MAGIK’S portal to the Transian hills didn’t open the way it should, the rip slow, the disc’s shining edges traveling outward at half speed as it followed the clean slice.

“Close it,” Caretaker said, immediately. A demonic ward was in place, a resistance to dimensional changes. The image of the sun-dappled trees and rocks flashed closed. They could easily force their way through, dispel it, but the spell-caster would already be aware of the attempted incursion.

How far does it extend? And what else is in place?

“We need to appear outside their wards, so that I can see what they’ve set up,” Caretaker said.

“There’s a ridge east about half a klick,” Blade said. “Lots of cover.”

Caretaker nodded, and Magik cut again. This time the portal opened easily, and Nico used her staff to shield and warn, speaking in what sounded like Somali.

The Suns exited the portal, stepping into a flat, rocky field surrounded by thick woods. The day was sunny, warm. Boulders as big as houses blocked them from seeing the area of the vault, west, but the raw power of multiple demonic spells was palpable, concentrated. Zarathos had grown, his signature dominant, but there were dimensional protections, glamours, gathered soulless, and—

Caretaker sensed it just as Nico spoke, her young brow furrowed. “The seal is breaking!”

Minutes. The ward keeping the vault hidden was all but gone and its lock was crumbling fast. They needed to—

A fire-demon dropped from the sky, landing in a splash across a boulder behind them, immediately growing into a towering humanoid tornado of flame. Its eyes were blackened red pits, its long limbs rippling, melting the rock beneath its hissing form.

A burning portal had split the sky sixty feet above and another demon, then a third, hit the field like rockets, more of them splashing over the forest surrounding them, roaring to life. Trees burst into flame as the creatures rose and walked, all headed for the Suns.

“Magik, a portal in front of theirs!” Blade shouted, and Magik flew high.

The Suns were instantly enveloped in searing heat and Caretaker condensed the moisture in the air, blasting the demon behind them with a sheet of water as its flaming arms reached out.

The force of the splash knocked it back, but the demon didn’t diminish. If anything, it grew, spreading wide. Smoke boiled from the flash forest fire, rocks cracking and liquefying all around them.

“Non noceamur, coagmentatio!” Caretaker threw up a dome around herself and the other Suns, filled it with her dimension’s cool air, fixing it to the ground. Three demons leapt on it at once, their amorphic bodies pouring over the sparking half-bubble, and Caretaker strained to keep the shield whole, to keep the air inside from roasting the Suns. High overhead, Magik floated next to her portal, flames pouring into Limbo from the rift above. The formless monsters tried to escape their new destination, sent long droplets of liquid fire out from between the portals. Everything the demonic fire touched burned.

Magik rained blasts of energy down at the fire-demons, knocking them out of shape, but they instantly reformed. Eight had come through, and they raged toward the gathered Suns. Magik hit the hill north of them and an avalanche of dirt and stone swallowed two of the creatures, but they burned through in clouds of hissing smoke.

“I can hold it a minute,” Caretaker managed. “Water won’t stop them. They’re Koth’s children, Sumerian.”

“Nico,” Blade and Robbie both said.

“How?” Nico cried, the Staff of One tight in her bloody fist—

—and she disappeared in a flash of purple light.

Magik couldn’t leave her portal—they’d be buried in fire, and all of Caretaker’s energies were invested in the shield, the only thing keeping them from incineration. Robbie and Blade both stood ready but there was nothing they could do against an inferno.

Caretaker sensed Zarathos near, his presence a foul stain, but the rocks were crumbling and melting around them. She had to pour more of herself into the shield, to increase its coverage where it touched the ground. A blast from Zarathos might end them. Wherever Nico had gone, Caretaker prayed the young witch would be back in time to help.

*   *   *

NICO hit what felt like a brick wall, the impact dazing her for a second. She was standing in front of the forge at the Abbey. The demon that lived inside was awake, filling the giant glass wall, a roaring sphere set against the worn stones. The chamber was like a sauna.

I got through. The Staff of One had punched into Caretaker’s dimension, impossible, but the thought was background; it didn’t matter. Nico had to get back.

With an answer.

Nico concentrated her will, held up the Staff.

“Let’s talk.” Light blasted from the Staff’s eye, but she still stood in front of the roaring forge. Nothing had physically changed.

WHAT

The voice was sexless, annoyed, as loud as a scream in her mind. The flames of the demon’s body beat against the glass.

“The Suns are being attacked by your kind. How do we stop them?” Nico asked.

The silence was sullen. Nico could feel its irritation at being commanded by a mortal.

“Please!” Nico’s desperate shout echoed from the high, shadowy ceiling.

EXTINGUISH FiRE

The forge demon’s tone was patronizing to the extreme.

“How? Chemicals, sand, what?”

There was a sound like roaring flames, a clatter like embers, and Nico felt its disdain. It was laughing.

THEY WILL GROW

Time time time! Her friends were going to burn to death and the vault’s seal was breaking!

“Please tell me,” Nico said, because please had worked before and she had nothing at all to bargain with, except that the demon had no interest at all in continuing their conversation. Nico seized on the idea.

“I promise I won’t ever bother you again if you’ll tell me how to extinguish their fire. I’ll leave you alone and never force you into a conversation that you don’t want to—”

WE EAT AIR GO AWAY NOW

“Thank you, thank you!” Nico raised the Staff of One and didn’t consider how to return to Transia, only visualized the faces of her friends and willed herself to them. “Go!”

The Staff protected her entrance back to the scene, floating her high above the burning ridge, above Magik and the sandwiched portals. Bitter smoke roiled up from the fiery ground, the demons dancing through the flames, converging on Caretaker’s tiny bubble. There were eight demons in all, slipping through the burning trees, pounding at the invisible umbrella above the rocks.

“Magik, hold on to something!” Nico screamed, and saw Limbo’s energy shoot from Magik’s portal and envelop her.

Nico didn’t stop to think, she thrust the Staff out. “Deep space!”

A crack opened in the sky and the world flew upward, fire, trees, boulders, everything loose sucked to the icy vacuum. The eight fire-demons stretched and thinned, clawing at the passing debris as they whirled upward in streaming sheets of smoke.

Yes! It was working, she just had to—

“Nico!” Magik’s cry was faint in the rushing air. Nico turned—

—and saw Zarathos hovering in the sky above the pit west of them, saw the ball of lightning hurtling at her head.

Nico brought the Staff around and split the demonic light shooting toward her, streams of power crackling away to either side, but the energy blasted her backward, spinning wildly, and she felt herself sucked toward the crack in space above.

“Blue sky!” she shouted, the Staff drawing from her panic, and the gaping, icy void zipped closed, along with both portals. The few clouds floating around disappeared.

A ton of smoking rock and flaming trees that had been hurtling for the rift fell, raining down like bombs on the ridge below. Magik flew into the destructive chaos, blasting pieces away from where the other Suns were still gathered. Nico shoved the majority of the flaming rain against a cliff farther east, the debris dropping harmlessly into a stony crevasse.

Zarathos hit the Caretaker’s shield with another lightning ball. With a twist of her hand, Caretaker wrapped what was left of the shield up and around the incoming blast, hurling it back at him.

The Suns broke apart, Blade and Robbie joining Magik in knocking the last flaming chunks out of the air, Caretaker sending a bolt of white at Zarathos’s hovering form. Nico got her bearings and threw a disruption spell at the musclebound demon, the tight beam of energy rocking his horrible face back.

“Get to the vault!” Caretaker shouted, and Magik scooped up Blade as Ghost Rider portaled across to the hill where the vault was buried. Nico darted after them, over a narrow gorge that separated the blocky hills. The air was thick with magic—dark spells, dark ether, wards like webs clinging to Nico’s skin as she swooped down to join her team at the edge of the pit, where—

“Gotcha,” a seductive voice drawled, and Nico went deaf and blind, the Staff of One knocked from her hand. She was paralyzed and falling, lost.

*   *   *

GHOST Rider ran for the well, alert for their enemies. Caretaker appeared at the rim of the pit, ducking another lightning strike from Zarathos. Blade and Magik were running with Robbie, Blade darting ahead.

“We don’t have much time,” Caretaker shouted. “We—”

She disappeared. All the Suns were gone. Ghost Rider stood alone… and the ground trembled and came to life.

Rock creatures sat up from the broken ground, demonic forms wrenching out of the soil, cracking free of the earth. They stirred and climbed to their blocky feet, joints crumbling dust, blind, featureless heads turning toward Ghost Rider. A dozen at least, each seven feet tall with rough-hewn limbs, and the first few were stomping in his direction.

Robbie dove for the closest, spinning before he tackled the thing to land face up, the creature’s solid body pressed to the ground beneath him. He slung his chains at the next two closing in, the flaming links knocking them together with a thundering crash. A jerk of his hands and they went down in a heap. Robbie turned, wrapped his chain around another and whipped him into two more, turned again—

—and the monsters he’d flattened had disappeared. More were wrenching themselves free of the stone, the sound like shattering ceramic, like pebbles in a blender, but there weren’t any bodies on the ground.

Glamour? The Suns could still be there. He could be attacking them now, like he’d gone after Magik before.

“Nico!” he shouted, and whipped his chains at the stumbling, relentless onslaught, afraid to hurt them, not sure what was happening.

*   *   *

BLADE sensed the thick magic slamming down and then he was alone.

Glamour. Rock demons sat up all around him, conjured from the ground. They pulled stumpy limbs out of the Earth and staggered toward Blade, rattling the ground, joints forming in cracks and puffs of dust.

The rock monsters plodded forward, and Blade reflexively dodged when the closest one swung its block of an arm, driving his heel into its rough thigh. It was like kicking a house, but the thing was unbalanced and fell backward, crashing to the ground.

I kicked something. A glamour but something more. He could smell the Suns, hear many hearts beating, but the data was diffuse, blurred by the heavy spell that thrummed in the deceitful air.

“Nico!” he called, dancing back from the clumsy attacks, turning to slip between another pair of looming monsters, ducking another swing. He couldn’t see.

*   *   *

CARETAKER felt a glamour envelop them and she was alone at the empty pit.

“Revelare,” she commanded, and she saw soulless soldiers with guns dropping into the open crater, pointing their weapons in all directions, several trained on her. She sensed the other Suns, close by.

“Revelare omnia!”

The soldiers disappeared. Ghost Rider flicked in and out of view. She saw a handful of small rock demons knocked down by his chains—

—and she was alone again. Small puffs of dust rose from the ground, painting shafts of sunlight, and there was a sound like heavy rocks being smashed.

“Diluere lux,” she said, and spread her hands, and the pale light that should have illuminated movement appeared and settled to the trembling ground like powdered chalk.

Layered glamour. She needed more power to cut through it. Caretaker tried to open a channel to her dimension but it was blocked, the effort like opening a jar that was glued shut. Magik might be cut off from Limbo. Caretaker couldn’t feel the vault’s seal anymore. She couldn’t find the Suns or their enemies. The Triumvirate had the upper hand.

The Staff of One. Without dimensional access, the Staff was the Suns’ strongest magical asset.

“Nico!” Caretaker called, weighting the word with intention for the girl to hear her, reaching out with her mind to find her—

—and a fist-sized chunk of rock slammed into Caretaker’s shoulder. She stumbled, startled and enraged by the pain, and forced her attention back to finding Nico, sending the intention to the other Suns: Nico, find Nico. If they couldn’t fix this fast, they were all dead.