Demon's Vengeance The Complete - Jocelynn Drake Page 0,71

could study in secret. I could review his notes and read his books, expanding my knowledge and finally getting the one thing the bastard owed me—an education in magic. I’d give the demon a little bit of my blood if it brought me one step closer to gaining control over my life, a step closer to evening the score at last.

Picking up the dagger, I sliced the palm of my left hand, pain drawing a hiss of air through my clenched teeth. The pain was good. It cleared my head, brought me out of the past and secured me in the present. I held my hand open, waiting for the blood to well up, before squeezing it into a fist over the outer line of the symbol. The symbol didn’t need to be entirely filled with my blood, just three key lines required a small smear.

As my blood dripped into the last of the lines, a surge of power jumped into my body, knocking the breath out of my lungs and causing my heart to skip a beat. I shook my head as if to clear it, but the buzzing wasn’t in my head. It was the energy in the room and I was suddenly tapped into it all. But the energy wasn’t coming from some old spell that Simon had created. It was from the demon.

“Gage!” Gideon shouted outside the door. “Gage! Are you in there?” His hard-soled shoes echoed across the floor as he ran toward Simon’s old rooms.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

The demon snarled in my brain and I could feel it gather up its energy as it launched itself across the room, slamming into the door with enough force to make the thick wood barrier shudder in its frame. While I couldn’t see the creature, fresh gouges appeared in the wood as it fought its way toward the other warlock.

“Stay out, Gideon!” I shouted back. “I’m alive! Stay out!”

Not trusting my companion to listen to me, I tried to use the same spell I used in the basement at Asylum to lock the demon back in the symbol, but the creature was stronger in these rooms than I was accustomed to. It turned the energy it was using on the door toward me. I raised my shields at the last second, but it still plowed through. Pain slashed across my cheek as it tore three long slashes through my flesh with its talons.

“You’re not touching him!” I snarled, putting more energy behind the locking spell as I dropped my shields completely.

Glass exploded on the table and the lights winked out again, but I didn’t need the light. I couldn’t see the demon with the lights on, and the darkness actually helped me focus my magic. As the demon turned, preparing to rush me a second time, I changed tactics. It was lost in a rage, determined to hurt something now that it had been denied access to its prey. When it crossed above the symbol toward me, I directed the energy to reach up from the floor and grab it as if the hands of the dead were trying to pull it back toward the Underworld.

No!

It shrieked in my head, the sound so deafening that I didn’t hear the glass breaking, but I could feel it raining down on me from around the room.

“Enough!” I bellowed. I halted the spell, but didn’t disperse the energy releasing the demon.

“Gage? Are you all right?” Gideon shouted from the other side of the door, but I ignored him.

“We need to come to an agreement. You attack who I say or I will close the doorway and destroy the stones,” I said in a low voice.

You need me, the demon howled.

“But you need me more,” I said. “I can find another way to get what I want. Are you willing to wait for someone else to come along to set you free?”

I have an eternity ahead of me.

“Yeah, or you can make a deal with me now.”

The silence stretched for several seconds. Sweat beaded on my brow and my arms started to tremble under the weight of holding the spell in a state of limbo. I was giving this thing another two seconds and I was shutting the doorway down. If I had any sense, I’d do it anyway. Dealing with demons was too dangerous and I was beginning to wonder about my own sanity if I was willing to go down this dark road. But it was right. I did need