I let Cassandra get on with it and turned back to Emmett.
Mick and I had a strategy—we’d decided that pointing and shooting wouldn’t work, but distraction and combining forces might. I reached for lightning that had come ever nearer the hotel, fed some of it to Cassandra to bolster her spell, and whacked Emmett with the rest of it.
He batted the crackling energy aside. Drake and Mick, coming at him while he focused on me, sent fire at him, which Emmett again batted aside. Without waiting, I sent another strike of storm magic at him, followed by a ball of white Beneath light.
Emmett opened his hands, gathered all the energies we’d thrown at him, and shot them through the roof Drake had just paid to refinish. I bit back a scream of frustration—those molded tin ceilings were expensive.
Emmett brought his hands back down, a shield of magic between him and me, Mick, and Drake. “You can’t win this way,” he said calmly. “I’m too strong. Surrender, and I might be merciful.”
Cassandra now sent the spell she’d been conjuring. It didn’t fire like my magic or the dragons’; it seeped around Emmett’s barrier and into him while he was focused on me.
Emmett’s eyes widened, and his gaze shot to Cassandra. His shield weakened, and he flinched, his face graying.
“Nice,” he said to Cassandra. “Turning my own blood to poison—diabolical and clever. No wonder Christianson wanted to hire you.”
Emmett dragged in a deep breath. He closed his eyes, balled his fists, then opened his mouth and expelled an inky black mist. The mist hit his wavering Beneath shield and vanished.
Drake hadn’t waited for him to finish. He shot fire into Emmett as soon as the black mist had dispersed, and Emmett again flinched.
Then he opened his eyes, rage flaring, and slammed Drake with Beneath magic coupled with a spell.
Drake countered with a wall of fire, but he was thrown upward, slammed into the magic mirror, hit the top of the bar, and toppled forward to the floor. He staggered up, then roared as Emmett’s spell sliced into him. Drake’s hands went to his face, the dragon tatts that clasped his throat and neck fading.
“One down,” Emmett said. He pointed at Cassandra, and she rose into the air, Pamela reaching for her in alarm. Cassandra clutched her chest, gasped out a string of odd-sounding words, and fell again, breathing hard. Pamela caught her and gently eased her back into the chair, then turned a snarl on Emmett.
“Maybe two,” Emmett continued. He easily tossed aside the magics Mick and I hit him with as he’d focused on Cassandra. “Is this the best you can do, Janet?”
The door to the kitchen swung open to reveal Elena framed in its doorway. She raised her hands and began to chant.
The language was ancient Apache, I assumed, at least, far older than what the White Mountain Apaches spoke today. Elena’s voice was clear, beautiful, compelling, and the hotel shook as the pool of shaman power in the basement rose to engulf her.
Emmett was definitely distracted by that. I gathered the entirety of the storm outside, married it to my very angry Beneath magic, joined it with Mick’s fire, and let him have it.
Wind whipped through the saloon, tearing a bigger hole in the roof. Rain poured down, drenching us. The rain could do nothing, though, to quench the fire that seared across Emmett’s body or stop bolts of lightning I slammed into him.
Emmett screamed. I’d felt firsthand in my dream what it was like to be burned by dragon fire. Now Emmett’s body melted with it, his spell to counter it thwarted by the full power of my dual magic and Mick’s fire.
Triple threat.
The air around Emmett turned black. Pressure filled my ears, and the building rumbled ominously. I took a hesitant step back, just before the blackness shattered into fragments of obsidian.
I ducked as the deadly pieces sailed by. When I came up, I saw Emmett standing calmly in the middle of my falling-down saloon, brushing off his sleeves.
“Janet,” he said in a quiet voice. “Now you’re starting to piss me off.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Elena!” I yelled. “If you’re here to help—do it!”
Elena ignored me. She continued to chant, her arms raised, unprotected in the doorway.
“Not yet,” my grandmother said behind her. “It doesn’t work that way. The young are always so impatient.”
Emmett sliced a shaft of magic past them both and blew up the kitchen.
Before the resulting flames could hit my grandmother and Elena, two slim arms came around them, and Ansel leapt upward as only a Nightwalker can. He took them out through the roof, but I didn’t have time to see whether Grandmother and Elena made it to safety, because Emmett was on me again.