Someone touched me, and I jerked, pulling my energies back when I saw Trent. “Trent . . . ,” I started, words failing when I realized he was dragging me away from Nina.

My eyes darted to her, and my mouth went dry.

I didn’t think it was just Nina anymore.

She’d rolled to her feet, hands still holding that staff as she hunched into a ball and bared her teeth at the surface demons still shaking off the fall. Her eyes flicked to Trent and me, and I shuddered as I recognized the second presence smothering her psyche. It was Felix. And it had happened far too fast.

In a smooth, unhurried motion, Nina rose, her feet placed wide to bind the skirt about her knees. An almost visible charismatic power spilled from her in the new dark. Black eyes glinting, she whirled the staff in a dangerous arc, making it smack into the earth in a clear threat.

Anger tightened my resolve, and I pulled myself straight. Nina had lied. She had outright lied to Ivy, telling her she’d made a break from Felix. There was no way the master vampire would’ve known she was in danger if she hadn’t already had him in her, balancing her emotions and soaking in her thoughts of sunlight and love.

From the darkness, a surface demon hissed.

Trent spun, his shoes grinding the grit as his magic tugged at my energies. The smaller demon was running at her, Nina screaming at it, egging it on, whirling the staff again as if it were a sword.

But it never reached her as that second, larger surface demon plowed into the first.

“Look out!” I cried, pulling Trent back as the demons rolled in the dirt, grappling, hissing and howling, clawing at the tatters of their clothes and gouging each other’s eyes.

“Get back!” Trent said when, with a scream of outrage, the larger demon finally beat the first away. Standing between Nina and the darkness, the tall surface demon raised his hands to the sky, howling as if making a claim. His cry echoed against the flat spaces, dying away to leave the demon staring at us, his chest moving up and down as he panted, thin hands clenched.

Trent’s fingers tightened in mine, his uninvoked charm hovering just under his skin. “Wait,” I said as the surface demon spun to Nina. “No, wait!” I demanded as the silence was broken by the soft clicks of rock and the whisper of dead grass as the surrounding surface demons skulked back, leaving us. “I think he drove the rest off.”

With a high-pitched whine, the tall surface demon fell prostrate before Nina, burbling and groaning, the tattered remnants of its aura smearing the dust to leave patterns. Nina/Felix stared, inching backward.

“What is it doing?” I whispered as the demon closed the new gap, his wizened arm black with age or disease, stretched out as if wanting to touch her but afraid to.