Legacy & Spellbound by Nancy Holder Read Free Book Online Page A

steps and all hell broke loose.

THREE  
AMETRINE

    Death and destruction spread our fame
Till all others tremble at the Deveraux name
We will rule them in the end
King and serf, foe and friend
    And now we claim for our own
All the power that we’ve sown
Goddess answer us in our need
Cause our foes to scream and bleed
    â€œGoddess, protect us!” Holly cried as directly above the Coven, about twenty feet in the air, immense, scaly demons dressed in ancient battle armor burst from round portals shimmering with blue. Their heads were horned, their eyes red, glowing slits, and their mouths glistened with multiple rows of fangs. Their bodies were the sickly color of a bruise, purple and blue-black.
    They began to drop to the ground.
It’s raining fiends,
she thought, feeling an overwhelming urge to laughhysterically. Then one of the demons landed mere feet from Holly, and the urge to laugh vanished. She leaped backward, stumbling and falling, yet she managed to release a fireball at the monster. It raised its taloned hand, grasped the fireball, and extinguished it, flinging the embers to the ground. With a roar, it advanced on Holly. Its fangs glistened with green saliva as it lumbered forward on thick, well-muscled legs. Reaching into its armor, it withdrew what looked to be the hilt of a sword. Then it raised the hilt into the air.
    A black falcon shrieked as it burst from the portal. Between its clawed feet it carried a gleaming blade. With another cry, it released the blade, which whistled through the air like a bomb and then magically connected with the hilt.
    As the demon swiped it at Holly, crackles of green magical energy trailed. The weapon sizzled and danced with magic, and as Holly launched another fireball, the sword sliced it into dancing shards of heat and light.
    She conjured and flung more fireballs, feeling herself almost a machine, some kind of animated fighting automaton such as warring clans had possessed back in the Middle Ages. She wondered where everyone else was, aware only of chaos whirling all around her.
    The demon sliced her projectiles apart with ease. Then it hacked at the air itself, and the gray, snowy skyseemed to shatter. Solid nickel-colored shards exploded outward, leaving a churning hole of fluorescent green about ten feet in diameter.
    From the magical rent crawled more demons clambering over the broken pieces of sky, these much smaller and completely black, with deep, bloodred eyes and mouths that wrapped halfway around their snakelike heads. Seeing Holly, three of them leaped at her. She moved her hands and uttered an incantation, forming and sending a magical bolt of energy in their direction.
    Her aim was true; she took out two of the three, and they exploded in a shower of body parts. The survivor sailed through the flying carnage and attacked her knee, clamping down hard with incisor-like teeth.
    Holly screamed from the pain; it distracted her, but she managed to conjure another bolt. She flung it at the demon, and it disintegrated. She conjured more, sending them flying without aiming them, trying to wound the larger demon as it shambled toward her. The sword was no longer glowing, as if it had lost its magical charge, but the sharpness of the blade looked deadly.
    â€œGoddess from the depths of night, banish them all from my sight,” she murmured. She looked up, expecting to see the demons vanish. Instead, thedemons kept coming but her vision began to blur and fade. “No!” she sobbed, frustration overwhelming her. “Goddess, now restore my sight, and kill this beast with whom I fight.” Her vision was partially restored, but she was beginning to lose consciousness because of her injury.
I’m the strongest witch alive,
she thought,
but I don’t know how to use my power to save myself.
    Then the monster froze, threw up its hands, and roared in agony. Slowly it began to tip forward … directly on top of Holly. Her fingers twitched as she