couple it with a healthy dose of magic and the right spell, you can move mountains.

The light snaked out of my hands, spiraling around all four of the demon’s arms, then flowed through its skin easily and seamlessly. The creature gasped, its body seizing up, and its grip tightened for an instant.

Then a blinding white light blotted everything else out. It was accompanied by searing pain, like my head was cracking open. There was a high-pitched whining sound, like the feedback from a microphone, but at ear-splitting volume.

A vision bloomed before me, vivid and close enough to touch.

Bryan Peterson, my mate. His mouth formed a small ‘O’ of surprise, and his eyes were wide with disbelief. Like something had just startled him. Then he fell to his knees, blinking rapidly, his lips moving like he was trying to form words. Dark blood foamed on his mouth.

And then the light drained out of his eyes and the tension fled from his face. His lifeless body collapsed to the ground, face-first. Blood so dark it was nearly black pooled all around him. The end of a long wooden stake protruded from his back.

He turned grayish blue in a matter of moments, the skin mummifying everywhere on his body as his life-force withered to nothing.

My mate was dead.

The vision winked out of existence, popping like a soap bubble.

I gasped in relief as I realized this wasn’t something that had happened, no matter how real it had seemed. It was merely something that might happen. There was time to stop it. I would stop it. I had to.

The demon dropped me as my spell finally took hold of its mind completely.

Still in spirit form, I collapsed to my knees on the ground, but I barely noticed.

The demon calmly turned away from me and vanished into thin air, no doubt returning to whatever dank hell it had come from. The space it had just occupied seemed to become warped and cavernous for an instant, as though hundreds of invisible doors had opened all around me. Then, in the next instant, reality reasserted itself, flattening back out, and the space was once again as it should have been. Just a normal alleyway in downtown Seattle, with the Space Needle looming overhead behind us.

I slammed back into my body. Horror and shock tried to rocket through me, but I shoved them away. They were useless.

My mate needed me.

Because unless I stopped it, Bryan was destined to die.

*

“Are you sure that’s what you saw?” Ethan asked me over an hour later, his violet eyes searching mine. Beside him, his husband, Nathaniel Bailey, the king of Seattle’s vampires, gave us both a worried look. Behind him, the city skyline at night sparkled through the windows like a sea of glittering jewels, indifferent to the mounting panic I felt at the prospect of something awful happening to my mate.

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