Interrupted. Ruined. Extinguished.

“They are inside,” he growled.

Silence pulsed through the room.

“Who’s inside?” Kai demanded.

“Odin’s Eye,” Tori answered in a choked whisper.

My head snapped toward her. Odin’s Eye? The guild? How did she know that? Even Zylas didn’t know who the intruders were.

Aaron jolted like he’d been electrocuted. “We have to get out of here!”

He, Tori, and Kai pivoted toward the basement’s only exit, but I didn’t move. Because I already knew. I’d already seen it through Zylas’s eyes. The enemy had been heading for the stairwell. They knew exactly where we were and how to trap us.

A hand closed over my arm. Zylas swung me toward Amalia, then sank into a half crouch in front of us, fingers curling and claws unsheathing. His thoughts flickered across mine.

He could hear them. Footsteps on the stairs. Rustling clothing. The heavy breaths of large men.

“Aaron Sinclair. Kai Yamada. Tori Dawson.” The deep voice called through the doorway, the Odin’s Eye team just out of sight. “You’ve been charged with harboring a demon mage, a capital offense under MPD law. Surrender now, or we will attack with lethal force.”

Reaching out, I grabbed Amalia’s hand, my fingers digging in. They knew. They knew Ezra was a demon mage. How?

“Ezra Rowe,” the man continued in a rough half-shout. “You’ve been identified as a demon mage and the MPD Emergency Judiciary Council has ordered your immediate execution. If you have any integrity or humanity left, you will surrender as well.”

Amalia squeezed my hand so hard it hurt.

Ezra stood as motionless as a statue. He hadn’t moved from his spot in the circle, his expression terrifyingly blank and the gleam of demonic power gone from his left eye.

Tori whipped her arm out, flinging a small glass orb at the floor.

At the exact same moment, Zylas leaped toward the summoning circle. He slammed his fist into the floor, shattering the concrete—and the runes inscribed on it. Breaking the circle. Freeing Ezra.

Tori’s glass ball smashed an instant later and smoke billowed out from the shards, rushing to fill the room. My vision went white.

With roaring shouts and thundering steps, the unseen mythics charged into the basement.

Chapter Eleven

Magic exploded everywhere, flashes and booms within the mist. A burst of orange light briefly illuminated Aaron’s silhouette.

Panic screeched in my head. What should we do? Fight them? Kill them? But they weren’t rogues or cultists—they were bounty hunters trying to bring down a lethal demon mage. There was nothing evil or immoral in that.

“Robin!” Amalia shouted in my ear, clutching the cult grimoire. “The circle!”

The circle. Drawn across the floor was twenty-five feet of evidence that we’d been engaging in illegal Demonica magic. To have any chance of getting out of this without a death sentence, we had to get rid of the circle.

I launched toward the corner where we’d left all our things. A shadow loomed across my path—a bearded man with a battle axe in hand.

Zylas shot past me. He slammed into the mythic, driving him back, and I rushed forward, Amalia right behind me. There. My backpack and the duffle bag. I skidded to a stop and dropped to my knees. Amalia shoved the cult grimoire into my backpack while I dug into the duffle bag.

An explosion hit us, throwing me into Amalia. We sprawled on the concrete as two mythics ran out of the fog, one with a sword and the other holding a key chain that rattled with small artifacts.

Zylas darted in behind them. Before they realized he was there, he’d swept his leg into their ankles. As they crashed down, he sprang onto their backs, grabbed their heads, and slammed their faces into the floor.

Don’t kill them! I shrieked silently, praying he would listen because I didn’t have time to explain why we couldn’t use lethal force in this fight.

Lurching toward the duffle bag, I got my hands on a thin metal handle. I yanked and the two-gallon bucket of “remover” lifted out of the bag. I pried off the lid, threw it aside, and heaved the bucket up. The clear liquid inside sloshed wildly.

Heedless of the nearby shadows of mythics obscured by the smokescreen, I ran to the circle and flung the potion onto the floor. It splashed over the concrete, and wherever it ran, the red-tinged lines of the Arcana array vanished.

Amalia appeared beside me, holding the mop bucket, full of old water from when I’d cleaned the floor. She pitched the water into the circle. It sloshed into the remover potion, the two liquids mixing, and as it spread farther across the circle, the markings blurred and melted away, leaving indistinct smears.

Dropping the bucket, Amalia dove back toward our bags.

A gust of wind whipped across me, smoke swirling in its wake. Ezra rushed out of the haze, lunging across the wet floor at a group of Odin’s Eye mythics.

“Mario!” The shout cut through the chaos. “Get your demon over here!”

A demon? There was another contractor here?

With a flash of crimson, a beastly shadow appeared, moving toward Ezra. More mythics had surrounded him. He was trapped—and in moments, he’d be overwhelmed.

Zylas!

He didn’t need my prompting. His agile form shot past me, then he was smashing into the wall of mythics encircling Ezra. A man went down, knocked off his feet, while Zylas leaped for the next in line. Swinging off the heavier man’s shoulders, the demon kicked a third mythic into the wall.

As the mythics reeled back from the demon, magic gleamed off something silver on the floor a few steps away from me—the case of Nazhivēr’s blood, abandoned on the concrete.

“Ezra!” Aaron shouted. “Whirlwind!”

A shrieking gust erupted through the room, whipping grit into my face. Squinching my eyes, I dove for the floor and grabbed the case with both hands.

The howling whirlwind exploded into flame.

I screamed—then weight landed on my back. Zylas covered me with his body as the inferno tore through the room, carried by Ezra’s tornado. As heat buffeted us, all the hair on my body stood on end.

Zylas scooped me up and leaped off the floor, wrenching me into the air—right as the fluorescent lights lining the ceiling exploded with electricity. Bolts flashed from the ceiling to the floor. Cries rang out as the crackling power found its targets.

Landing on the wet floor, Zylas slipped on the slick surface, recovered, and sprang toward the corner where Amalia cowered with her arms over her head. He swung me under one arm while I desperately clutched the case of demon blood, then grabbed Amalia. As he heaved her over his shoulder, I stretched my hand out.

My fingers snagged the strap of my backpack, the top open and a corner of the grimoire sticking out.

Wind roared, fire flashed, and electricity crackled, the entire basement consumed in a hellscape of raging elements. As I swept the backpack up and stuck my arm through the straps, Zylas whirled. He sprinted along the wall, keeping out of the worst of the elemental storm.

The doorway loomed just ahead—and fire blasted out of it.

Zylas dove. Cold swept over him as he sucked the heat in before it could burn me and Amalia. The inferno roiled over us and we slid into the small landing at the base of the stairs.