Ether knew what I was about to say.

  I could tell by the look on her face, but I still had to say it.

  “I need to go back into it.” I started to pull away, but Ether tightened her grip around me.

  “Mive told you that you would get caught if you kept going in there!” Ether shook her head. There has to be another way!”

  “We have a few minutes at best before more demons show up and they already tried cutting Mive out, if they can’t do it, then what makes you think that one of us can?” I pulled her arms off of me. “But maybe if I go inside that thing, I can find a way to break it.” I took a deep breath because I knew she wasn’t going to like the next part.

  “But you can’t go with me.”

  “What?” Ether shook her head, then grabbed my left arm. “No. No way. I’m not letting you go in there alone.”

  “I won’t be alone.” I motioned at all of the tendrils. “Everyone is connected to it. So I’ll have plenty of backup.”

  “Everyone is going to be in a cage.” Ether corrected me. “No one is going to be able to help you.”

  “Maybe that means we can overload it.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. But what I do know is that this is something that we haven’t tried and while I’m in there, I need someone out here to protect everyone.” I turned so that I could touch her arm. “Someone has to stay behind to make sure we’re all safe and I’m the only one who can go in there.”

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  Ether growled and I could see her mind working to try to come up with an alternative. It didn’t take long for her to close her eyes as she came up with nothing.

  “You need to hurry.” She opened her eyes and looked at me.

  I pulled her close and kissed her real quick. I grinned as I backed up. “For luck.”

  “Right…” Ether shook her head. “I think luck gave up on us a long time ago.”

  “I don’t know.” I walked over to the main mass under Mive’s throne. “We’re still here despite everything that’s tried to kill us.”

  Ether shook her head as she followed me.

  “You might move everyone closer together.” I nodded at the unconscious people. “Just in case we have to fight.”

  Ether looked at me, then back at her sister. I could tell that she didn’t like the thought of leaving me.

  “I’ll be fine.” I touched the mass and could feel the magic in it. There was only one tendril left that was wrapped around Mive’s left leg. Justia had done a fairly good job of untangling it and whatever the demon had done had almost completely finished freeing him. Before I tried to use the restraint as a medium, I grabbed onto the smokey restraint and tried to pull it off. It was only up to his knee, but it wasn’t budging. It was almost like it was attached to him now.

  I swallowed and tried to ignore how much faster my heart was beating. Despite my assurances that I’d given to Ether, I had serious doubts about whether or not I could pull this off. It didn’t really help to encourage me that we were down to rushing bad ideas. At least it was only a mental spell. If I was trapped inside it, then Justia could still use my blood to close the Chamber, whenever she woke up, anyway. So it wasn’t like my doing this was also going to trap everyone in here. Unless by doing this, I reactivated whatever had stopped it from feeding on Kara and it slowly made its way through everyone that it’d latched on to.

  I shook my head to try to stop my mind from following that line of thinking. I needed to start this quickly, because I had no idea how much time was going to pass while I was in there and I wanted Ether to be alone for as short of time as possible. I closed my eyes and said the spell in my mind.

  SIPHON

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