Jessica Andersen - 04 Demonkeepers by Jessica Andersen

Author:Jessica Andersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

June 16

Two years, six months, and five days to the zero date

Jade slept later than she’d intended, but woke more or less refreshed. Trying not to resent that she’d woken alone, in her own suite, when she would’ve rather been elsewhere, she pulled on jeans and a tight, dark T-shirt, and laced on the boots she’d taken to wearing in place of sandals. Anticipation thrummed low in her gut: She had been banished to the training hall to experiment with her magic. And that felt damned good.

When she headed over to the main mansion to scrounge some breakfast—her appetite had skyrocketed—she found the place nearly empty. Which felt seriously weird. “Hello?” she called, and heard the word echo back to her.

Granted, the compound wasn’t actually deserted, but with half the magi out on assignment, it sure felt that way.

After a failed attempt to ‘port Lucius himself out to Ecuador—something about Lucius, whether the hellmark, the library connection, or something else, had fouled the magic—Strike had ‘ported several of the warriors to Ecuador to search for the hellmouth, in case the Banol Kax had somehow returned it to the earth plane in advance of the solstice. Patience and Brandt had gone to Egypt, to the site where Akhenaton’s capital city had stood. The city itself had been thoroughly defaced by Akhenaton’s successors, who had returned the empire to worshiping their familiar pantheon and done their best to wipe Akhenaton from the historical record. Lucius had put the Nightkeepers in contact with a curator he knew from the 2012 doomsday message boards, in the hopes that Patience and Brandt would get lucky and find an artifact or reference giving a clue as to how Akhenaton thought he might usurp the sun itself … and from there, how the magi could stop him.

Jade had been left behind, but not in a business-as-usual way. She had an assignment of her own, and it wasn’t in the archive. Which seriously rocked.

Over a breakfast of cold cereal, she wrote down the iceball spell for Strike and the others to try, in the hopes that it wouldn’t be specific just to her. Then, refusing to let herself hesitate at the place where the path split off and ran down to the cottages, she headed to the training hall—which was fire-, water-, and freezeproof—to practice her new magic.

She felt a quick, hard jolt of relief when she called up the spell in her mind and got a buzz of power in response. Grinning in solitary triumph, she held out her hands, shaped an invisible, intangible ball, and whispered the iceball spell. Magic detonated, blue-white light flared, and a shock wave exploded away from her, sending a lettuce-size iceball whizzing across the open hall to slam into the far wall. When the light died down, exhilaration roared through her. “I did it!”

The wall was ice crazed and coated with thick frost. It had held, but just barely.

After giving herself a moment to do a booty-shaking solo dance that

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