DANIEL’S ARMS WRAPPED around me, keeping me from tumbling across the floor. Pinned against him, I felt us slide nearly a foot across the gravel-strewn floor. The magick washed off us with a crackling snap like a fire whip. Daniel groaned, his arms falling away from me.
I moved, scrambling to take my weight off him. He sat up, and blood spotted his hoodie where the gravel on the floor had torn through it and the skin beneath. My hands touched his arms and chest, avoiding his injuries. “Are you okay?”
“It hurts, but I will be.” He shook his head, making his shaggy bangs fall over his eyes. “What was that?”
I pointed.
The Sushi Priest now stood on the limestone altar. A tendril of vile sorcery from the talisman in his hand still pinned the Man in Black to the ground, but the priest was surrounded by a crackling orb of chartreuse magick. Cthulhu’s tremendous hand cupped over it, squeezing, sea-god flesh sizzling as the etheric energy scorched and sparked between webbed fingers the size of the Sushi Priest himself. I could feel the pain in Cthulhu’s hand; it echoed down the connection between us, making the Mark on my own hand grow hot, the lines burning across my palm. I looked down. The swirled and whorled scars glowed a dull red-orange. Rubbing it on my pants made little wisps of gray smoke. I looked back at the fight between elder gods and sorcerer.
The Sushi Priest’s spell cast Cthulhu in lime-green highlights, flashing and popping like a strobe, making the elder god look like a special effect in a movie as he loomed in the darkness. His back brushed the ceiling of the cavern, crushing stalactites into a rain of dust.
Cthulhu leaned on the sphere, pressing harder. The limestone slab under the Sushi Priest’s feet broke in half with a CRACK! that resounded across the stone-littered floor. The Sushi Priest screamed and swung the Eye of Omens up, adding its magick to his own. The sphere around him doubled in size, intensifying, pushing Cthulhu back. The energy flared so bright I had to squint just to look, the sparks and crackles shooting little pains across my retinas. Inside my mind Cthulhu howled his agony, but he pressed on.
The Man in Black, free from his prison, rose off the ground in a fury, his coat flaring dragon-wing wide around him. The black-bladed sword gleamed in his red right hand, naked and wicked and iniquity-sharp. His hand pulsed with crimson energy like the still-beating heart of some cursed creature. It dripped gobbets of magick, spilling scarlet-black down the blade. His dark face twisted with raw anger and naked wrath, his black, glittering eyes slit-staring at the Sushi Priest.
He lashed out, slamming the sword through the sphere of energy. It struck the Sushi Priest at the knees, shearing through flesh and bone like black-bladed lightning.
The Sushi Priest screamed once as his protective spell crumbled. The scream still echoed as Cthulhu’s hand snapped shut around him, plucking him upward and leaving his legs from the knees down to stand on the broken limestone altar.