Legacy & Spellbound by Nancy Holder Page A

enough, she had created another barrier.
    â€œGet me out of here, get me out of here!” Kari screamed hysterically. “What’s going on?”
    â€œI’m guessing guards,” Silvana told her, wasting precious energy. “We must be near the headquarters.”
    â€œThen they probably know it!” Kari cried. “They’ll be sending out reinforcements!”
    As if on cue—or by magic spell—the area directly in front of Kari and Silvana burst open with a flash ofblue light. Dozens of tiny bony creatures poured out, chittering and gabbling as they darted toward the two girls. They were imps, all mouth and fury, and they were coming after Kari and Silvana.
    Kari started screaming again.
    â€œWill you shut up!” Silvana yelled at her.
    They both made U -turns, running back in the same direction they had come … until they hit the fourth barrier Silvana had created. Unable to slow down in time, Kari smacked into it, while Silvana managed to avoid a collision. Kari ricocheted backward, disoriented, while Silvana lunged forward and grabbed her, pulling the other girl against her as she held out her left hand and tried to conjure a fireball.
    Her spell failed.
    The imps kept coming.
    Sasha stood beside a male witch whose name she didn’t know—he wasn’t Joel, who had silently followed them here—and together they created a thick, brilliant wall of light. The creatures of darkness that tore themselves into it were instantly consumed. It lasted perhaps ten seconds, then faded.
    â€œAnother?” Sasha queried, and the man nodded.
    They extended their arms, murmured their invocations and incantations in Latin, and created a secondwall. But by then, the oncoming demons and imps steered clear of it, and it faded without taking out a single adversary.
    The man shouted,
“La-bas!”
and Sasha, who lived at the Mother Temple in Paris and spoke French, pointed her fingers at the ground. She willed her energy to become subject to him, to give strength to his spell, and together they incised a ravine into the snow.
    The first demon to step into it plummeted downward as if into a bottomless chasm.
    At the man’s urging, Sasha walked backward, allowing him to use her energy once more to create a second ravine, and then a third. By then she was utterly depleted and trembling like a leaf. Her knees buckled, and he caught her up in his arms, holding her as he whirled around. She knew they had kept their backs undefended for too long, and so she wasn’t too surprised to see a new kind of demon—this one snakelike, with several arms and an elongated head— whipping toward them. It extended its black, forked tongue and it snapped at the man’s arm like a whip. Sasha heard a sharp hiss of burned flesh, and the man flinched but did not drop her.
    The tongue retracted as the demon rushed at them.
    Then the creature extended it again.
    * * *
    Tommy bellowed as he fought in hand-to-hand combat. He was fighting with a sword Amanda had grabbed from one of the dead demons. His opponent had just appeared, bursting through one of the portals—a skeletal warrior with green glowing eyes.
    As Amanda bombarded it with waves of magical energy, it continued to attack. Miraculously, Tommy was holding his own, fighting with uncommon skill—
it can’t be because of that one semester we had of fencing—
he looked as surprised as she felt. Then she realized that someone must be augmenting his skill with magic.
    With an athletic lunge, he shoved the sword into the rib cage of the skeleton as if to pierce its heart, and the figure exploded in a shower of bones.
    There was no time to so much as cheer. Another skeleton burst through the same portal and took up position. Before Amanda could register its arrival, a third one appeared.
    Something rushed through her like an electric current, making the fillings in her teeth tingle. Her muscles jumped, her heart skipped