"Justin, you okay?" I heard someone ask, as though far away down a tunnel.

I opened my mouth to reply when I saw something which looked remarkably like a stone floor rushing to meet my face.

Chapter 46

"He's coming around," said a familiar voice. I opened my eyes and saw Meghan Andretti looking back at me. "Justin, can you hear me?"

"Are you okay, baby?" Elyssa appeared from my other side.

I blinked. "What happened?" I looked around and saw I was in my bedroom. Shelton and several others crowded through the doorway.

I nodded. I felt groggy, but otherwise not too bad.

"I believe he has overtaxed himself in the past few days," Vallaena said. "Yesterday's activities and the strain of the vampling curse have been too much."

"Not to mention today's," I muttered.

Vallaena's eyes met mine. "Justin, you slept all night. It is Saturday morning."

Meghan gave me a worried look, and added. "The Grand Melee starts in two hours."

The end is nigh! I leapt to my feet, and almost fell down from a wave of dizziness. "We've got to go, now!"

Shelton gripped my arm and helped me stay upright. "Hold on, cowboy. What makes you think you're in shape to do anything?"

"He's right," Elyssa said. "You've done too much."

A sardonic laugh erupted from my throat. "It doesn't matter how I feel. All that matters is we get this done." I pounded a fist into my palm to punctuate the last three words. I turned to Vallaena. "You ready?"

Her chin lifted, and she looked at me like a proud mother—or maybe like a mad scientist who just brought a monster to life with a bolt of lightning. "I am."

Elyssa sighed. "You're crazy, but I love you." She pecked my cheek. "Let's do this."

I heard a yipping noise, and saw the puppy hellhound at me feet, jumping up and down. I picked him up and petted him. "If anything happens to me, please take care of the hellhound, Vallaena."

Meghan's lip curled in disgust. "I was petting a baby hellhound? But he's so cute!"

"I will," Vallaena said.

I sighed. "I'm not looking forward to walking across campus."

"Oh, yeah," Shelton said with a smirk. "Guess you don't know what your girlfriend did."

I grabbed a protein bar from the pantry and gave Elyssa a concerned look. "What did you do?"

She smiled. "I happened to find a tunnel connecting this place with the arch."

"A what?"

"The doorway behind the arch," Shelton said. "It leads to here. We cut through the iron grate in the cellar and followed it down to that iron door. Didn't take me long to burn off the locks."

I gave Elyssa a smile. "You're amazing."

"I know," she said with a smirk.

My mind unscrambled as the protein bar kicked in, and I formed a plan. "In addition to getting the rune, we also need to stop the giant golems from killing the Arcane Council." My gaze found Michael standing at the edge of the room. Elyssa seemed to avoid looking at him. "Michael, can you convince the council not to go to the Grand Melee? Maybe evac them to an undisclosed location?"

He nodded. "I'll take care of it."

I turned to Zagg. You're well known here. "I need you to find out which golems are affected. Maybe you can get through to the operators and convince them to double-check."

"I'm on it," the professor said.

I looked at Shelton and Adam. "Please tell me you have good news."

Adam grinned. "Once Elyssa found the alternate route, we went down and ran our shield-hole generator. It's running through thousands of magic cipher combinations. We think this barrier is similar to the forest shield in design, otherwise we'd have no chance of opening a hole."

"How long will it take?" I asked.

"That, we don't know," he said with a frown. "But we also discovered the demon guardian is bound to the shield over the arch. If you banish it, the arch shield will lower, release the rune, and we'll have all the time in the world."

Profound relief swept over me. We could do this.

We took the stairs to the cellar, went through a hole Shelton had made in the grate, and followed more stairs down to a tunnel. At the end, I saw the slagged remains of the steel door that had blocked me the other day, propped against the wall. Through the doorway pulsed the star of malaether.

An arcphone sat near the door, the holographic images of runes and spell code dancing in the air above as it probed the shield for weakness. A row of six slots floated at the top. Cyrinthian symbols filled three of the slots.

"Halfway through to making a hole," Shelton said, his voice tense.

I felt Elyssa's hand tighten on my arm. She kissed my cheek. "You can do this. I know you can."

Just having her there meant the world to me. I looked to Vallaena. "I'm ready."

"Wait for the right demon spirit, Justin," she said. "Remember, you will probably have only one chance at this. Manifesting across a magical barrier will tire you more than you can imagine."

I managed a weak smile. "I got this."

I opened my incubus senses, and felt the tendrils of essence extend from me. Then I swallowed, my physical trigger to direct them inward. My own soul halo glowed before me for an instant before I felt the twisting sensation of my tendrils flipping inside-out as they pressed through the barrier between this world and my second astral address, the demon plane. I waited. Hundreds of spirits passed me, some tiny, some huge. Several times, I sense the presence of a good candidate for hound-doggery, but they sensed me and escaped before I could draw them in.

How long I sat there, I couldn't say, but finally, a presence came into range. It felt very much like most of the ones I'd summoned, albeit more mature. I ensnared it with my tendrils, gripping the soul before it could whisk away. Opening my eyes, I focused on the area just on the other side of the shield.

Manifest!

A dark pool formed in the floor much like the ones I'd summoned through outside. Suddenly, the weight of the world fell on my shoulders. It felt as though all my energy was being drained at once. I staggered, fighting to keep my concentration on the manifestation.

"The name, Justin," Vallaena whispered. "Remember the name."

My face went tight with strain, and I felt sweat pouring down my forehead. I almost fell.

"I've got you," Elyssa said. "I'm here."

Her voice bolstered me. Lent me strength. I sent the demon name to the forming hellhound. The dark form struggled free of the primordial matter, standing unsteadily on four legs, and looked at me with yellow eyes. Through the connection I sensed the demon name burning in its mind.

Shift, I thought to my minion, and imagined a shape.

The hellhound twisted, smoothly morphing into a familiar and naked shape, though it was missing vital components south of the waistline.

"Is that Shelton?" someone murmured.

"Where's his—"

"Shut up," Shelton said with a groan.

I told the hellhound—using mind waves, of course—to give the demon the name. It turned toward the cancerous growth in the floor. The demon's eye and mouth were closed, leaving a seamless black tumor connected by a thin strand to the summoning rune beneath it. The moment the hellhound stepped closer, the eye blinked open. The creature rotated toward it, horrific mouth peeling open in a toothy snarl.

The guardian's name blazed into my mind and the hellhound's at the same time, the pattern of the summoning rune somehow translating into sounds, twisting my mouth and that of the hellhound's into unnatural shapes as we spoke a string of consonants usually reserved for Scandinavians.

The demon's maw flickered, the teeth vanished. An eye stared back. It blinked once, twice, and the demon melted into the floor until nothing remained but the glowing light from the shield.

The shield over the arch flickered like a failing florescent bulb, then solidified.

I groaned.

It flickered again, slower, and slower. Then blipped out of existence. An instant later, a small sphere shot from the arch. It hovered in the air, rotating inches from the malaether. The thrum of deadly energy lessened, fading as the tiny sphere sucked it in until it vanished with a blink. The orb hovered for a moment more, dropped onto the floor, bounced once, and rolled to a stop.

Silence.

I looked around the small room at the tense faces. "I think we did it," I said. "We did it!"

Cheers erupted. Elyssa hugged me tight, smooching all across my face. Relief swept through me, and my legs dissolved to jelly. Vallaena had been right about the strain. I was beyond exhausted.

I told the hellhound to shift back to doggy form since nobody wanted to look at a naked, emasculated version of Shelton, and told it what a good doggy it was. The hellhound growled, sending me a message loud and clear that he felt degraded by such treatment, and curled himself on the floor around the rune.

"Once we get through the shield, we can put it back in the arch, or find another hiding spot," Shelton said as he high-fived Adam.

My phone rang. I answered.

"Justin, this is Michael. We've got problems."

The Grand Melee. "Did you warn the Arcane Council?"

"Security won't let me anywhere near them. Security golems barred Zagg from entering. "We're not getting anywhere, and the main event will be starting in thirty minutes."

Across the room on the other side of the arch, figures appeared, one of them in a top hat. He waved his staff and a hole appeared in the shield. Jeremiah Conroy stepped inside the room, and tipped his hat to us.

I looked at Shelton, at the arcphone. "We need a hole, Shelton, now!"

"I can't make it go any faster," he said, kneeling to look at the symbols floating above it. Five of the six slots glowed green. The last one flipped through symbols faster than I could read them.

Ivy entered the room behind Jeremiah. She gave me a sad look.