Page 36 of Try As I Smite
But mages got their power from within, and he had to be running low by now, risking his life to continue using magic.
Each spell affected fewer and fewer until the numbers swelled over him like a tidal wave and he went under. She waited. Waited for him to get out from under it like he had only moments ago. For him to fry the demons. But he didn’t. He wasn’t coming back up.
Delilah, heedless of how this was only a vision, sprinted toward him. Before she reached him, though, the bodies suddenly flew away, as though one of the gods had reached down from the heavens with his great fist, scooped them up, and tossed them away.
Thank the gods—
The thought stopped stone-cold inside her mind as she caught sight of him. Delilah tripped and fell to her knees. Heedless of the rocky ground, she gaped at the man now standing at the center of the demon horde. Pitch-black eyes in a chiseled face now as familiar to her and dear to her as her own.
Alasdair. But not.
He’d been possessed. The red glowing mark on his forehead, turning brighter by the second, told her what had him in its thrall. That same fucker who’d been after him all along. The world was fucked.
She had enough time to suck in an audible, painful gasp before her vision went black.
Chapter Nine
Delilah’s father had sent him to the forested mountains of northern California, just outside the Syndicate headquarters.
She’d made him leave. Had him sent away.
Delilah.
Everything inside him screamed and strained to go back and get her, but he couldn’t. He curled his hands into fists at his sides, pushing the devastation of losing her—because that’s what had just happened—down into the dark recesses of his soul.
She was right. He was out of time.
With a whisper of a spell, he teleported to the building. Alasdair didn’t use the landing pad officially created for teleporting use, a spell that tended to be windy on takeoff and landing. The wards around the Covens Syndicate building prevented arriving or departing within the walls as a precaution against magical invasion.
His wards. Ones he’d put in place himself.
Which meant he could break his own rules. So he bypassed the pad to appear directly in the main chamber where the members of the Syndicate met. The possessed members, now. The windows rattled a protest at his sudden, slightly violent appearance.
“Dammit, Alasdair.” This from Abernathy Khan, the oldest of their order. “Rules.”
Fuck, the demon inside his old mentor was good. That was exactly what the real Abernathy would have said.
Don’t believe it. It’s not him.
He ignored the old man, looking around. Two empty chairs now. His and… “Where is Hestia?”
“Behind you, big brother.”
Alasdair tried not to stiffen, calling on that control that he’d lost sight of today as he’d gone through all those visions with Delilah. Because that might be Hestia’s voice, but his sister never called him big brother. Ever.
“Good. We’re going to need you,” he said, pretending to be ignorant of the demon inside her.
Inside his sweet younger sister, who’d been raised separately from him because she cried every time she saw him and had to remember what he’d done to their father. Who he’d hardly known until they were both adults, when he’d discovered that she cried because she hated what he’d had to witness and go through, not because she blamed him. Anger seeped into his bones like poison, and he had to physically hold back his own power. He was going to need it for what was about to come.
He had to stop this. Here and now.
A whoosh of sound, soft as hummingbird wings, was the only warning he had before Delilah suddenly appeared in the room next to him. Right in front of him, back to the others so she could look up into his face, hers deadly serious, paler than her usual shade of cream. She glanced around and he could have sworn relief flitted across her expression.
Relief?
“I just saw the future,” she said, dark eyes intent.
And came rushing to him after so adamantly refusing to come with him? Not only that, she was relieved to see him in a room full of demon-possessed mages? Whatever she’d seen must’ve been horrific.
