Phoenix Academy - Lucy Auburn Page 0,2

moved to the Great Beyond and is at peace, though my heart aches at the thought of her being alone, even in a place like Heaven.

I'll free our mother's soul so that she can join Lizzy and they can have the peace denied to them.

I just have to figure out how to get her out of that marble. It can't be too difficult—a shrink spell of some sort, easily reversible. Whatever the demon did, his magic is nothing next to Auerbach's. He should be able to help.

"Here we are." Turning a corner in the maze of hedges, Isiah motions towards a large carved wooden door at the end and bows mockingly in my direction. "Now, if you'll just come with me, I have a little something to show you."

He draws a knife from the pocket of his three piece suit.

Xavier looks over at me with panic in his eyes.

Reggie tenses, staring at the demon.

Beneath my fingers, David begins to pant with anxiety.

This is it. This is the moment where I do something, anything. Where I use my half-formed, barely controlled Blue Phoenix powers to save the world from being overrun by demonic hordes.

Reaching into the bright pool of magic that lives within me, I summon it to my fingertips. Then I let my awareness reach out towards everything around us: the strange emptiness of the Spirit Realm, the feeling of my three familiars standing around me, all connected, and the black hole of pure evil that is the trickster demon.

He's like a black pit that pulls everything around him in and destroys it. While I can feel the pulse of life in the hedges around us, flowers and vines running through them, the garden full of naturalistic energy, it all ends a few inches away from the trickster demon. There's something about him that eats up life, energy, happiness—sucking it in and destroying it as if it were nothing.

And there's deception in him, too.

He didn't tell me his true name, but I have the feeling I'll need it to create a connection between us and try to control him.

So as he turns to me, sensing my magic, and snarls in rage, I throw all of myself into him to try to see inside his not-quite-human mind.

It's hard. I'm not telepathic. I don't know what I'm doing, either. But the rules of magic seem upended here, between the realms of the living and the dead. My power does strange and terrible things.

Like fill Xavier, Reggie, and David with rage and anger, causing them to attack the demon all at once.

As they fall on him, he attacks them back, throwing balls of red-hot energy at them and wielding his knife. He stabs Xavier, who grabs the knife in his chest, tears it out, and stabs him back.

It isn't a death blow for either of them. Xavier's shifter energy begins to heal him almost instantly, and the demon is clearly going to be fine, based on the way he laughs and pulls the knife out. Even when David leaps on him and throws him to the ground, wolf teeth snapping in his face, he barely seems affected.

But the tear in his physical body created by the stab wound is enough of a weakness for my magic to exploit. Pouring my consciousness out and into him, I root around in the demon's mind, looking for his true name. His demonic name.

I know he isn't Isiah.

He tries to fight my magic, but I take a step forward, blue hair crackling with energy, eyes on him. David growls in his face and holds him down; Reggie leaps on him as well, sitting on his legs, the two of them keeping the demon from getting up, at least for a moment.

In his frustration, the demon concentrates on my shifters instead of me, just for a moment—and that's all it takes. I open up the lock inside his mind and step through, into the truth on the other side of it.

Ezriel.

He was an angel once, whatever that is in the Great Beyond. A being of pure light and energy. One who blessed and healed. Until he fell, and became a different, twisted kind of thing, a dark and evil presence on Earth, not quite mortal, not quite immortal. Then he fell again, this time through death, becoming a demon—not the kind that Dani's quartet are, a mortal serving penance for sins committed in life, but a horrifying, monstrous kind of demon.

His mind throws me out all at once,