I wanted to weep but didn’t have the strength. They couldn’t help me. I admired Ceri’s confidence, her proud and impassioned stance, but it was misplaced. I might as well be dead.

“Demon,” she said, her voice chiming thorough the still air like a bell. “I bind you.”

Al jerked as a sheet of smokey blue ever-after blossomed over us, and his face reddened. “Es scortum obscenus impurua!” he shouted, letting me go. I stayed where I fell, knowing he wouldn’t have released me if I could escape. “How dare you use what I taught you to bind me!”

Panting, I pulled my head up, only now realizing why she had touched David and then Keasley. David had started the circle, Ceri had made a second portion of it, and Keasley had made the third. They had given her permission to bind their paths together as one. The circle had been made; he was caught. And as I watched him pace to the edge of the bubble and a victorious Ceri, I thought it wouldn’t take much for him to decide to kill me out of spite.

“Moecha putida!” he shouted, hammering on the force between them. “Ceri, I will tear your soul from you again, I swear it!”

“Et de,” she said, her narrow chin high and her eyes glinting, “acervus excerementum. You can jump to a line from here. Leave now before the sun rises so we can all go back to bed.”

Algaliarept took a slow breath, and I shuddered at the bound anger in the movement. “No,” he said. “I’m going to widen Rachel’s horizons, and you will listen to her scream as she learns to take the full capacity of what I demand.”

He could draw more through me? I thought, feeling my lungs press together as I temporarily lost the will to breathe. There was worse than this?

Ceri’s confidence faltered. “No,” she said. “She doesn’t know how to store it properly. Any more, and her mind will bend. She’ll be insane before you teach her how to make your tea.”

“You don’t need to be sane to make tea or do my toast upon one side,” he snarled. Snatching my arm, he jerked me unresisting to my feet.

Ceri shook her head, standing in the snow as if it were summer. “You’re being petty. You’ve lost her. She outsmarted you. You’re a sore loser.”

Al pinched my shoulder, and I gritted my teeth, refusing to cry out. It was only pain. It was nothing compared to the steady burning of the ever-after he was forcing me to hold for him. “Sore loser!” he shouted, and I heard the cries of fear from the people in the shadows. “She can’t hide on holy ground forever. If she tries, I’ll find a way to use her through the lines.”