As if trying to get ahead of her winding movement, they were swirling around her faster now, like a tornado, hoping to twist and disorient her, upset the human top and watch it fall. The weight made her body shudder. She felt their desire to take her. She was a creature with Darkness within her, one they could use and overpower.

She put the final twist in the braid, and then thrust out with both hands, a sharp, blunt movement. They squealed, recoiling as two braided whips of Light and Dark energy slashed through the smoke, finding its target. The Dark held them to her, didn’t allow them to get free, and the Light burned them like holy water on a vampire. She ripped the energy free, taking Underworld flesh with it, then went with a dual overhand strike like she was wielding two single tail whips. Slashing down, across, bisecting their energy, snapping her wrists so the tails didn’t come back to hit her in recoil.

The smoke was burning off as they spent more energy fighting her than creating distractions. She saw their skeletal bodies, the long talons and burning eyes. They belonged to him. At this close range, the truth of it was even more potent. They were an advance guard, sent to test the perimeters, see what Asmodeus would be up against. The desire to protect and reinforce disappeared beneath the weight of her need to obliterate, destroy, cause pain.

They were circling, trying to dodge that weapon, but she was moving just as fast. Or so she thought. One of them punched through her anger, made contact. It sent her somersaulting. She hit the ground hard, plowing up the dirt with her shoulder. She thought she heard a scream. Miriam, maybe, close enough to see some of what was going on now that the beasts were more form than fog. The girl lunged out of the circle, grabbing at Ruby’s arms to get her back into it.

“Miriam, no!” Linda’s cry, but it was too late. In that blink, one of the soul-eaters had grabbed the young woman. They were tossing her among them like a rabid rock concert crowd who’d captured the lead singer. Pulling at her hair, her flesh, her clothes. It would take them fewer than two seconds to rip her limbs from her torso. Scrambling back to her feet, Ruby lashed out full force, no doubt or restraint.

The explosion illuminated the clearing like a warhead, showing her ugly, hungry expressions, Linda’s white, determined face, and Miriam’s terrified one.

The soul-eaters screamed as the burning, braided weapon cut deep, deep enough to truncate. The recoil sang back up Ruby’s arm, rocketing pain through her body, but they dropped Miriam. She dove on her, covering her with her own shields. Then Christine was there, shouting. “Back. Back, you bastards.”

She was using the strength of female anger to bolster herself, but she was holding that shield in front of them just as Ruby had taught her. But they needed more coven members to make that diamond formation strong enough. Christine couldn’t hold it alone. Not for more than a second. Then Linda was there, grabbing at Ruby. Ruby shoved Miriam into her grasp, pushing them back toward the circle. Miriam’s blood was on her arms, her shirt. She had no idea how badly the girl was hurt, but at least all limbs appeared to be attached. Linda dragged her back over the perimeter.

“Go, Christine, she’s in. Back to the circle. Hold the circle.”

Christine obeyed, though her expression, a quick flick toward Ruby, suggested she thought she’d lost her mind, staying out here. She probably had, but the demons were still not contained.

She wasn’t sure whose blood was whose, but she’d use it. Bringing her hands together, she screamed out another chant. The braided line of power coiled back up in her hands like an obedient serpent, then melded into an oblong shape. Like bread dough, she kneaded and spread it, a quick alteration of the magic. As she did that, she called out the words to reinforce her shields and recharge the energy, using her blood and the darkness, the scattered shards of Light sparking off the circle. A potluck of things like a magical dirty bomb, many different unpredictable elements combined. Unpredictable was exactly what she needed here.

She flung it outward, like a master pizza chef expertly launching his dough. As it left her hands, it became the snake again, whipping out into a rippling, seething line of Dark and Light fires, a deadly white squall line. Reinforced by the circle’s strength behind her, she moved forward with it, driving it, driving the soul-eaters back toward their rift point.

They snarled, lunged. Then screamed their rage and pain as that line tore shreds out of them, as if they’d stepped into a minefield. They backed off. She kept coming, driving them back like a lion tamer. Two steps forward, one step back as they lunged, dodged, and she parried, ducked shots of flame back at her, thrown punches. They were at close quarters now, less than two or three feet between them, but they were getting more stubborn and brave, the closer they got to that hole. She tasted her own blood on her lips, knew they were getting in some strikes as well. It didn’t matter.

Pain slashed across her back. A cry broke from her lips as she went down hard, but the pain wasn’t the danger. She was trapped beneath the suffocating weight of a fourth soul-eater, one who’d gotten past her guard. How had she missed him in the smoke? Maybe he’d come out behind them. More important, he was completely independent of the rift, no longer tethered to it at all, the chains broken. Corporeal.

Struggling to her back, she punched wet, slimy flesh like sticky Jell-O, a thought that would keep her from eating Bill Cosby’s favorite dessert ever again. Damn, she really liked those pudding cups, too.

She’d become two creatures, one standing back with oddly rational mind, cracking wiseass remarks and thinking about the next step. Then there was the part of her that was screaming her rage, wanting him off. She was outnumbered. But it didn’t matter. The fight was what mattered. She’d been preparing for this for so long, and suddenly it was here. After that initial moment of fear and hesitation, all she’d thought about was protecting the coven; then rage took away even that much thought. It was all reaction now.

Energy gathered in the pit of her stomach. Up until now, her power had been coming from a combination of will and mind, but this bastard was about to find out what it would feel like to be fried by what she could summon from the darkest part of her psyche. It was darker there than anything these pieces of Underworld garbage knew.

As if sensing the imminent danger, and realizing he was free to leave the party, the soul-eater let her go, tried to make a break for the sky.

She caught him around the throat with that lariat of streaming energy— Go, Wonder Woman—and tossed a few more volleys at the others, but the problem with tethering one enemy when others were around was that it made her just as vulnerable, as anchored in one place as he was. And they knew it. She threw up a protection spell as they bore down on her. The weight, the pressure, was incredible, making her snarl out as the air around her decompressed like a plane cabin. She couldn’t hold it. Couldn’t. Damn it, she wasn’t going to let go. He was the only one who was corporeal. She had to have him. Had to take her shot.

A blast shuddered through the ground and blinded her like lightning at close range, a strike that could have come from the hand of God Himself. It crackled through the three soul-eaters, seared them down to their very essence. Shrieks of pain and a god-awful smell filled the clearing, the electrical energy searing across her nerve endings so she convulsed in its backwash.

It was impossible not to feel a surge of fierce exultation and love. He was here, with her. He’d come back.

The darkness was slashed to ribbons, cut by the enchanted flash of a broadsword’s blade, wielded in Derek’s capable hands. He could change anything to a different weapon, as long as it kept the same properties. She suspected what she was seeing was his switchblade, transmuted for a different purpose. She turned her attention swiftly to their enemy.

They weren’t gone, of course, but they’d been blasted off her. Two were pushed back toward the rift, but they were scrambling to re-form ranks. The fourth soul-eater was still held by her line, and now she sure as hell wasn’t letting go. Managing to struggle to her knees and then to her feet, she started to reel him in. You’re going to be my guinea pig, you monster. This was her chance, to test the deadliest weapon she had in her arsenal.

Derek was by her shoulder. At a screech behind them, he shoved her down so they both ducked. The missing third soul-eater swooped over them. It bowled into the other two like a pterodactyl whose radar had gone haywire. It was the deciding moment. They crawled, flapped, and clawed their way to their rift opening, flinging themselves back down into it, conceding defeat.

Unfortunately, that shove had lost her purchase on the fourth one, and he’d come to the same conclusion his companions had. Best to live and fight another day. He dove for the rift, a straight shot down like a pelican dropping out of the sky.

No. Not that easy, pal. Muttering the proper chant, feeling the Dark energy uncoil eagerly, she tossed out that powerful lash one more time, but this time it had barbed ends. Those ends caught the fourth soul-eater, latched onto him just as he had his foot in the rift door. Because he was corporeal, it wound around him, using his own Dark energy against him, but also feeding it back to her. She felt it pumping inside of her, like an answering heartbeat. She knew what he was, what he was made of. She knew the composition of his soul in that connection.

“Ruby.” Derek’s voice, urgent, a command. “Let him go. They’re retreating. We need to seal the rift.”

“No.” Her voice was hoarse, unrecognizable. She’d managed to get to her feet and now took a step away from him, toward the soul-eater, coming out of fire and smoke. She saw fear in the demon’s eyes, and she loved it. Be afraid, you bastard.

He writhed, the poison and power in those barbs sweeping through him, twisting his body and lifting it in the air, making it contort. His essence was turning sickly green, traces of flame. He screeched. It was an unearthly sound of torment, one she recognized because she’d made it herself, the night everything had changed.

Face the nightmare of what the world truly is, what it will always be for you. Desolation and emptiness. No purpose, no worth.

The energy she was using spilled out a bloodred light that illuminated the night, cast the moon with a red tinge, made the fountain nearby look as if it were a pool of blood. The soul-eater’s body was visible, the winged form, the forearms and legs roped with muscle. Unlike the skeletal shapes of the others, he was a heavyset gargoyle, a thug of the Underworld. However, under the power of her spell, his skin began to break like cracked mud in a desert long after the rain had dried up. Bits of him rained down onto the ground, each one moving, whimpering of its own accord.