Page 9 of Rites of Passage

He clenched his teeth, gripped the writhing shadow trying to escape his magic, and wrenched it free of the possessed man’s soul.

The man bowed off the bed, his breath locking in his throat on a guttural rasp. His eyes rolled back in his head. He groaned and jerked fitfully, a sliver of blood trickling out the corner of his mouth despite the gag stopping him from biting his tongue. He collapsed back down on the gurney, body drenched in sweat and chest heaving.

The army medics and coven healers standing by rushed over to him, the group giving Nikolai and the agitated, ethereal form spitting and growling in his hold a wide berth.

Nikolai turned, walked over to the glowing rings scored in the floor of the chamber, and squatted in the center of the magic circle. The runes warmed his skin as he pressed the demon’s intangible soul against the cold stone.

“I banish you back to the place where you came from.Begone, fiend!”

The demon shrieked, the sound echoing painfully in his ears and reverberating off the soundproof walls. The corruption making up the creature’s soul disintegrated into inky specks that soon faded in the brilliant, pale light that was his magic.

Nausea churned Nikolai’s stomach. He swallowed down bile, his vision swimming for a moment.

“That’s enough for today,” someone said coolly.

Nikolai turned his head.

FBI Special Agent Alicia Calvarro straightened where she leaned against the wall, the scythe-shaped silver medallion on her leather necklace gleaming for a moment where it lay on her chest. She ignored the wary looks the soldiers and coven members cast at her, crossed the room, and offered him a hand.

“Are you okay?”

Nikolai nodded weakly and took the agent’s hand, the quiver in his limbs telling him he’d overdone it. The room spun dizzyingly as she pulled him to his feet. He blinked and swayed.

Alicia steadied him with a firm hand, her fingers cold where they clutched his arm. An anxious squawk left Alistair. The bird’s wings fluttered worriedly against his cheek.

“It’s okay, Al,” Nikolai mumbled.

Alicia smiled faintly and scratched the crow’s head. “He really is like your mother.”

Alastair crooned and butted her hand in a friendly gesture. He recognized the FBI agent’s true nature and was not afraid of her.

Faint lines marred Alicia’s brow as she looked at the bright rings around them. Though she was from Hell, Nikolai’s magic did not harm her. As Thod, the Queen of Soul Reapers, she could navigate the world of the dead and the living at will, although she’d been spending most of her time on Earth lately.

“Ten exorcisms a day is your limit. You should avoid doing more than that unless you want to drain your soul magic dry.”

Nikolai had to concur with her warning.

It had been a week since he’d started helping the innocent men and women he and the New York coven had rescued following their battle with his brother Oscar and the demon Barquiel in Brooklyn. The people he was purging of possession had been taken up by fiends against their will, victims of his father and the Dark Council’s dire experiments aimed at creating modified soldiers of Hell.

It was Alicia who had suggested to the coven and the U.S. Special Affairs bureau that Nikolai try and exorcise them.

“These people will go mad and ultimately die because of the demons riding their souls,” the Soul Reaper queen had told Bryony and General Rutger Cooke bluntly. They’d stood in a ward in the private U.S. army facility on Staten Island where the ones they had saved that fateful night lay groaning and screaming, magic and drugs the only things stopping them from fully transforming into the monsters dying to escape the prison of their flesh and skin. “There is a way to help them.”

Mae had appeared as full of misgivings as Bryony when Alicia had claimed that Nikolai’s newly awakened white magic could rid the men and women of the fiends eating them from the inside out.

It was Mae who had broken the spell the Sorcerer King had engraved upon Nikolai’s soul when he was a child, an act that had allowed her to locate the sorcerers holding her sister and grandmother prisoner in the city. The spell was borne not just by him and Oscar, but by all Dark Council members from the time they were initiated into his father’s court. It was a way to mask their black magic from detection, especially in combat situations.

Undoing it had almost killed Nikolai. It was thanks to Mae that he’d survived the process, although she’d always insisted it was his will to survive that had saved him.

Neither of them had anticipated that the side effect of that deed would be the ability to fully tap into his powers for the first time since he was a child.

Accessing the magic he’d inherited from his mother without the shackles that had long bound him meant he could now draw on ley lines, a gift that looked like it would fast become a hindrance. According to Alicia, he was the first human in centuries to be able to tap into the magic seeped in the very bones of the Earth.

He’d been able to sense the preternatural energy humming beneath his feet ever since he was little, a fact his mother had made him promise never to reveal to anyone. He’d even managed to use a ley line briefly when he’d performed theAura of the Moon, the scrying spell that had revealed New York city as the location where the Witch Queen would awaken.

Has it really only been three weeks since that night in Paris?

So much had happened since then. Things that he was still trying to process. One fact had become crystal clear during his recent clashes with his brother Oscar and the demon who inhabited Rose Blake’s body. He was now a walking target for the Dark Council, just as Mae was.

---