Memories flooded me. Fighting a creature just like this one, almost dying, bringing its body to the inn, learning it was my brother’s best friend, and then watching the corruption within it leak out and escape. It crawled inside my inn like some disgusting parasite. It tried to infect Gertrude Hunt and Tony, while I could do nothing, helpless and torn from my own body by the death of the tiny inn I’d tried so hard to save.

I had killed that intruder. I had purged it from my inn. I was an innkeeper, and I would purge this one. It was my duty.

I pulled the broom from my back and planted it in front of me. Magic streamed around me, spiraling from my body and tugging at my hair.

The corrupted ad-hal snapped its hands up.

I pushed my magic out into the building under me. It streamed through the stone of the terrace into the first floor below, glowing from the soles of my feet like roots of a tree.

Twin balls of lightning flared in the ad-hal’s hands, fed by its magic. It clamped them together. The glowing clumps connected, merging into a blinding sphere churning with energy. More lightning clasped it, sliding from the creature’s robe.

“Dina!” Karat yelled behind me. “Get away from it!”

I wrapped my magic around me and the broom like a cocoon, binding us.

The brilliant sphere broke. A beam of orange lightning streaked toward me, mottled with dark magic.

I gripped my broom, pulsing my power through it.

The beam tore at my magic screen, trying to drill through it, scalding, burning, biting… The strain gripped my spine, crushing my vertebrae, so heavy it felt like I would crumple and collapse. The magic tore at me, trying to push me back, but I was anchored. My roots were deep. I would not be moved.

The beam flared with pure white.

Agony vibrated through me, radiating from my chest to my fingertips. I tasted blood and held fast.

The beam sputtered.

I waited, filled with pain.

The lightning died.

“My turn.”

I fed everything I had into my broom. The shaft split in my hand, sprouting tentacles of brilliant turquoise. They surged to the creature and gripped it in a vise, wrapping over its robe.

The corrupted ad-hal screeched. Its power flared, coating my tentacles, fighting against me. I gritted my teeth and squeezed. Killing it wasn’t enough. I had to contain it. It would not infect anything else.

The lightning dashed up the tentacles to the broom and bit at my hand. It felt like someone flayed me with an electric razor blade.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t rage. I just squeezed, harder and harder, trying to wring it out of existence. Nothing it could do to me would make me stop. If the sky cracked and fell on me, I would keep squeezing.