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.By thinning the ranks of the Wardens, they may have disrupted what binds us together and made it possible for them to call one of their Masters forth unnoticed.”She felt a laugh bubbling up in her throat, knew it came out just this side of hysterical.“Unnoticed? I have a hard time believing that one of the seven embodiments of ultimate evil in the universe popped up in Saskatoon or someplace one day and nobody noticed.”“And that is to our advantage.”Spar lowered himself to the sofa beside her and reached for her hand.She fought to keep it from him, but his strength easily overwhelmed her.His gentle concern, though, was what really threatened to push her over the edge.“We have an advantage?”“If one of the Seven had broken free of its prison of its own free will, it would have been at the peak of its strength.Nothing else could shatter the wards and safeguards that keep it contained, and a demon of the Darkness at full strength could have passed no one’s notice.Without the Guardians there to battle against it, its path of destruction would already have swept wide and bloody across the land.We would have heard about it.”Fil looked up at him, at his dark, serious eyes glinting with inner fire, and struggled not to climb into his lap, curl up into a ball, and hide.She didn’t know how much longer she could take this.Every time she thought she got a handle on this nightmare, something else happened to make things even worse.If she thought pinching herself would wake her up into a different, saner reality, she’d be nothing but a giant walking bruise.Of course, after her run-in with the golem, she sort of felt that way already.“Maybe that means Onslow was wrong, then.” She tried to make the hope in her voice come off as something other than pathetic, but had a feeling she hadn’t succeeded.“If we haven’t seen any evidence of activity by the Seven, maybe they’re still locked up where they belong.”“The evidence is here.” Spar gestured to the paperwork, making her stomach sink into her ankles.“I believe the Warden invested a great deal of time into his research, and it appears he was thorough.His theory, and I agree with him, is that the nocturnis either discovered or developed a spell that works like the one the Wardens use to summon us from our sleep, only instead of waking the Guardians, they attempted to pull a demon onto our plane of existence.It would require a tremendous amount of power, but it could work.”“And you think it did.”“It makes sense.” He picked up newspaper clipping and spread it open on her lap.“I assume that you do not read Arabic—”“Not so much.”“—so I will tell you that this article relates the tale of a massacre in the mountains on the northern border of Afghanistan.”“Considering there’s a war on there, do you really think that has anything to do with demons? I mean, I’ve always considered the groups who want to subjugate their women and make war on the West to be pretty evil, but—”He shushed her with a glance.“A place like that is the perfect cover for the nocturnis.As you see, the media reports that a group of militant rebels attacked a small village in the dead of night.Fifty people were slaughtered, every man, woman, and child in the village.The eldest was almost eighty, the youngest only weeks from its mother’s womb.”Fil felt her heart clench.“That’s unspeakably awful, but things like that happen during wars.”“And they happen when doers of evil need to raise tremendous amounts of power through the sacrifice of blood,” he insisted in clear, cold words.“Nothing in the universe raises more Dark power than the spilling of human blood and the draining of a human life force.Nothing.It is the most unforgivable of acts, and one that feeds the Darkness like nothing else.Even the nocturnis reserve it for the rarest and most important of their rituals.The lifeblood of a single human will nourish a demon at full strength for days.Perhaps weeks.To sacrifice fifty of them could have broken through the wards of one’s prison and allowed the Order to call it forth.”Fil shook her head.She understood what Spar was telling her, but she didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to believe it.“If that’s all it takes, then why don’t they just bomb a city and break all of the Seven out at once? Why waste time lurking in the shadows when they could have already taken over the world a thousand times by now?”Spar gaped at her for a moment [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]