Page 111 of Spirit Storm

The atmospheric pressure in the chamber becomes evident to me the moment I touch it. It's strange to feel it so subtly while the world is in chaos and everyone around me is fighting for their lives.

I give it a pull and there's a change in the weight of the air, something that makes Freya glance sideways and Bjorn's next strike go fractionally wide as the air around his fist suddenly pushes back.

"Sorry." I raise a quick hand in apology and refocus. "Give me a second."

I breathe it into my lungs and let it build. The thing about the air down here is that it isn't as still as I first expected. It's moving through cracks and fissures and hollow places in the rock, pulled by temperature and pressure and the subtle draft of deeper passages.

Now that I'm tuning in, I feel all of it. Every thread and current, every place the air thins and every place it stacks.

And, like Orion suggested a few days ago, I experiment.

I pull it tight… and the demons in the center of the chamber stumble as a rotational pressure system drops around them. It's a bit like wind but kind of the opposite. More like a plane hitting an air pocket and bouncing around in the turbulence to find its position again.

I try it again, and Tharuzel's attention turns from my friends and the rune circle and retargets me.

Good. If he's focused on me, they are safer.

I drive a column of pressure down, and the four demons beneath it slam into the floor like they've been pressed there by an invisible fist. The floor cracks under the force, and I realize just how much strength this new affinity affords me.

Freya stares at me. "What was that?"

There's no time to answer. I've got Tharuzel's attention now, and that means I've also got the next wave of demons redirected at me.

That's fine. It pulls them away from the rune circle and from Asher, and it gives the others space to breathe.

I meet them with both magic systems running simultaneously, spirit fire in my left hand, atmospheric strike in my right, and it is genuinely the most cognitively demanding thing I've ever done in my life.

But it is also working in a way that spirit fire alone was not.

Amara lets out a short, fierce laugh somewhere to my right. "She's a wind witch too?"

Wylder flashes a wide smile. "She's something."

Nolan grunts, his left arm hanging limp at his side, blood dripping down his fingers from under his sleeve. "Any other surprises we should know about?"

"Ask me when we're not about to die."

The next few minutes are the most alive I've ever felt and also the most terrified. We fight well as a unit without practicing or planning to, the nine of us with spirit affinities understanding the magic each of us wields, even if it presents in different ways.

The variables added are my second affinity, Wylder's plant magic, and Asher's angel power. Where Tharuzel and his demons are darkness, torture, and suffering, Asher is all light, joy, and celebration.

There's no fighting that.

Well… there's definitely fighting it, but they're having a hard time defeating it.

Poor Wylder is fighting to keep the chamber intact. Every time Tharuzel hits the walls with a strike, Asher's shield holds, and more of the cave structure around us crumbles.

And the demons keep coming.

And coming.

And coming.

Priya is the first to go down hard. A demon the size of a refrigerator catches her mid-turn and drives her into the wall. I hear the impact from across the chamber and it turns my stomach. I don't think she's dead, but she certainly isn't getting up anytime soon.

When her attacker steps back, she crumples to the ground and is swallowed up by darkness. Sebastian sees what happened and drags her clear of the mass of fighting in the center of the room.

"Poppy!" Bjorn shoves me to the side and takes a strike to the chest that should have been mine. The force throws him six feet, and he lands badly and doesn't get up.