I lay there on my side, too exhausted to feel fear, too exhausted to feel hate, too exhausted to feel anger. It was all that I could do to keep from lowering my head and going to sleep, and without will or emotion to fuel my spells, I might as well have been one more frozen sculpture in Mab’s prison garden.
Charity’s heels began to kick frantically, uselessly. The Scarecrow went on purring, and I thought I could actually see the damned thing grow a couple of inches taller. Lily’s incendiary butterfly fluttered around my head, obscuring my view for a second.
And I suddenly got it. A sluggish hope surged up in me.
The fetch drew its power from fear.
And I had none. I was just too tired for it.
That was why I had thrashed the fetch at the hotel so badly. Not two minutes before I faced it, I had gathered up my fear and hurled it out on that decoy spell. When I faced the thing in the darkened hallway, I’d been nothing but angry. Without my fear to play on, the fetch could not disrupt my magic, and I had batted him around like a softball.
Similarly, when I decapitated the Bucky-fetch, I had been feeling no fear. It all happened too fast. I’d reacted on pure reflex, before any pesky thoughts or emotions could weigh in on the matter. There’d been no time to be afraid, and I’d struck the fetch down.
I would never have realized the weakness in the fetches’ defenses had I not pushed myself to my limits; the only thing I had to fear was fear itself. I suddenly knew I could take this chump out, if only I had enough power left for one more spell. I’d done it twice. Third time’s the charm.
The butterfly danced wildly in the air in front of me.
I stared at it for a second, realization dawning, and then I burst out into weak laughter. “Lily, you manipulative, deceitful, wonderful girl.”
I held open my left palm, and the butterfly alighted on it. Its light flashed brighter for a second, and then my will touched it lightly. It fell apart into glowing threads that settled down on my scarred palm and rushed into my spirit. Pure flame filled me, the joyous heat of full summer, and I exalted in the sudden, overflowing life of it. It met the tiny spark of hope still glowing within me and the two multiplied, power unfolding and expanding inside me.
I found myself on my feet, arms spread to my sides, face turned up toward the enormous silver moon. Sunlight seemed to spill from me, to wreathe me in dancing fires that blazed their defiance of Winter. Arctis Tor itself, the fortress of black ice, groaned in protest at the intensity of the light.
I looked down to find the creature staring at me in utter shock. Its tendril-fingers had gone loose, and Molly and Charity lay moving weakly at its feet.
“You cannot do that,” the fetch said in a shocked tone. “You… It is not possible.”
I flicked out a hand, whispered a word, and my blasting rod flew from the ground where I’d dropped it and into my hand, its carvings bursting into light as the blazing heat of a thousand Julys welled up, ready to fly free. “You like movie villains, do you?” I lifted the blasting rod while Summer fire flickered around my outstretched arm. I peeled my lips back from my teeth and purred, “Have you seen this one?”
The carvings along the rod flooded with a blaze of scarlet-and-golden light.
“How about a little fire, Scarecrow?”
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Scarecrow let out an ear-splitting trilling chirp, like a summer locust on steroids, and it bounded to one side in an effort to keep the mounded ice of the fountain between us. I’d already seen how fast a fetch could move, and didn’t bother with a snap shot. Instead, I let it distance itself from Molly and Charity, until it reached cover behind the fountain’s ice and stopped moving.
Then I blew two-thirds of that dome away in a single blast of light, thunder, and fire.
The golden Summer flame hammered straight through the ice and into the Scarecrow. The old fetch was taken off guard, and the lance of fire incinerated what would have been a hip and thigh on a human being. It bellowed a metallic roar of pain and anger, bounced off one of the white marble statues of the three sisters, and was forced to seize hold of one of the statues’ ankles to keep from bouncing over the edge of the parapet.
But the Scarecrow wasn’t the only faerie who cried out. Without warning, a hurricane of sound slammed into me, painfully intense. Once more Arctis Tor shuddered, the black ice trembling and heaving while deep, almost subsonic groans echoed through the fortress. The other fetches’ screams arose from below, a frenzied chorus of berserk rage.
The heaving ground and the sonic sledgehammer tossed me into a bank of ice-sculpted rose vines with thorns three times as long as their flowers. The ice was not brittle, and it didn’t break as my weight hit it. I felt a sharp pain from my ankle, a thorn stabbing underneath the hem of my duster, but the spell-worked coat protected me from further harm. I was on my feet again in a second, readying another blast.
But in that second, the Scarecrow had reversed its course with eerie agility. It headed for Charity and Molly, running on all three of its limbs like a wounded spider, awkward but still swift. This time I couldn’t afford to take my time about lining up the shot. I flicked a lash of fire between the Scarecrow and the Carpenter women, but it sidestepped and I only burned a few loose-end tendrils from its vine-body. The Scarecrow hurtled toward Molly. Charity lay perfectly still beside her, sprawled on the black ice.
But only until the Scarecrow came within reach of her sword. Then Charity rolled and popped up into a low, slashing lunge. Her sword seared its way through the Scarecrow’s undamaged leg, slicing it off at an angle that began at midthigh and finished just above the knee. It frantically rolled again, struggling to get out of sword range. Charity pressed ruthlessly, too close to the damned fetch to let me blast it again. The Scarecrow hopped and skittered on its remaining limbs, heading for the edge of the parapet.
“Charity!” I shouted. “Down!”
Michael’s wife dropped out of my line of fire in an instant.
The fetch shimmered, body contorting weirdly, and leapt. On the way, it changed. Membranous wings unfurled from its body and beat powerfully down, and within a heartbeat the rest of the fetch’s body had conformed to the shape of one of the monstrous, hang-glider-sized bats I’d seen in Faerie once before. It hurtled away, wings thrashing to gain altitude, and the faerie moon shone down in lunatic glee.
I had a perfect shot.
Once more, I called upon the fire of Summer I’d taken in. I could feel its intensity beginning to ebb, but if the fetch managed to slip away I might never have such an opportunity again. Besides. That creature had tormented my friend’s wife and daughter, nearly murdered them right in front of my eyes, and now it was going to answer for it.
So I unleashed the fire again, this time so brilliant that it lit dark mountainsides five or ten miles away, so hot that the blowing snow hissed into instant steam in the wake of the flame. When it struck the fetch, it detonated into a blinding conflagration, an explosion that roared so loudly that it shattered every icy replica of a rose vine upon the parapet.
What tumbled burning from the faerie skies toward the merciless mountains below could not have been identified as anything in particular. It trailed sparks, soot, and ash, and when it slammed into a granite cliff side, it hit with such force that an icy rockslide was jarred loose from the mountain’s slope, burying the fetch under incalculable tons of stone.
I shook my staff at the rockslide in a primal gesture of triumph and shouted, “Who’s next!?!”
The courtyard below become completely silent for a second, and then I could see fetches, too dark to make out clearly, darting away from the base of the spire, retreating from the fight.