Page 37 of Try As I Smite
“Let me help,” she said. “Please.”
Begging? He couldn’t allow that from this amazing, tough, brave woman. He reached for her, but a voice stopped him.
“Alasdair?” Hestia circled around to face him. “Why is this…person…here?”
He ignored the facsimile of his sister, focused on the woman in front of him.
Delilah didn’t move by so much as a twitch. “Trust me,” she mouthed.
…
Even the thought of what she was about to do had the bindings around her wrists clamping down so hard, keeping the agony from her face was a battle of sheer will. If Alasdair knew, he’d send her away.
The instant she’d landed back in her office, the significance of those sparking lights around the crater in that future vision had struck. This moment, right now, would start the entire battle. Because Alasdair was going to blow up the building. He had made that crater in the future.
Not even her mother could have predicted that, or Delilah had no doubt that vision would have started in this room instead.
The man stared down at her and she could see the battle in his eyes. Who’d already betrayed him by refusing to help once? Would he trust a woman whose blood was half demon? She wasn’t remotely confident that she’d make a difference. Her vision hadn’t gone beyond what happened without her here. After seeing that…no fucking way was she letting him face this alone.
Alasdair’s expression settled, determination there in the cold set of his jaw, and utter, incredible trust in the blue of his eyes. “Okay, goddess. Call the shots.”
She couldn’t let the burst of relief at his words distract her. He wasn’t going to like the shot she called. Neither was she.
Wrists already screaming in agony, she turned slowly.
Pain leaked from her eyes in rivulets down her cheeks that she ignored even as her skin now might as well have been dipped in dragon fire. She put out a hand, palm facing them, feeling the essence of each demon in the room. Lower-level demons. Her mother had once explained that escaping the bounds of the seven hells was easier when the signature you put out, due to a lower power level, wasn’t as easily traceable.
Exactly what Delilah had been hoping for.
These were placeholders for the more powerful demons to come. Which meant, thanks to her mother’s stronger demon blood—the original blood of angels—in Delilah’s veins, she held sway over these foot soldiers.
With a grip on the demons’ essences, she dropped two words into the silent room of watching demons and magi. “Idimmu Alka.”
Demon Come.
Then formed a fist and jerked it toward her.
As the demons screamed a protest at being forcibly wrenched from the bodies they inhabited, pain lit up every single nerve ending in her body, radiating up her arms and down her spine and outward. Agony sent her to her knees.
“Delilah?” Alasdair’s voice barely registered.
“When they’re out,” she managed to choke. “Take the others and go.”
“I’m not leaving you—”
“Please.” She wasn’t beneath begging. Not for his life. “Trust me.”
Even if she died in the process.
The last demon, shadow seeming to hold on to the body it had claimed by the tips of its claws, finally slipped free. “Go!” she shouted.
In an instant, wind battering her, he was gone, along with every other human in the room.
“Impossible,” one of the shadows hissed.
Delilah didn’t stop, though.
Summoning the strength to push through the pain, she spoke again. “Ati Me Peta Babka. Alik.”
