Life's A Witch

Chapter Twenty

I watched as I got closer and closer to the ground in what seemed like slow motion and wondered what would happen when I hit. Would my bones crack instantly? I'd never broken anything before, although I'd always wondered how I'd managed to escape that rite of passage.

But if I was seriously hurt in this fall I might not be able to get myself—let alone everyone else—out of there alive. Maybe I'd be able to convince enough of the others to get out, so it wouldn't turn into a total slaughter. This thought nearly made me sick to my stomach. Or maybe it was the fact that I was falling so quickly now that my insides felt like I was on a roller coaster. Either way, I wasn't feeling too hot.

I was seconds away from going splat all over my living room floor when I clenched my eyes shut. Right as I was expecting to feel the floor come up to bite me in the ass, the strangest thing happened.

My body began to slow down, resisting gravity as if I were attached to an invisible bungee cord. And then I was being pulled sideways, arms and legs flailing as I tried to somehow navigate the flight. I had to open my eyes because I had no idea what had just happened. And what I saw didn't make any sense.

The guy in the trench coat was still there, only now his eyes were following me as I flew across the room. He seemed oblivious to everything that was going on around us. Peter and June were taking turns shielding each other and knocking bad guys down, and Asher was in the middle of pounding on another guy near the front door. Sascha was still recovering from reviving me earlier, but Fallon had moved to her side, deflecting spells as they were thrown his way. The Cleri were too busy fighting others to go after the guy who currently had his black eyes trained on me. So he just stood there, smiling that eerie grin of his like he was actually having fun.

"Shifagin momentus!" someone yelled out, barely audible over the noise in the room. A few moments later, my body hit the soft cushions of the couch with an "oomph." The landing may have been better than hitting the floor, but I still ended up having the wind knocked out of me and had to take a moment to get air back into my lungs. When I could breathe again, I jumped up from the couch and stood in a defensive stance. I knew I had someone to thank for making the couch move four feet backward to soften my fall, but there was no time. Trench coat guy was steadily walking toward me, still smiling, which made me totally uneasy.

Just as he was raising his hand to cast yet another spell, I muttered the words to a bubble spell that trapped its caster in the safety of an impenetrable, circular force field. I felt the strength of the guy's spell hit my bubble, but—thank God—it held.

This time, trench coat guy's mouth twitched even though the smile was still plastered across his face.

"I knew you'd be a worthy adversary," he said, as if we were the only two there.

I watched with horror as Fallon knocked out a man who'd jumped over the counter to get to him and Sascha. then he ran straight toward trench coat guy. Just as he was opening his mouth to let out a spell, Trench Coat flicked his wrist, tossing Fallon into the air like he was a ragdoll. I screamed his name, but that was all I could do. Luckily, Asher turned around just in time to see him and reached out to help cushion his fall. The bad guy was still talking, as if he'd just swatted at an annoying fly.

"I've been waiting a long time to meet you," he said with an almost animalistic snarl. "Everyone else was just too easy to defeat. Or too damaged. Or too . . . predictable. I needed a challenge. And that's where you come in."

"Like you're the first person to tell me that I'm challenging," I said, sounding a lot more like myself than I had in days. The only problem was that it was taking all my concentration just to keep the bubble around me intact, and I needed to try and pull the others into it with me.