“Hold on,” I hissed.
My mates roared in rage, sensing my pain through our bond. They tried to reach me, but they were still in the vortex with Ares, locked with the god.
I’m fine. I got this,I shouted through our bond.
Mind over matter.
I shut my eyes for a second, took a deep breath, and opened myself to this realm, just like Mom had taught me how to feed.
The core of the inferno connected to me, showing me its riches and letting me draw from its pure energy. My hellfire powered up, forming a shield around Loki and myself, and the pressure on us dropped to a ripple.
Loki gave me an appreciative nod, his tired eyes sparking with renewed hope.
Maybe we stood a chance after all.
Lucifer widened his eyes, then his nostrils flared and fumed, emitting a puff of smoke and fire.
“It can’t be.” He spat like a barbarian. “I’m the sole master of the domain. I do not share power. Only I can feed from this realm.”
I shrugged. “It seems the realm doesn’t agree with you, dude. It no longer owes you absolute loyalty. Hell belongs to my mother, too, and I’m her heir. If I’d learned that truth earlier, I could have kicked your ugly ass sooner.”
Loki chortled. “No one has called him ‘ugly ass’ before.”
Lucifer’s nostrils fumed again, his pitiless eyes burning with a fallen archangel’s rage. He started murmuring a string of ancient chants and curses.
“Don’t let him finish, Celeste!” Loki shouted and tossed his Hell power at his father, endeavoring to stop the chanting.
I threw a spare dagger toward the devil’s eye, but Lucifer swatted it away. He was good at multitasking. Then, a dark purple wave surged out of him, pierced through Loki’s and my combined hellfire and force field, and crashed into us.
The purple light wrapped around Loki, twirling until it bound him like chains.
When the purple light tried to chain me, it bounced right off me, as a wave of crimson light bled out of me, forming a cocoon around me. However, my new shield didn’t extend the same courtesy to the prince.
I’d never had a good grasp of how to use my shield. It had automatically shielded me when I’d passed out after dueling Paxton, when the sea demigod had let Jack beat me near to death. But my shield had failed to protect me when Lucifer and Ares combined their forces to attack me in the Ever Realm. I had no idea why or how it popped out to resist Lucifer now.
Loki bellowed in rage and pain as he struggled in vain.
I tried to push my crimson light toward Loki to cover him, but it didn’t move an inch.
“Let him go, Lucifer!” I shouted.
I didn’t know what else to do to release Loki from the binding or the agony, so I shattered my cocoon to apply my new ice magic to counter Lucifer’s power and aid Loki, hoping ice could cancel out fire and the heated purple light.
My ice magic didn’t break the purple chains that bound the prince but sent him colliding against a large rock reeling outside our circle.
“I’m sorry,” I called frantically, cold sweat forming on my nose. “Hang in there! I’ll figure this out.”
“Save yourself, Celeste,” Loki called back. “Get out of here now. He has a dark plan for you.”
“Pathetic,” Lucifer said in disgust, flicking a wrist and sending a bellowing Loki flying backward.
In a blink of an eye, Loki vanished as if he’d been dragged into some phantom realm.
“Where did you send him?” I demanded. “If you harm him—”
Lucifer tore open the fabric of the air, and I peeked through the hole into another dimension.
The prince was in the same dungeon in the Seventh Hell where he’d been chained and tortured as a little boy. I’d seen that part of his memory.