Page 63 of Demon Loved
Sensing its weakness, she brought her hands together in a single abrupt clap, and at once the orb shattered into a thousand pieces. Bill sank to his knees, fully himself again.
“The Council will hear of this!” their attacker spat, and then dissolved into darkness.
Brianna gasped, even as the energy she’d summoned seemed to flow out and away from her, like waves receding from a shore right before a tsunami swept in. Her knees buckled, and she found herself falling.
But there was Bill, catching her in his strong arms before she collapsed to the pavement. He steadied her, holding her up, until he seemed to realize she could stand on her own. Then he let go and took a step backward.
During all of this, he’d looked exactly the way he had when she first met him. Those brief glimpses she’d caught during his struggle with their assailant told her that he was far more than what he pretended to be, however.
They could discuss that later. For now….
“What…what just happened?” she stammered as she stared down at her hands in confusion. They looked the same as they ever had, lightly tanned and with the nails cut short so they wouldn’t get in the way of her guitar or piano playing.
But she’d seen the blue light that had flowed out from them…had seen how that laser-clear light had somehow broken the dark chains that bound Bill in place.
Just what the hell was going on?
“That’s your true gift,” Belshegar told her, his voice hushed, almost awestruck. “You’re a harmonic — you can balance energies across dimensions.”
She’d never heard of such a thing, although she understood there were plenty of magical talents out there that she had no real experience with, just because they hadn’t occurred in any of the Arizona witch clans. But she’d seen with her own eyes what her magic — her supposedly wimpy, unfocused magic — had just done.
It had cut through those magical chains as if they didn’t exist, had shattered the magical orb their attacker had held as if it had been as fragile as spun glass.
Not exactly the actions of someone with magic that everyone around her had thought was far weaker than average.
As best she could, she gathered her thoughts, straining to analyze and absorb everything that had just happened. Bill stood nearby, expression concerned and wary at the same time, as if he was just waiting for her to ask why his appearance had kept slipping.
Oh, she would ask…just not right now.
“Is that why my magic always felt…scattered?” she asked, trying to sort her racing thoughts into something halfway coherent. “Because it wasn’t one kind of magic, but sort of everything all at once?”
Bill nodded, now looking relieved. Clearly, he understood she wasn’t going to press him about the way his appearance had kept shifting during the encounter.
Well, not yet, anyway.
“You don’t create energy or destroy it,” he told her. “You harmonize it. And that, Brianna, is a gift much rarer and more powerful than you can imagine.”
She looked down at her hands again. They appeared completely normal, but she knew better.
“We should get you inside,” he went on, his gaze roving across the dark alley where they stood. “I don’t sense any other hostile intentions nearby, but I still think it’s better if we don’t stay out here.”
A point she heartily agreed with. The unnatural cold had disappeared along with their assailant, and as far as she could tell, everything had gone back to normal. Still, she knew she would much rather be inside her apartment.
Could these strange gifts that had just surfaced help her ward the place? Brianna didn’t know for sure, but she figured it couldn’t hurt to try.
They began walking down Main Street to her apartment. The only real signs of life on the street were the sounds of voices and music drifting out from the Spirit Room and Paul and Jerry’s Saloon just a block away, but she still found herself heartened by them. They told her she and Bill weren’t the only living beings in town, even though she couldn’t detect any sign that anyone had even noticed the altercation that had taken place just a few minutes earlier.
Thank the Goddess that she always left a light on inside the apartment. Right then, she didn’t think she could have handled walking into an entirely dark space. Her imagination would have conjured all sorts of attackers, even though she knew the place was empty.
All the same, she flicked on more lights as soon as she was inside, doing her best to send all the shadows fleeing. Bill came in and waited as she shut the door, his expression diffident, as though he knew the inquisition was about to start at any moment.
Once she was sure the door was safely locked behind them — for whatever reason, she feared the person in the hooded robe who’d attacked them far more than she did the person…creature…whatever…who faced her now — she turned toward him and set her hands on her hips.
“Okay, are you going to tell me just what the hell is going on?”
18
Belshegar had always known this moment would come. Perhaps he hadn’t thought it would arrive in such a spectacular fashion — clearly, the Collector had wearied of his stalling and had sent one of his minions to rectify the situation — but still, it would have been impossible to forever hide the truth of his nature from Brianna McAllister even without such an attack to precipitate the revelation.
