I move over to the window with all the broken glass, and with a little dread, I slam my hand down on a jagged piece. The glass breaks and falls away, but my hand remains unscathed. “I’m still immortal,” I tell him on a quiet breath.
“Then we need you. Even Alyssa seems to be mortal right now. We’re vulnerable, exposed, and weak.”
“I’m at least twenty-four hours away if I drive all night, and I’ll have to find a car.”
“What the actual fuck? How’d you get that far away that fast?”
“My magic is different than your magic. But that power is gone right now.”
He releases a litany of curses, and I lift Kya when her phone starts ringing. Carefully, I hold her to me, allowing her to climb back onto the bed that I’ve ensured is safe to the touch.
All those years I spent tending to Ella and Kimber as they grew up with mortal fragileness until they hit immortality is coming back to me.
She answers her phone, and I can hear Slade barking at her from this side after she tells him how far away we are.
“Hang on,” I tell Gage as I listen in.
“How long will it last?” Kya is asking.
“Twenty-two hours exactly,” Slade tells her. “So stay put. You’re too vulnerable right now. We all are. There will be a brief intermittent moment where our powers are restored for a few hours, but they’ll be stripped again. Those fuckers are close to opening the portal, and now there’s no way we can go after them until this wears off.”
I question her with my eyes, but she holds up a finger.
“Chaz has power. Just his dragonite power, though. And he can’t shift.”
A silence stretches for a few long minutes. “Then they don’t know what all he has in him. This could be what we need to surprise them, because there’s no doubt they’ll do this again right when they open the portal. That’s why they wanted to know all our weaknesses. It was never to build an army of power. It was always to do this. They have all the anointed weapons they need and the numbers to take us down.”
“And we’ve been honing our skills instead of our fighting abilities,” Kya groans.
“Which is what they knew we’d do.”
“What is it?” I ask her. I somehow missed the explanation.
She purses her lips. “A spell.”
“No spell is this strong.”
“A fucking spell?” Gage says against my ear, reminding me he’s still on the line.
“Only a coven—a very powerful coven—could pull off something of this magnitude, but they’d have to have a sample of blood from every known species to block their powers. It’s temporary, because they don’t have the power to hold it for that long. No one does. Twenty-two hours is the maximum, but they can just relock it in. It’ll drain them, but they can reuse the spell immediately. We’ll only have a small window to get back and help the others take them down,” Kya explains.
“Did you hear that?” I ask Gage.
“All I heard was muffled bits and pieces. Apparently our keen hearing has disappeared with our powers. Vision and other senses too.”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity fuck.
I repeat what Kya just said to me, telling him almost every detail, and pausing for her to tell me things I might have missed. She finally takes the phone away and puts both our phones on speaker.
“Now tell us the rest,” she tells Slade. “Why does Chaz still have his dragonite?”
He mutters something too low for even me to hear.
“The spell has certain limitations. I doubt they had the blood of a dragonite to use, nor did they even consider that possibility,” Slade explains. “The spell is complex and incredibly exhausting to the ones using it. It’ll weaken them.”
“But they would have weakened the demons too, right? And they’re witch demons or something,” Gage says through the speaker.
“I don’t have my powers, so they had to have stripped demons as well,” Karma interjects through my phone.