The inner chamber was dim, lit by a couple of lanterns. I darted in, followed by Trytian and Shade. The others were only seconds behind us.
Inside, I was surprised that there wasn’t a contingent waiting. But then I stopped, skidding to a quick halt. Four demons stood there—I wasn’t sure what kind but one was a Tregart. The other three were also human-looking, but I knew better than to let that fool me. And around their necks, they each wore a pendant. The spirit seals. Four of them.
Trillian skidded to a halt behind me. He must have noticed right off, because he let out a slow whisper. “The spirit seals.”
I glanced around, frantic.
In the corner, in a cage behind iron bars, sat Nerissa, staring at the floor. She jerked her head up at the commotion and when she saw me, she let out a strangled note and rushed forward to the bars, grabbing hold of them and shaking them. Her eyes were wild and I realized that her inner puma was feeling trapped, captive in a way that a non-Were would never understand. Her hair was stringy, hanging down in mats, and she looked like she’d been dragged through the mud and back again.
At that moment, Jorge screamed and I whirled around, startled out of my fixation. I was just in time to see him turn to dust in front of my eyes, at the end of a stake wielded by one of the demons. Another scream, and Sandra vanished.
I sprang toward them, but Shade grabbed my arm. “Be cautious, they have stakes. Let us go in first. You work on that cage.” His eyes were blazing and he let out a roar and moved toward the demons, along with Vanzir and Trillian.
Trytian was busy blocking the door, and the two remaining daemons with him were joining the guys. I raced toward the cage, leaning my ax against the side of it. The sight of my wife, trapped and wild-eyed, triggered me, and I grabbed the bars and began to bend them, slowly working the metal with as much force as I could. My hands were burning—the part of me that was Fae still reacted to iron, but I would heal. Nerissa began to calm down, though she hadn’t said anything yet. But another scream chilled me to the bone. I glanced over my shoulder. Tico was gone. That left Jacob. And one of Trytian’s comrades had also fallen, which left Lokail, one other daemon, the guys, and me. We were rapidly losing our forces.
“Go, help them!” Nerissa finally found her tongue.
Grabbing up my ax, I let go of the cage and headed over to the nearest demon.
He was wearing a brilliant ruby—the spirit seal that I recognized from our fight with Karvanak, the Rāksasa. And he wasn’t carrying a stake. He was fighting Trillian, wielding a nasty-looking sword against Trillian’s slim but lethal silver blade. The demon was winning, driving Trillian back toward the wall, the spirit seal giving him a tremendous amount of skill. But there was something off about his movements, even though his strength seemed greater, and I realized he wasn’t quite in alignment—almost as though he was blurred, out of sync.
The spirit seal isn’t meshing with his energy—that has to be it!
As I swung in behind him, he suddenly realized I was taking aim, but it was too late. I raised my ax high over my head and brought it down to bear right on his back, cleaving the blade in between his shoulders. He let out an unholy scream and almost yanked the ax out of my hand as he turned, blood spraying Trillian. I managed to keep hold of the hilt, dislodging it from his flesh and swinging it again.
He lunged forward, all semblance of skill vanishing as a look of panic spread on his face. I still had no idea of what kind of demon he was, but he let out a garbled screech—I had no doubt it was some sort of curse—and swung his sword hard. I danced to the side as my ax met his blade, cleaving the sword in two. But I had been so vigorous in my attack that my battle-ax—not meeting flesh or something more solid to dig into—continued its motion, lodging firmly in the stone floor.
The demon stabbed at me with the broken sword, clipping my arm, hard. It couldn’t really penetrate the way it would have with the tip, but it sliced through the jacket, gashing my arm deep. Thankfully, it didn’t sever it, and so I yanked the ax out of the stone and, one-handedly, brought it sideways, biting deep into my opponent’s side.
At that moment, Trillian attacked from the back, the thin tip of his sword skewering through the demon’s chest to spit him like a chicken over a rotisserie. Between our combined attacks, the demon wavered, tried to clutch at the spirit seal but failed, and then toppled forward.