This is. So. Not. Good.
Kylie saw the lights blink out and instinctively dropped to the floor. She couldn’t have explained why, because it wasn’t like she suddenly came under attack from a flock of pigeons, but her butt hit concrete a split second before Dag roared out his battle cry.
She felt the rush of air under his wings while her eyes tried to adjust to the dark and realized once and for all that the excrement and the bladed wind machine had just become very close acquaintances. She and the rest of the humans in this auditorium had just come under attack from a Demon.
She knew Dag had doubted her at first, but when he’d seen what she saw, he’d spat out a name that made her skin crawl. She had no doubt she’d been correct, and no idea how this changed their carefully laid plans.
Who was it who had come up with the whole “splitting up” part of the plan? Because right at that moment, she wanted to give that person a good, swift kick in the tokhes.
Built like a theater, the convention center auditorium lacked windows, so when the lights went out, it became black as pitch. Kylie could literally not see her hand in front of her face, not even when she waved it around close enough that she could feel the breeze it stirred on her skin.
She shouldn’t have worried, though, because a source of light presented itself soon enough, in the form of the sickly, putrid red light of the energy four robed nocturnis directed into four corners of the room. Well, it looked like they’d been right about one thing.
Patsh zikh in tuches un schrei, “hooray!” Slap your butt and yell, “hooray!” It might end up being the only thing they got right, but it could prove to be the most important.
Gathering the slightly bent and worn edges of her courage, Kylie pushed herself to her feet and faced the nocturni in her corner of the room. He stood perhaps twenty feet away, his face illuminated by the light of his tainted magical energy. She could see the malevolent excitement in his eyes and the cruel line of his mouth as he chanted something she didn’t understand and had no desire to translate. She just wanted it to stop.
She inhaled deeply and reached inside herself, finding the spark of magic at her core. This time it leaped immediately to life, going from ember to blaze in a blinding flare of pale green light. She accepted the surge of energy with gratitude, letting the magic flow through her, under her skin, and down her arms until her fingertips itched like a thousand bug bites.
Then she raised her hands and let it loose.
It struck the nocturni in the side, catching him off guard and making him cry out not in pain, but in anger. His gaze swung toward her, but his hands remained pointed at the swirling vortex of darkened energy at the end of his stream of magic. Instead of responding to her attack he shouted something and another robed figure rushed out of the darkness toward her.
Kylie yelped and dodged, managing to put a row of chairs between her and her attacker, but it interrupted her concentration, and her hold on the casting nocturni broke apart. Damn it. She had to stop that portal.
Unable to see in the dark, her attacker ran right into the row of chairs and tumbled head over heels into a tangle of plastic and metal. Chairs slid and skittered across the floor, giving Kylie enough time to run to the end of the seating area and into the open outer aisle. It made her more vulnerable, but it also gave her a lot more room to maneuver.
Her gaze zipped around the room looking for Dag, finally catching sight of him at the front of the room. He and Kees seemed to be attempting to catch the Hierophant/Demon host in a pincer move, approaching the inhuman entity with wary caution. She didn’t want to distract him from an enemy she knew was a lot more powerful than the one she faced, but darn it, she could use a little help here.
Apparently, she wasn’t the only one. The initial buzz of confusion caused by the loss of light had turned into widespread panic when the magic had begun to fly. People screamed and shouted, pushing and shoving as they tried to rush toward the nearest exits. The ushers continued to block the way, erecting some kind of magic barricade that contained the audience to the center of the room. Like cattle in a pen.
She pressed herself against a concrete wall to avoid the pushing and shoving of overwrought conference attendees. It really seemed like that was something the Wardens should have planned for a little better. She’d give up any one of those defensive spells Wynn had taught her for something that would just freeze the mass of humanity in place.