Page 125 of First Ritual

I wrenched myself back from that edge with painstaking intention. Wild and I were done. We’d never been, but we were done.

We had to be done.

He, more than anyone in this world, could discover the truth. I needed time to figure out how to kill the demon within me. How to cut the mystery tether that connected me to another demon.

My voice was hoarse as I placed a hand on Wild’s chest and pushed. Not hard enough to make him move, but the intention was evident to us both. “All the best for Caves and figuring everything out.”

I strode away.

And he let me.

Something in that felt final. Like a true goodbye. The idea of a farewell settled upon my shoulders. The coven could never discover what I was if I left. Maybe I’d operated for so long alone on an instinctual level, knowing other magus shouldn’t get too close.

Leaving would be my last resort. I had answers to seek first about how to fix myself. Then I could leave.

Reentering the caves, I didn’t join the bustling business of breakfast. Heading to my room instead, I proceeded to empty my duffel of demon books. Selecting one titled, Daemonium, I banished the other tomes back to the depths of my bag.

Finding the index, I ran through the chapter headings listed there. I wanted to know more about demon possession—if that’s what was happening to me. I wanted to know if demons had possessed magus in the past. How to extract the demon. How to cut the tether.

If I could figure all that out, then maybe I wouldn’t feel like an imposter in every facet of life.

Unfortunately, none of the chapter headings was titled, Everything Tempest Needs to Know, so I settled on chapter fifty-nine, How to Kill a Demon.

As expected, that chapter explained—in gory detail—how to physically kill a demon. I flipped through. Anatomy of a Demon. Magical Weaknesses was after that.

“This could be something.” I read the chapter, going over lines four or five times as I pushed through. Why did reading suck so bad?

I got there in the end, closing the book after to reflect on a statement I’d just finished.

Being a conduit of dark magic, a demon is weakened by the opposite, just as the light of a magus is weakened by darkness. A stronger magus will survive an attack from a demon as the sum of dark versus light will prevail in the magus’s favor. A stronger demon will survive a battle with a weaker magus for the opposite reason. In a scenario of matched power, both will die. A magus and demon are as poison to each other and cannot exist alongside each other.

The last sentence caught me most, looping and repeating in my head. Poison to each other. That’s what I felt. What all magus would feel about harboring a demon in their being. A magus and demon were poison to each other. How was it possible that I had poison in me and didn’t feel like death? How was I strong and healthy? Alternatively, why hadn’t my magic forced the creature out if I was the stronger supernatural?

How were we coexisting? Even if our magic was equal and opposite, then we should both be dead.

I ran through the chapter headings again, then banished the book for another.

Then another.

I found similar information about magus and demons in the texts, but nothing new. I wanted to know…

What did I want to know? So much.

I knew when this creature entered me—when it murdered my family. I knew how it entered me—by overwhelming me when I was on the brink of death and setting up camp in my weakest and newest magical channel.

But how was it surviving? This had to have happened to a magus and demon before. I should look at books on historical battles with demons. The idea was as good as I could summon. Banishing the books to the library ahead of me, I hurried to the bottom level to get more books from the damn place.

“Bronte!”

The call had me skidding to a halt. I located Rooke back at my door. Our tether hummed, and I couldn’t ignore her like I would’ve the guys. Deep down, part of me didn’t want to set fire to everything in my life.

I walked back. “Hey.”

“I was coming to get you for the final strategy meeting,” she said, blue eyes searching my face in a way that spoke of what the guys had told her about their recent encounters with me.

I noticed the emptiness of the hall for the first time. “It’s that time already?” I’d missed lunch too.

She quirked a brow. “You coming or what?”