Frank was gone only a minute before a nephilim forced his way through the field and landed on Phoenix. I aimed the angel stone and blasted the creature into dust. Brock appeared to help Phoenix up from the ground, and she preened and fawned over him as if he’d been the one to save her from the attack. I swung around in the circle, keeping an eye out for any breaches. I was startled to see Adam Sinclair, but before I could aim at him, I watched him and Leon Botwin repel a nephilim trying to wedge through a crack in the plaid. When they were successful, the boys high-fived and grunted, “Oorah!” So my speech to the Alphas had an effect. Heartened, I continued my patrol until Frank returned.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” he shouted, grabbing my hand. “We’re gonna join hands, but not to sing ‘Kumbaya.’ ”
A circle was hastily formed. When Brock Olsen grabbed my other hand, I felt a jolt of power. The angel stone in my right hand pulsed and burned like a hot coal.
“Hot damn!” Frank shouted. “That baby’s ready to blow! On the count of three, the Stewarts will drop the plaid and we’ll blow them out of the sky. Ready?”
The circle cheered as one. Frank squeezed my hand. “One …”
“Frank,” I whispered, “what about Soheila?”
“She knows to get out of the way,” he said between gritted teeth. “Two …”
I looked up and saw the owl creature winging upward, then one nephilim detached itself from the throng to pursue it. I was going to tell Frank, but it was too late.
“Three!” he shouted. The plaid field melted to the ground in a shower of red, green, yellow, and blue streamers. Frank raised my hand and I concentrated all my power—and all the power of the circle—through the angel stone. A wide beam of white light shot into the sky. Inside the beam, winged shapes writhed and tumbled toward the ground, their delicate wing bones briefly etched against the surrounding glare. I smelled incense and heard a screaming inside my head. I momentarily felt the nephilims’ pain—not just their dying but all the hurt of their long lives, the horror of their fathers, the expulsion from their love, their love of humans twisted into hate because it was their human side that had turned them into monsters. For the briefest moment, I wanted to lower the angel stone and save them—surely there was some way for us to live in peace—but it was too late. Ash fell through the sky like black snow. My arm felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. I dropped to my knees, dragging Frank down with me. I saw his lips shouting my name, but I couldn’t hear him. The nephilim’s dying screams had deafened me. Then I saw Frank look up and his eyes filled with terror. The sky darkened, and a great winged creature swept down through the ash. It slammed straight into me, claws raking my throat, wings beating my face. The angel stone dropped from my hand. Bright-blue eyes glared at me out of a blackened face. It was Duncan Laird.
You have destroyed my brothers, I heard his voice say inside my head. But after I’ve destroyed you, there will be no one to open the door between the worlds. All your friends will die. His claws dug into my throat, and my vision blackened. In that darkness, I glimpsed William’s face as I’d last seen him in Faerie. He’d sacrificed himself so that I could return. I couldn’t let his sacrifice be in vain. I summoned all the strength I had and pulled myself out of the darkness, shoving Laird away. I felt his surprise at my power—and then felt something else: Frank pressing the brooch into my hand.
“Hold on, McFay, and use the damned stone.” Over Frank’s shoulder, I saw Duncan grappling with another winged creature, but this second creature had the body and face of a woman. Soheila. She fought him with all her strength, but one wing hung broken by her side, and her face was slashed. Duncan lifted one wing bristling with razor barbs, just about to bring it down on Soheila. I raised the angel stone and aimed. The white-hot light struck the razored wing, lighting each feather tip with flame and illuminating the bony structure beneath the skin. Veins of fire ran through the wing toward Duncan’s heart. I could see his entire skeleton light up like an X-ray, but before the power could dissolve him, he twisted into a knot. His hands tore at his own flesh. There was a horrible rending sound and a scream that vibrated in my own bones. Sparks flew into the air along with a flurry of feathers that rose, flaming, to the sky before drifting down to the ground as ash. When the blizzard cleared, Duncan stood at its center, one soot-stained wing arched over his head like a mantle. He had torn the other wing off to survive the attack. I was so shocked by his self-mutilation that it took me a moment to aim the stone again. Too late. He had already bolted from the circle and vanished into the woods.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“He can’t go far with only one wing,” Soheila said, limping over to me, her own wing dragging in the dust. “I’ll go after him.”
“Nothing doing,” Frank said. He reached out and gingerly stroked Soheila’s wounded wing, his gruff face utterly transformed by wonder and awe, which he spoiled the next moment by asking, “Should we, like, take you to a vet?”
Soheila swatted him with her good wing. “I’m fine,” she said, “but I can’t transform back as long as this wing’s broken.”
“I can mend it,” Diana said, running her fingers gently over Soheila’s broken wing. A golden glow flowed from her fingers—Aelvesgold. Diana was using the magical elixir of Faerie to heal Soheila’s bones. Soheila’s face relaxed, and she let out a long sigh that blew through the glade. I looked around and saw that all the folk who’d returned with me from Faerie were using the stores of Aelvesgold they’d amassed there to heal those who’d remained in Fairwick. Liz Book was tending a gash on my grandmother’s face, Brock was setting Leon Botwin’s broken arm, and Dory Browne and her troop of brownies flitted among the Stewarts, tending the many burns they’d incurred holding the plaid against the forest fire—a fire that still smoked beyond the glade.
“How long was I gone?” I asked Frank.
“A couple of hours,” he answered. “But it was a fucking long couple of hours.”
His answer made me so dizzy I had to sit down. I’d spent almost two months in Ballydoon, but only a few hours had passed here in Fairwick. I supposed I should feel lucky. Fairy lore was full of travelers to Faerie who spent a night dancing with the fairies, only to come back and find they’d been gone a hundred years, all their family and friends long dead, and when they set foot back on the ground, they turned to dust and bones. Instead, I felt as if the last eight weeks I’d spent with William had turned to dust.
“You look like you’ve been sucker punched, McFay,” Frank said. “I have a feeling you had to pay dearly for that stone.”
I looked at the angel stone in my hand, which was still glowing. “Yes,” I answered. “And I’m not the only one who paid for it.”
“Well, then,” Frank said. “We shouldn’t let it go to waste. Let’s go track down that bastard Laird and make him pay.”
Healed and recharged by Aelvesgold, the Stewarts and the witches’ circle joined the new recruits from Faerie to march back to the campus, where we all thought it likely Duncan would go.
“He’s been running this show out of the dean’s office,” my grandmother told me as we walked toward campus. “He’ll go there to destroy records of other nephilim nests around the world, to make it harder for us to track them down.”
“Other nests?” I asked, unsnagging a vine from Adelaide’s sleeve. I noticed as my arm brushed against hers that she was trembling. Although I’d seen Liz tending Adelaide’s wounds with Aelvesgold, my grandmother looked older and frailer than I’d ever seen her before. She still had the power to make me quake when she scolded me, though.