He sounded genuinely stricken, but Pan didn’t trust it. “Yet you survived while they all died?”

“A cruel trick of fate. I was knocked down early and pinned beneath the bodies. I lay there until it was over, stunned and bleeding, unable to move.”

“Your vaunted magic? Your skills with oratory? Nothing would have helped?”

“Do not mock me, boy. I did what I could. I don’t have to explain myself to you or anyone else.”

This was the Skeal Eile Pan knew, arrogant and dismissive. The boy began to advance on him anew, enraged. But once again the runes of his staff blazed and a fresh uneasiness washed through him.

He stopped once more, trying to decide what was wrong. The demon was here. It had to be. Close by. It felt as if it were right in front of him.

His gaze fastened on Skeal Eile. Right in front of him. Skeal Eile, for all intents and purposes, but yet not quite as Pan remembered him. Something was different—enough so that he realized the truth. He took a quick breath. He had almost missed it, almost given himself over to his worst enemy. This wasn’t the Seraphic he was dealing with, even if that was how it appeared. It wasn’t the Seraphic who was standing there, speaking to him.

It was the demon.

The confrontation that Prue had warned him about was happening right now, and he hadn’t even been aware of it.

He had just enough time to whip the staff around in front of him like a shield, the magic flowing through its length and into his body, his startled recognition changing to steely determination as the demon attacked. It must have seen something in his eyes or read it in his body language, but it acted quickly, arms extending in a billowing of black robes, fire lancing out in a wicked green wave. The magic slammed into Panterra and threw him backward, knocking him off his feet to sprawl among the dead. It washed over him like a blanket that would smother him, sucking away all the air, its heat intensifying as it pressed downward. Pan fought back with his own magic, using the staff to keep the flames at bay, fighting to gain space and time.

When the attack broke off, a sudden cessation of sustained effort, Pan rolled away from the place to which he had been pinned and surged back to his feet. But at once the attack began anew, this time in a series of sharp bursts that struck with such force his bones rattled. He fought this attack off, too, but it drained his energy and left him shaking. The demon was giving him no chance to react to what was happening. He was fighting a defensive battle, and the effort he was expending kept him from mounting any sort of counteroffensive.