Page 66 of Titan’s Mate

Brandon said, “We can fight you.”

The demon laughed harder. “You cannot. We feed on your anger, on your hate. The more you fight us, the stronger we become.”

Mari and Titan glanced at each other. We? That didn’t sound good.

“We can take you down,” Colt said. “There’s only one of you.”

The demon shook its head slowly. “There are so many more.”

He called out in a hoarse language, and Mari saw black fire running from him into the distance. And then the distance seemed to be coming nearer. Flames erupted just behind him, forming into a set of huge gates, glowing like red-hot metal.

The literal gates of Hell.

They swung inward, and flames billowed out, making the crew flinch. Behind her, the Wild Bloods held their ground, but she could feel the shift from aggression to desperation.

More demons stepped out of the flames.

Please, Mari prayed. They’ve risked so much. They don’t deserve to die.

At the sight of the demons, Titan was overwhelmed with grief and anger—grief for his family, for the other people Raines and his panthers had hurt. Fury at Raines, fury at his murdering crew. Fury at himself.

The anger fed his spirit and his power, and he began to grow bigger, towering over Mari and his friends. But as big as he got, the demon matched him in size.

Titan conjured a white-hot sword of power, and the demon conjured a matching red-hot one of his own.

Fine, Titan thought. You want to fight? I’ll fight.

As their swords clashed, he heard the growls and the stirring behind him as his crew prepared to fight the other demons.

The demons growled as well, readying themselves.

Titan fought the demon with all his might, but it mirrored his movements easily, always seeming to know what he was going to do a split second before he did it.

He pulled on the power of the bond, and the demon pulled on power from its friends.

He dealt out a flurry of blows, and the demon did the same.

There was no way past it. No way to defeat it.

And then the other demons attacked.

Mari shrank back, watching the clash of battle. Her friends were fighting, each person and each animal with their own matching demon. But they weren’t doing any better than Titan—they weren’t getting anywhere.

As she watched, she realized the demons were mirroring her friends—just as the first demon was mirroring Titan.

The fights would go on forever—or until their bonds to the real world dissolved, and they died anyway.

But she didn’t have her own demon. None of them were mirroring her.

Because I’m hiding behind Titan, she thought. I’m not a brave bear.

Her bear said, Because we don’t fight.

And then she understood. The demons were feeding on her crew’s anger, their aggression, their hate. In a sense, they were her friends. And the more they fought, the more they fed the demons.

We fight our own way, she said. We can make the spirit world into anything we want. Titan showed us how.

She started thinking of the happiest, prettiest things she knew of, concentrating as hard as she could, willing them into existence.