And over all the noise, I heard a crackling laugh.
Fax Torris stood at water’s edge. She dragged Johnny’s naked body behind her. With a jerk, she hauled him farther onto the beach. She dropped his arm like a filthy rag, and kicked him so hard he was lifted into the air, rolling, and landed hard. He didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not.
My heart froze, hard and heavy, a block of ice in my chest. I jerked the dagger from my sleeve. I turned to Menessos. “Call her!”
He shook his head. “Lucrum’s death, the Beholders’ deaths. I haven’t the strength.”
Trembling with rage, I took his chin roughly in my free hand. “Say the fucking words!” I shouted even as I shoved energy at him.
He recoiled from me before I could transfer it, throwing himself backward to the sand. “You must not!”
“Fax must die!”
“You have to shut the gateway! You need your energy to do that!”
“I’ll use the ley. But she has to die first!”
“You can’t use the ley to shut the door.”
That stopped me. “Why not?” I felt deflated, lost and scared. So angry. Failed.
“We didn’t know about ley power when we opened it. You have to shut it as we opened it. All we had was our own power. Our desperation. Our hope and resolve. Our pain and our loss.” He moved onto his knees, so weak. Jerking up his pant leg, he released something concealed there.
I’m not the only one hiding backup plans on their person.
The willow wand.
He offered it to me. “There’s another way.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Fax Torris’s fire wings had carried her and her scalding laughter out over the lake. She was gathering some of the collared phoenixes to her, a new formation for a new attack.
Unicorns with broken legs or bleeding stab wounds sprawled around me. Their pitiful noises told me they’d have to be put down. Griffons struggled in the surf, trying to come ashore. They didn’t seem able to swim and twisted at odd angles. One, already ashore, had lost an eye and the talon tips from the claws of one foreleg; it hobbled around stretching its beak down to other griffons that lay unmoving on the sand. A smaller dragon was curled protectively around the head of another dragon that was coughing blood on the sand. The small one whimpered.
Those that still wore collars continued fighting the handful of Beholders who remained.
The witches had regrouped and were attempting some sort of airborne offensive against the griffons. My attention strayed to Johnny. Was he dead or alive? Mountain was crawling toward him, trying not to gain the attention of any collared elementals.
The air prickled with another calling of the ley. As I felt it crawling over my skin, I knew Fax was drawing heavily on the line. The fire fairy pushed her hands down before her, wrists together, and opened herself like a conduit. Her wings flared like flamethrowers, engulfing nearby phoenixes like burned offerings. She was creating an energy reservoir within herself. The accumulation of ley line magnitude caused the air underneath her to shimmer. The swell of her power triggered something in Beau’s charm. It answered with a glow that thawed my frozen indecision, emboldened me and warned me.
This is going to be bad.
A white-hot beam of energy flashed into existence beneath her. Twisting up from the lake, a waterspout instantly turned into steam. Fax glowed an eerie red; her eyes were radiant white orbs. Her hair and clothing whipped around her in a cyclonic turbulence of steam.
Tapping the ley in normal usage was dangerous and potentially addictive, but she was taking in more power than I could even imagine. That she could hold that much power and not explode was amazing.
Fax Torris angled her wrists, moving the beam toward the shore, filling the air with steam. Her fingers splayed wide, broadening the beam. It seemed a heavy burden, difficult to move. Hard to control. She guided it in the direction of the fighting dragons and Beholders. None of them were aware of what was coming at them.
“Get out of there!” I screamed. My voice was lost to the lashing wind. “All of you run away. Run now!”
The beam came ashore. Where the beam touched sand its progress was slowed, and a dark strip of something glossy was left in its wake.
Glass. The temperature required for that—
The beam ran across the middle of the dragon coughing up blood—it was cut in half and left nothing in its wake! The superheated light was incinerating nearly everything it encountered.
The Beholders ran—the young painter with the broken demeanor of a pit-fighting dog was among them. He stumbled. Clawing at the sand, desperate to get up, he managed to rise to one knee just as the beam struck his still-extended foot. He lurched forward and sideways. Relentless, the beam passed over his legs. His scream was unlike anything I’d ever heard: pure agony enunciated. When the beam moved on, his legs were just . . . gone. His clothes were consumed in flames.
Fax Torris guided the beam, keeping it trained on those fleeing. The molten light destroyed two more. Then the fire fairy seemed to notice Mountain. And Johnny.
She shifted the death-bringing radiance toward them.
Menessos, taking my dagger from me and casting it to the sand, put the willow wand into my hands. “The sacrifices you have made, you made only to see that things are done right,” he said.
He aimed the tip of the wand at his chest. “Do this,” he said. “It is the right thing, for the right reason.”
“No.” Horrified, I backpedaled. Limp fingers let the wand fall to the sand.
“There isn’t time to debate, Persephone! I cannot call her. This is the only way to sever the bonds so you can seal the gateway.”
“No,” I whispered.
Menessos took up the wand and staggered to his feet. My legs were jelly. He placed the wand—a stake!—into my limp hands, curled my fingers around it. “Let’s give her what she wants. Free her. Let her go home and take her madness with her.”
“Menessos.” I drew a breath. My words came back to haunt me. When have I not accepted the responsibility thrust upon me? When have I drawn the line and said “No, this is too much”? “No. No. Here, at this, I’m drawing the line,” I said. “This is too much.”
“You are my master, Persephone. I accept what that means. The good and the bad.” He stood straighter. “For you, I will experience death.” He opened his shirt and bared his chest.
I beheld Arthur. My hero and king.
I thought of Seven. She’d chosen love over destiny. Seven believed herself a failure for her choice. Johnny might be dead already. And Menessos was telling me to kill him, as well. Destiny sucked.
“Take pity, Persephone, do not draw this out.”
I nodded, once.
But I couldn’t do it.
I grabbed him into my arms and I pressed my lips to his.
A rush of heat blossomed around me. Was it Menessos’s heat or the charm redirecting something dangerous?
The charm.
Screams erupted to my right. I broke the kiss to see two witches taken by the beam, reduced to nothing in an instant. They were trying to stop Fax Torris, drawing the beam away. But she was back on target.
Menessos whispered, “In signum amoris.”
Staring into his eyes, I drew on our bond, just enough. I held him in my mind because I could not hold him in my arms.
“By your hand, let it be done.”
My heart thudded once and my world slowed as battle-heightened senses went dull. I heard only my own tardy heartbeat in my ears, the shift of fabric as I drew back my arm.