And I didn’t need to turn my head to know what he was doing.
But I did it anywa
y, as if in slow motion, because my brain wasn’t working right. I felt Rhea crash into the ground beside me, and grab my arm. Felt the ghostly embrace of the librarian on my other side, heard them trying to talk to me. But it all washed away on a tide of emotion.
I didn’t need comforting.
I needed that, I thought, watching Mircea grab two ancient warriors and crash their skulls together so hard that their heads exploded.
Blood spewed out like rain, a full-on cloud of it, which he absorbed on his way to carve up three others. He’d found a sword, I noted vaguely. One of theirs, I supposed. It was sharp.
A rain of body parts followed him, as he moved through a whole line up in a deadly dance too fast to see. Even so, they might have caught him, have overwhelmed him by sheer numbers, but he had help. Pritkin was back on his feet, looking like a corpse but machine-gunning spells in all directions.
And he wasn’t bothered by the shifting magical currents. He could have cared less. He effortlessly moved from fey magic to human and back again, without missing a step.
I wondered why he hadn’t done that earlier, why he’d taken that beating instead.
I didn’t know. Didn’t care. The shock of losing Billy was eating into my soul like acid, making impossible to think about anything else. Rhea was shouting something now and shaking me. I ignored her.
But it was hard to ignore something else. Something that looked like electricity that suddenly arced between my fingers. It was pretty.
A fey came running at us, sword bared, and I reached out—
And the lightning jumped to him. He fell to the ground, spasming, and didn’t get back up again. But I did, rising to my feet, looking around, wishing I could stop the roaring in my ears, but it seemed to have swamped me.
“Lady! Lady!” Rhea gasped, as another dozen fey headed our way. Until an arc of blue white fire erupted from my fingertips, turning them to ash that fluttered away on the breeze. Easy, so easy.
How had I never noticed how easily they died?
All of them were running now, not toward the portal where I stood, but away, scattering in every direction. I started after them, but Rhea held me back. I turned on her, snarling—
And she held her ground.
There it was, I thought. There it was: the courage, determination and strength I’d always seen and loved in her. Her color was high, her hair was down and whipping around her face, and her expression said she knew what she risked. Yet, unlike the fey, she didn’t run. An enraged Pythia in her face who had just killed thirteen men, and still she didn’t.
“Lady, please! Listen to her!” she yelled, pointing.
At the librarian, who was kneeling in the dirt, sobbing.
“My fault,” she told me, staring up. She was human again for the moment, and her face was wet and her eyes bloodshot. “My fault! I’m sorry, Lady, so sorry—”
I slapped her, full in the face, and would have done it again, but Rhea stopped me. “Cassie! Cassie, listen!”
The use of my name when she never did, brought me back a little, helped me think. But it didn’t help much. “Listen to what?”
“Oh, thank God,” the librarian sobbed. “Thank—”
“Thank whomever you please later,” Rhea snapped. “Tell her!”
And she did. I didn’t get all of it. Mircea’s bloodlust was throbbing in my veins, or maybe that was mine. Grief was tearing me apart, what felt like literally. My heart was beating so loudly that I could hear it, as if it would rip itself out of my chest.
But I could hear her, too.
And what I could hear . . . explained everything.
She told me how the file on Lover’s Knot in the Circle’s library contained more than just the spell. It had the full history of its use, the one they didn’t want anyone to see. But the Pythian Court had the same history in its archives, and Rhea and the librarian had found it after I left and she recovered.
And what a story it was.