Page 92 of Strike It Witch

The shutter sound went off several times in a row. Ida was quick on the draw with her cell phone. She had over tenthousand followers on her Photogram page and had even had a post go viral once.

“That’ll do,” I said.

“Do not capture my image.” Belial’s words hit like thunder punctuated with explosions.

Okay, then. The creature didn’t like having his picture taken.

I could relate. There was nothing worse than being tagged in an unflattering picture on social media. Ida had one of me snort-laughing with my eyes closed on her PG page right now.

Focus. I fisted my hands to stop them from shaking and took a stealthy deep breath. Making sarcastic remarks in my head at a time like this was a sure sign I was walking the razor’s edge between smart moves and fear-based reactions.

Lighting smashed against the salt-circle barrier in glowing streaks, a Tesla coil in a dome aquarium. Three quarters of his human form was complete. I was running out of time.

With calculated care, I paced between the circles, my steps carefully spaced apart, and chanted a banishment spell. It was a delicate process—each word had to be spoken distinctly, intention infused in every syllable. This wasn’t the spell I’d used for Gnath. This was far more powerful. If Gnath escaped the circle, I could drag his sorry hide back into it. If a demon with the power of Belial escaped, I didn’t know if I could get him back.

“No.” The slit in the atmosphere from which Belial had poured out widened above his head. “I’ll not return.” He stretched his mouth open until he looked like a python eating an ostrich egg and screamed until my eyes watered and ears plugged.

I missed a step and backtracked, but continued chanting.

“Watch out,” Ronan, Joon, and Ida yelled.

Belial was now mostly human. He craned his neck to peer down at me, eyes filled with malice. He looked like a silver-headed, red-fleshed caricature of Paul Bunyan, seven feet tall,with arms like redwood branches and shoulders three axe handles across. Only his feet were unformed.

He lowered one massive hand to the ground and pushed a thick finger through the salt line, the digit charring and curling like bacon cooked too long.

Oh no.

In a movement too fast to track, he gripped me by the throat. I picked up my feet as he yanked me into the circle with him, careful not to disturb the salt any more than he already had.

The outer circle with the element bowls wouldn’t be so easily breached. It would hold him in and the others out. I’d planned it that way.

Redundancies weren’t always redundant.

Ronan snarled. He shifted to wolf and rammed the outer circle, once, twice, and on the third time, he left a bloody smear in the air from his muzzle.

And all the while, through Ronan’s bashing, Ida’s yelling at him to stop lest he free Belial, Joon’s feverish chanting, Floyd’s howling about his stupid grimoire, Bronwyn’s tears, and Margaux’s gasps of horror, I continued chanting the banishment spell.

I was in the presence of a demon so powerful it had broken through a salt circle, but I was also a godsdamned professional. I would not allow this thing to make me look like a fool.

Or kill me, which really should’ve been the first thing I thought.

“I’m going to kill you slowly,” Belial said. “Scramble your brain into liquid the way I did the witch who used to live here.”

“What do you know about her?” I screamed, dropping the threads of the spell.

A too-wide grin split his face in half. “Everything.”

His left foot formed. The toes on his right foot.

I tried to find the words of the spell, but they were gone from my head as surely as if the demon really had scrambled my brains.

He backed toward the portal I’d created, the doorway between this realm and Hell. The soil Joon had rubbed on my forearms wriggled up to my neck and glowed like a school of bioluminescent fish. I watched the process with an out-of-body curiosity.

“Let’s see how you like being pulled between worlds against your will.” He shoved my head through the portal.

The pain was unlike anything I had reference for. Thousands of cuts sliced into my skin. Metal claws scraped the insides of my skull. My teeth were raw nerves, open to freezing wind. My breath, which had stopped the second my head went through, returned with a roaring vengeance, lungs pumping fiberglass air, gouging my alveoli, popping the tiny air sacs—a boot heel grinding bubble wrap.

Belial yanked me back into my world, and the pain was wrenched from me with an excruciating abruptness that rivaled the agony of being pushed through in the first place.

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