she placed it on the table, everyone drew back from the set of diagrams.
As Zaara would have said, they reeked of bad magic.
“It’s a binding spell,” the widow explained. “The demon’s life force and magic are what power the binding—or the illusion. It’s not an exceedingly useful one for most people. For one thing, it takes almost as much power to bind the demon as it does to do the rest of it, and it’s riskier. For another, there’s a chance that it will break free at any time—and there has to be containment when the binding is broken, even deliberately.” She closed the book with a snap. “But Sephith was never exactly a cautious person. If you want my guess, it suited his purposes fine.”
“How d’you mean?” Justin took another sip of tea. It really was good. He couldn’t tell what it was made from but the buff helped him feel better than he had in days.
“It was flashy.” Her tone dripped with derision. “And my guess is he reasoned that if someone broke it or the demon broke out…well, he’d be gone, so what did it matter if it ransacked the countryside?”
“That son of a bitch,” Zaara said. Her voice sounded hot and angry.
“You’re not wrong.” The widow replaced the book and sat again. “The ruins—again, this is a guess—were likely a hideout, an entire city he could run to if he needed one. Whether the spell decayed and he simply didn’t notice, or he pulled the power from it for some other purpose, I can’t say. Either would be like him. He was sloppy. Powerful but sloppy.” Her tone was deeply bitter.
He sighed. “So, I didn’t kill her, did I?”
“You knew you didn’t kill her?” Hildon’s tone was overly sweet.
“I…might have noticed there wasn’t a body or anything.” He hunched his shoulders. “She’d already turned into a pile of goo, though, and the curse was gone, so that could have gone either way.”
“Hmph.” The man didn’t look pleased but the reasoning was good enough to forestall a fight.
“No,” the widow said. “You didn’t kill it. To kill a demon is a tricky thing. It’s not impossible but it is difficult.”
“Wait,” Zaara interrupted. “I don’t understand something. The witch made the werewolves, right? She made that curse? But then she told us to undo it because it was draining the forest. None of that made sense to me.”
“She was a lyin’ bitch,” Lyle interjected.
“You can hardly expect something different from a demon,” the healer said wryly. “Be that as it may, however, the girl has a point. There’s a reason I gave Justin a silver sword—werewolves have been known in this area for generations. I don’t know how the first came to be, and when I heard mention of large wolves behaving oddly, I thought perhaps they had returned. I was both right and wrong. The demon did make them. It wanted an army of monsters to do its bidding, you see. I can’t exactly blame it for wanting revenge after what Sephith did to it.”
“It tried to make werewolves but realized the curse took too much power,” Justin said slowly. “That makes sense. She was trapped in a weakened form—it was enough to trap us when we went into the hut but not enough to fight the entire pack of werewolves.”
“And to undo a spell takes an investment of power, much like making one in the first place,” the widow agreed. “It needed someone to get rid of the problem. It probably didn’t see you coming up with quite that solution, of course.”
“How do we kill it?” Hildon asked bluntly. He didn’t seem at all interested in the lore. “You said it wasn’t impossible, so how do we do it?”
The widow gave him a smile. “Very, very carefully, of course.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The Diatek labs were vastly more impressive than PIVOT’s had been. Amber wanted to be dispirited by that. She’d been so proud to be able to rent a space of their own and now, it looked shabby by comparison.
On the other hand, she wanted to drool at how many tools were laid out within eyesight. There would be no scraping projects together and McGuyvering solutions that might go wrong at a critical moment. They would have whatever they needed, whenever they needed it.
The pods were laid out in an orderly row. Nick worked with the Diatek engineers to get each of the unused pods hooked up while another followed them and made extensive notes.