The Edge of Temptation by Peter Meredith

Author:Peter Meredith [Meredith, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Market Publishing
Published: 2016-06-15T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Tours, France

Jack Dreyden

“Damn,” Jack said for the third time, this time it was only a gasp. Taking a deeper breath, he yelled: “Stop!” It was a word of command with a great deal of power behind it and such was the strength of his soul that the demon froze above him. It was “standing” supported by one arm and one leg so that it was sideways, its bodies horizontal to the earth, looking now more like a centipede than a spider.

It stopped for all of two seconds, but that was enough time for Jack to take a proper breath, and roll backwards in a crouch. The next words out of his mouth were ancient: “Phra-isth rath em.”

In that tiny span, the demon was above him again, blows coming from both right and left as well as from directly above, but in a blink, the demon seemed to suddenly stop, poised to strike. And it wasn’t just the demon, the entire world went from a movie to a picture. Bullets hung in the air, screams stretched out, and the dying were stayed, momentarily from their fate.

Jack had almost stopped time. It was progressing about fifteen times slower than it normally would have for everyone except him. He could move freely in that blink of an eye and yet he couldn’t maintain it for long. Stopping time wasn’t that taxing, it was maintaining it that drained him, and so he dashed forward and hacked downward with his sword just as he let the spell go.

The edge of the blade sliced right through the run of gut, splitting the demon in two parts. He fully expected one of its bodies to simply collapse and when that didn’t happen, he figured that each would be half as strong as they had been as a whole, but he was disappointed here as well.

Both bodies were now independent from the other and were just as strong and quick as they had been, and where before it was an awkward fight because of the crazy angles, now it was a desperate one. The demons—and now Jack understood that there were two separate entities that he was dealing with—were pulling out all the stops.

One would breath ice as the other blasted poison fog. One would come flying in from the side with claws extended while the other shook the earth with a stomp of its foot. Again and again, Jack was forced to use magic.

To conserve his strength he used it in bursts as the eastern sorcerer Truong had.

A dodge here, a riposte there, a dive roll, a flash of his sword. He had no time to show off his form or to display his full power. He had to get the fight over as quickly as possible before one of those claws took out an eye. A poisonous scratch was one thing. They hurt like nobody’s business, but there was no recovering an eye in the middle of battle.

As fast and wild as the two demons were, Jack was faster, especially when he controlled time.

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