At first glance, I’d thought it was some kind of weird smoke. It reached all the way to the twenty-foot ceiling, yet it didn’t spread out like normal smoke. Instead, it was almost man-shaped, if giants existed. Even stranger, it appeared as if individual, separate smoke trails were slowly coming out of Vlad, Maximus, and Marty. Those trails fed into the manlike smoke mass, and although Marty was the only one screaming, Vlad and Maximus also looked as if they were in a lot of pain.

“What’s going on?” I said, running over to Vlad.

He didn’t move even when I shook his arm roughly, but Veritas’s head whipped up.

“Leila,” she said with relief. “You are demon kin, so the soul spell won’t work on you. I’ve tried to counter the magic, but even with the added supernatural benefit of the convergence of ley lines in this place, I do not have what I need to do it. I have to kill the necromancers who cast it to stop it. Until then, your electricity should buy us time.”

Veritas leapt up, but I yelled “Wait!” before she disappeared through the door at the other end of the room. “How am I supposed to electrocute all of them at once?”

“Not them,” she said, with a swipe at the huge, smoky thing. “That. Every time a life is taken by force, a trace of dark energy from the murdered person remains on their killer. This spell pulls that energy out and magnifies it into the creature you see before you. Yet you are filled with natural, electrical energy, so it should counter the creature’s strength. You must hurry, Leila. Once the last of the dark energy remains are pulled from your friends, their own souls will follow.”

I looked at the wispy trails leaving Vlad, Marty, and Maximus with new, horrified understanding. Those weren’t thin, scarflike puffs of smoke. Those were dark energy fragments from all the people that Vlad, Marty, and Maximus had killed during their very long lifetimes.

I lashed my whip at the creature. It turned its faceless body toward me and let out a roar that blasted out my eardrums and made me clutch my head. If every voice silenced by the grave could suddenly scream, it would sound like that.

Then I forced myself to lower my arms and to strike the creature again. Another roar had blood coming out of my ears, but I didn’t stop to grip my head this time. Instead, I continued to lash it, noticing with fearful hope that every time I did, it seemed to slow the progression of dark essences that were trailing out of Vlad, Marty, and Maximus. For once, I was glad that Vlad’s past had been an almost nonstop array of brutal battles. He had plenty of slain dark energy remains in him, and Maximus was a thousand-year-old former Templar knight, so he did, too.

But Marty didn’t. Aside from when he’d been mindless from hunger as a new vampire, he’d only killed in self-defense, and he’d hardly led a violent life on the carnival circuit. His screams intensified, and fear for him made me lash the creature harder. My whip couldn’t cut him down, however. It sailed right through the thing, and those writhing, dark energy essences immediately re-formed back to their manlike shape.

This wasn’t working. I needed more electricity. I cast a quick look around the antechamber. It must have been the site of a lot of dark magic rituals because its walls were covered in symbols, and now that the creature had moved away from the pit, I saw that it was filled with various bones and other strange, menacing-looking objects. But it didn’t appear to have any light sockets or electrical wiring that I could pull more voltage from. Whatever rituals the necromancers had held here, they must have only used torchlight for illumination.

Marty’s scream grew anguished and he fell to his knees. “Hold on!” I shouted, lashing the creature so madly that it swung at me. I was slammed back against the stone walls. Pain exploded in my head and I heard the sickening crunch of bones as my skull fractured.

Blood filled my vision and the pain was so intense, I wanted to throw up. Yet I pushed myself to my feet, using the wall for balance since everything seemed to be swaying. Then I stumbled back toward the creature, my whip recharging as my body began to heal. I raised it, bringing it down once again.

Marty’s screams abruptly stopped. He fell forward, something shimmering rising from his body. Then it tore free and flew toward the creature. The worst kind of horror filled me when I saw that what had flown out of Marty was a mirror image of him, except in filmy, diaphanous form.

“No!”

The scream tore out of me with more force than what the creature had used to yank Marty’s soul from his body. Rage and grief slammed into me, filling me until my skin felt like it would burst. At the same time, ferocious determination sent a surge of power to my voltage that I didn’t know I had in me.

I wouldn’t just kill the thing that had killed Marty and was still trying to kill Vlad. I would fucking destroy it.

My vision blurred from the tremendous surges of electricity building in me. This time, I didn’t hold any of them back. I let them come, using my seething emotions to feed them, until I was shaking from the overload of electricity that had sparks flying from every part of my body.

The creature swung that couch-sized fist at me again. This time, I ran toward it, flinging myself into the air with such force that my leap caused me to clear it. I landed on the creature’s torso instead.

At once, I blasted out all that raging voltage, howling like a banshee surrounded by death on a battlefield. The sharp scent of ozone filled the air as bolt after bolt of pure electricity shot from me, as fast and deadly as lightning. The creature screamed, exploding my eardrums, but I loved the pain. It fueled my voltage, joining all my other raging emotions and making more electricity shoot from me. I had never let myself fully embrace my power before, yet I did now, and it was viciously glorious. Soon, I was mindless from giving myself over to it, and the electricity kept shooting out of me to slam into the horrible, magic-made monster that had dared to hurt and kill the ones I loved.