Mark of Damon by Eva Chase Page 0,41
gesture, spread my fingers instead. As Rose lifted the last bits of fabric from my skin, I extended my open hand toward the rotted circle, palm forward.
“Go back to where you came from,” I said, training all my will on the searing energy snaking through the muscles of my arm. “Go back and stay there. I’m finished with this.”
Rose murmured something beside me, raising her hands with a sway of her hips as she moved into a casting. Her strength wrapped around me. The other guys remained poised with their batons, determination etched on their faces.
I could do this. We could do this. I knit my brow as I concentrated even harder on propelling that energy out of me, out of this place, to sever the connection the demons had forced on me.
A stream of light flared from my palm. It blazed across the patch of forest, brightest where it hit the matching ring of glow. At the same time, pain lanced through me right down to my gut.
A gasp spilled from my lips as I fought to keep my arm up. The muscles clenched. Some of the vicious energy crawled up toward my shoulder, seeking admission. Tempting me with the quivers of power it offered to my command.
I gritted my teeth against the power and willed all of it out of me, out and across the decayed circle, back into the demonic realm where it belonged. The agony dug deeper. For a second, I thought my ribs would crumple in to pierce my heart. But then, as more of the power poured out of me, I sensed a shift in the air.
The energy I expelled was searing across the vegetation too—scorching away the rot. The sickly patches on the tree trunk contracted until they vanished. Delicate stems and leaves shed the darkness of decay, curling upward. And the putrid mess within the glow congealed as it shrank, inch by inch. The glow diminished with it.
More. I put every ounce of my being into propelling the rest of the energy from my arm. As it burned out of me, the rush of it starting to diminish, the silvery lines marring my skin drew back. They faded away until nothing was left but that scar from the raked claw. That blemish shivered and dwindled too, healthy skin filling in its boundaries until my flesh was whole again.
The last pulses of power left me. My arm fell to my side. My chest heaved with ragged breaths I’d barely been aware of in the past several minutes as I performed my last act of magic.
The forest before me looked as vital and alive in the thin light cast by the guys’ phones as every other part of the woods did—as it always should. I couldn’t make out where the eerie opening had once begun or ended.
Rose stepped up to the pine tree with its newly restored bark and spun in a slow circle, her eyes closed. When she opened them, she beamed at me. “You did it. How do you feel?”
A gentle humming that wasn’t magic but more a simple sense of freedom traveled through my limbs. As it reached my chest, I realized it was more than that. It was joy.
“Their influence is gone,” I said. “As far as I can tell.” I flexed my left arm, studying the skin as well as I could. I might as well have never been scarred in the first place.
Gabriel brought his hands together in an emphatic clap, and within seconds the other guys added to that smattering of applause, the sound that should have been sparse echoing among the trees. “That was amazing,” Ky said, with an awe I didn’t think he could have faked. The poor guy had probably dreamed a gazillion times of getting to use magic himself after all his studying. Not that I would be using any more of it myself. Not that it’d ever been mine.
Thank God for that, was all I could think now.
“The fiends never stand a chance when you’re in the mix,” Gabriel said with a grin. “Come on—let’s get back to the house where we can really celebrate one last victory.”
Getting inside, out of the dark and the rustling sounds of the woods, sounded like the perfect idea until we started walking. Rose strode along beside me with her silky hair swinging against her shoulders and her cheeks living up to her name with their delicate flush, and the happiness that had come over me