Page 167 of Dead Beat

“Tripp!” Dawes shouted as Reiter got to his feet again, shaking off the salt chains.

She tried to rush forward but arms grabbed hold of her. Reiter’s familiars, the blond woman and someone else, were on top of her, dragging her to the ground.

“You want to kill a demon?” Reiter rasped, standing over Tripp. “Here’s how you kill a demon.”

He drove the salt sword into Tripp’s chest. Tripp howled in pain.

The albatross dove at Reiter, but he swung the sword in an arc, cutting straight through it. With a single cry the seabird vanished.

“You can’t do it with just one blow,” Reiter said, his jaws grinding. He drove the sword in again. “You have to cut the heart…” Again he struck. “From its chest.”

Dawes screamed in fury and desperation. Blue flame erupted over her body. The familiars yelped and cringed backward.

Alex.

“Leave him alone!” Dawes demanded, charging at Reiter. She couldn’t explain the hellfire crawling over her and she didn’t care. Reiter held the sword aloft and she saw he had speared something on its tip. Tripp’s heart.

She slammed into Reiter, taking him to the ground, engulfing them both in flame. He shrieked and thrashed beneath her, hissing and spitting. Dawes thrust her hands between his broken ribs, curling her fingers into claws, digging into the meat of his heart.

Dawes had studied the exaggeration spell to help Alex use hellfire, but now it was hers to command. She called on the flame and let it course through her palms.

She met Reiter’s gaze as the fire consumed his heart. For a moment she glimpsed the boy who had been Lionel Reiter, frightened and alone. She did not relent.

The words that came to her lips were death words, and when she spoke, there was an echo in her voice. “Go down to the vile dust, from whence he sprung, unwept, unhonored, and unsung.”

Dawes felt Reiter’s heart collapse in her hands.

She released him and crawled to Tripp’s body. His chest was torn open and he was blinking slowly. He should be dead and gone, but he was not really Tripp. He was the demon who had been Tripp, who had still somehow managed to remain kind, who had wanted so much to be good.

“I can fix this,” she sobbed, taking him in her arms. There had to be some piece of magic, some secret lore in all the books she’d read that would make this right, that would give him his heart back. “Someone help me!” she cried out, but she knew there was no one to answer.

The albatross had returned, spreading its wings tenderly over Tripp’s ruined body.

“I did okay, right?” Tripp whispered. “I didn’t let you down?”

“You saved me,” she said. “You saved all of us. You’re the hero.”

“Come on.”

“Really,” she said, cupping his cheek. “You saved the day.”

The barest smile touched his lips. “One of the good guys,” he whispered.

She watched the last faint light vanish from his eyes. The boy who had become a demon became nothing at all.

“Take up our master’s mantle!” shouted the blonde with the hammer. “Storm the tower!”

Turner had the professor’s shotgun in hand and had placed him cuffed on the ground, but the other familiars were still armed and advancing.

Dawes knew she needed to get up. She had to stop them, had to protect Alex and Darlington. But she couldn’t make her legs move. She had tried to play soldier and she had lost everything.

“You stay back!” an unfamiliar voice shouted. Dawes turned and saw Mercy leading a group of students she didn’t know—a boy in a baseball jacket, a kid on roller skates, a bearded hipster in suspenders, a young woman in a fanciful skirt and beribboned heels, a spider broach sparkling at her lapel. They were carrying a bizarre assortment of weapons—guns, batons, a musket, a saber. They’d used her spell.

Her church group. The thought was clear and defined, so different from her own.

Alex, are you with me?

I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.