“Focus on the ground,” Tally ordered. “The earth will take the magic and disperse it for you. That’s why we set the circle here. The reaper ejected it one way, yours will be another. You don’t have to manipulate the magic, or try to change it, just take it as it is and dump it into the ground.”

“Yeah,” I muttered as I dropped to my knees, “because it’s easy like that. There’s no magic to hold on to.” I plunged my hands into the dirt anyway. My claws were sharp and I realized I was in my Lycan form.

“Jessica, please.” Rourke’s voice was low. “I can’t let you go to the Underworld by yourself.” There was enough bitterness in that statement to last a lifetime.

“Harness the mass, Hannon,” Ray yelled. “It was a big cloud of dark shit in my mind. Get your magic around it, and once you have it, squeeze it.”

There was no cloud. Mine was a hazy brackish swirl that was now thoroughly mixed with my own magic. “There’s nothing to grab on to, Ray.” I panicked as the ground beneath me started to feel like a washing machine in its final cycle. “It’s all one big… mass.”

“That’s impossible.” Tally’s voice held a hint of desperation. “The magic is its own being. It can overcome you, smother you, but it can’t become a part of you.”

“Tell that to the damn magic.” I coughed as I plowed my hands deeper in to the ground, hoping it would help me.

“Ma Reine,” Naomi said in a worried tone. “You are starting to glow.”

“Jessica!” Rourke yelled. “Hold on.” His fists continued to pound against the barrier. The reverberations rang through me as I felt his sorrow beat against my chest.

There was more commotion as another voice entered the room. Danny’s worry jumped in my blood. We were bound together. I was still his Alpha and his need to help me was strong. “This is a bloody travesty!” Danny shouted, joining Rourke on the outside of the circle, their combined blows resonating like thunder claps in my eardrums. “You can’t go to the Underworld without anyone to aid you. How are you going to defeat the Prince of Hell, then? With your fists?”

“I’m… doing my best to stay here,” I panted. Did the color of the magic just change again? I asked my wolf. The hazy darkness of the combined magic had turned a shade lighter. The ground below my knees kept up its frantic tremors and I knew instinctively that once the vibrations reached a crescendo it would be too late and I’d be on my way to the Underworld. I flexed outward, trying to send all the magic in my body into the ground.

“That’s it,” Tally urged. “Keep doing that. When you do that I can feel the barrier weaken.”

I took a big gulp of air. “I’m tossing everything out but it keeps coming back too quickly. My body has done something to the demon magic. There’s no separation anywhere I can see.”

“You have a special ability to morph magic,” Tally said. “It helps you fight off an attack, and it’s truly remarkable, but I don’t want you to do it right now. If the demon magic becomes a part of you, I have no idea what will happen.”

“What did you think would happen when you pumped me full of this stuff?” I continued to push outward. But it was dawning on me that I wasn’t breaking the circle, I was still feeding it.

“Clearly not this,” she retorted. I was certain she had her hands on her hips and a wary look on her face. “The magnitude of power I shot into you was supposed to teach your body how to defend against such a force. You take the power in, harness it, and eradicate it. It’s magic defense 101.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I missed that class.”

“There has to be some way to get the magic out of her system,” Rourke snarled at Tally. “Do something to help her, witch.”

“Cat,” she replied, “I would if I could. But if what she says is correct, her body has completely absorbed the demon essence, and now it’s changed into something unknown. There’s no precedent for such a thing. Her own magic is fueling this circle. It thinks she’s a demon.”

“Jesus Christ!” he shouted. “I don’t care about any of that or who’s fueling what. I refuse to believe there are no other options.” I felt his tension and his love. This was killing him. “What was your backup plan, witch? There has to be a way to break this circle open if something goes wrong.”

“There is no backup plan,” Tally huffed. “No witch can do what she’s doing. Even if they were somehow chock-full of demon magic they couldn’t activate the circle on their own. And if this were a real demon, they would know how to drop their magic to stop fueling the circle.”

“Tally,” I said, “I’m not a demon and I don’t know how to stop it.”

“I’m picking up on that,” she answered. “It weakened when you first threw your power into the ground, but now the energy is circulating again. As much as I presume to know about demons, I’ve never spent any time with one. Witches eject power, but maybe demons do not. Instead of grounding it back into the earth, try to suck it back into yourself and see what happens.”

“Isn’t that what got me here in the first place?” I growled, my body still quaking in time with the ground. Suddenly I wondered if anyone else felt the earth shaking. It pissed me off that I still couldn’t see.

“Try to channel it where you keep your own magic,” Tally ordered. “It’s possible you can store it somehow. But you have to hurry.”

I had no idea where I kept my magic. It had always just been there. I usually left the power grabbing to my wolf, who did it instinctively, because that was her role in this partnership. Do you know how to do what she’s talking about? My wolf yipped. Where do we put it? I asked. My wolf started pulling back the magic we’d been channeling into the ground and began to funnel it into us, but I couldn’t detect any secret spot she was stashing it. It just felt normal. I began to help—by doing what felt right, like stretching my muscles after a long run.

The force of cycling it back into us launched me forward onto my face. “Oof.” I spit out a mouthful of dirt and braced myself back up on my arms. Holy crap, I said to my wolf. There’s no way we can harness all this. Plus it feels like it’s growing. The magic kept piling up on me, continuing to build. I was too new and unskilled to stop it, and my wolf was completely overwhelmed by how much was in our system. She abruptly stopped and sat down with her ears pinned back. And I knew instinctively that once the magic reached a pinnacle, the circle would activate completely and we would be sent to the Underworld and there was nothing we could do to stop it.