Page 95 of Redeeming the Angel

“Fuck.”I borrowed from her vocabulary.“I thought it was some sort of glamour.”

“So did I, until the dispel glamour spell didn’t work.”

A thousand questions darted through my mind.But they’d have to wait.The portal to Qua’ al-fán lay open, flickering with ugliness and emanating evil.I pulled Kerainne’s glove from her hand, then linked my fingers with hers, pulling her toward it despite the rational part of me wanting to retreat from it.

“No!”Kerainne screamed.“Please don’t!”

“Trust me, Kerainne.I know what we’re supposed to do.My mother told me what our union can do.In a moment, you will too.”

She fell silent, and let me lead her to it.

“Oh,” she whispered, with weighty understanding.

Instinct guided me as I willed our magic to mingle like it did when we made love.Then, together, we sent careful, specified pulsed of magic into the portal working at it like a chisel.When we’d worked the shape, we pulled magic from the air around us, the very essence of this world.With that essence, we built a solid door and closed it over the portal.

“We need to lock it!”Kerainne said.

Understanding filled me and we wove our magic together, then screwed it into the door.I knew with full confidence that only a Leonine and Jagwolfe together would be able to open it.And since the Leonine custom was to have their bodies burned, the Evil One’s necromancers couldn’t use corpse-walkers to open it.

The corpse-walker… I turned to see that it had crawled closer to Kerainne.I lifted her by the waist and dragged us back a few extra steps.

Unlike Xochitl, Nik, and probably Kerainne, I’d never had the decidedly unsettling experience of looking at one of my own corpses.And the fact that this one was moving, and only minutes ago trying to abduct my mate, just made the thing more gut-curdling.

“Let’s destroy that,” I managed to get out before gagging.

“No!”Kerainne shook her head.“It cantalk.Maybe Del or Rayven or Zareth knows enough necromancy to be able to find out who’s been spying on us and how they managed to steal your body and animate it to the point where it was capable of enough thought to operate alone.”

A terrible thought came to me.“Are we sure it’s alone?”

“Fuck sandwiches.Hold on a sec.”

I couldn’t help chuckling at her colorful phrasing.“Fuck what?”

She shushed me with her mom voice and knelt by the corpse-walker’s head.Which had beenmyhead three days ago.To my disgust, she put her hand in its hair and pulled out a few strands.Then she held the hairs in front of her and chanted a few words of magic.

I felt her power flow out in warm air currents.

After a few moments, she shook her head.“It came alone.Its necromancer must have been waiting on the other side of the portal.He or she probably fled when it felt our magic.”

“And now it can’t get through this way.”My shoulders relaxed with relief that we wouldn’t have to fight one of the Evil One’s soldiers tonight.Even though it would be better to have a live captive than this dead one.

“Exactly.”Kerainne stepped away from the grasping corpse and continued.“And creating a long-standing portal like that probably required the effort of several mages.It will be a while before they can make another one and attempt something like this again.Which gives us more time to prepare.”

I crouched and recovered my sword, putting it back in my bottomless pouch.“I guess I’ll have to carry the body while you get the head.”

I didn’t want to touch it.Especially since it still moved.It kept crawling toward Kerainne.

She frowned down at the body.“We’ll need to restrain it.Do you have any rope?”

I reached into my bottomless pouch and focused on my inventory.“No.”

“Ok.I have another idea.”She pulled a knife from her pocket, walked behind the corpse, grabbed the back of its filthy blue velvet jacket and started sawing at it.“If I brought my bottomless pouch, I’d have my sewing scissors,” she grumbled, then gasped.“That’s what you were wearing the last time you went to Luminista before this!No wonder the thing’s clothes smelled so wrong.”

The implications of her words struck me with a chord of dread.“That means they dug up my body in Raijin too.”

“Probably to use as a test model until they perfected their scheme.”Her eyes narrowed in anger as she finished sawing a wide strip of fabric from my old jacket.“Damn it,Ishould have been the one to bury your body that time too.I would have put it in the nightmare forest.”

“You weren’t at the point where you’d have been willing to do that for me.”

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