Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,93

the materials the spell-trap had to be drawn in if you were drawing it on a bare floor. He must have used water to bind it all together and hold the mixture to the ground—frozen—when he blew the leaves away.

The demon looked down at the intricate design beneath its feet, and as it did, all the marks flared blue, burning with a literally unearthly light. It hissed—the first sound Spirit had heard it make—and when it tried to step out of the design again, it couldn’t.

Loch shut down the leaf blower. “Gotcha,” he whispered into the sudden silence.

Spirit stared at the tableau before her, her mind utterly blank, knowing that Loch was waiting for her to do her part. The lines of the spell-trap were already dimmer than they had been a moment before. When they went dark, the demon would be free. She closed her eyes, knowing she’d failed them all.

I—Can’t—

“Spirit?” Loch said, and she heard the confused fear in his voice. “Spirit, why? . . .”

“‘Can’t’ isn’t in our vocabulary, Spirit.” The words in her mother’s voice cut through the cold, through her paralysis.

Suddenly she felt an uprush of heat through her entire body, as intense as if she, not the spell-trap, was aflame. She took a deep breath and began to speak, her mind automatically translating the Latin into English as she went.

“Hear me, ancient Abomination, firstborn of Creation, you who have rejected your birthright to reign over the charnel-houses of the Uncreated: I cast you forth from this place! I revoke your license to trespass here, in the name of those who have kept faith: in the name of those who have kept faith, I take from you the name you have been given in this place and name you outcast! I cast you out, to reign in the place of skulls! I cast you out, to reign on the field of blood! I cast you out, to reign over the Uncreated! You have no dominion here!

I charge you to go from this place! By the power of this seal and this covenant: I charge you to go forth from this place! By the power of this ancient spell and working: I charge you to go forth from this place! By the power of your true name, to be spoken upon the day of reckoning: I charge you to go forth from this place! Come here no longer—stay here no longer—return here no more! I take your name—I take your form—I send you forth! Begone! Begone! Begone!”

By the time she’d reached the end of the Spell of Dismissal, Spirit was shouting as loud as she could. And as she reached the last syllable of the dismissal, suddenly the spell-trap flared up even more brightly than before.

It was as if the carved design on the ground and the demon huntsman were both just water in a bathtub and somebody had suddenly opened the drain. The edges of the spell-trap started to draw inward—sliding across the ground just as if the entire design were a puddle of water being sucked down a drain—and the demon trapped inside began to sink down beneath the earth, its body stretching and narrowing as if it were being sucked down a straw. In moments both it and the spell-trap were gone completely, and there was nothing left behind but bare earth.

At the instant the demon vanished, the air went completely still. Spirit staggered out from her hiding place on unsteady legs, feeling as if the air were not only warmer, but cleaner than it had been a moment before. Loch stared at her, the expression on his face slowly moving through baffled confusion to realization toward joy. He raised a hand and took a step toward her—

And suddenly Spirit was seized and lifted off her feet and spun around in a rib-cracking hug as Burke reached her.

“You did it! Spirit! You did it!” he cried. He set her down a moment later, but only so he could reach out an arm to hug Loch, too.

“We all did it,” Muirin complained, coming back into the woods. But her voice still shook, and Spirit could tell that her heart wasn’t in her usual griping.

“That we did, Murr-kitty,” Burke said, his own voice giddy with relief. Spirit hugged him very hard. She’d almost lost him—lost all of them—tonight. And she didn’t think she could bear losing anyone else. Not now. Not ever again.

“Oh my God,” Loch said, laughing. “We won. We did it. I don’t