28. Matilda
28
MATILDA
“Wait,” I say before Draven can push the door open to Anu’s containment cell vault. “What’s the plan? Do we simply blast her with everything we’ve got?”
“Not exactly,” Vex says. “We need to be strategic about this. Anu may be weakened, but she’s still incredibly powerful.”
“And crafty,” Luc adds. “Don’t underestimate her ability to manipulate the situation. We spread out, don’t give her a chance to fire on all of us at once.”
“Hang on. Fire at us?” I ask. “We’re letting her out?”
“We have to,” Vex says. “It’s the only way we can get our magick in .”
“Fuck,” I mutter, my palms going a bit sweaty. I hadn’t anticipated that she would be able to fight back. That was na?ve of me, though. “Of course.”
Draven’s hand tightens on the door handle. “We need to be ready to move fast. As soon as I open this, she’ll know something’s up. ”
I nod, trying to steel my nerves. The guys all look grimly determined. I wonder if I look as terrified as I feel.
“Tilly,” Vex says softly, squeezing my hand. “You’re the key here. Your Praxian power is what will ultimately take her down. We’ll keep her distracted and off-balance, but when you see an opening, you need to hit her with everything you’ve got.”
“Right,” I whisper.
“That creature is not your mother. She never was.”
“I know.”
He leans in and brushes his lips over my ear. “You’ve got this, wife .”
Inhaling deeply, I exhale slowly. That gets to me. It makes me feel safe and loved, and I know that’s why he did it. “I’ve got this.”
Luc flashes me a fierce grin. “Yeah, you do.”
Drawing on the strength of their confidence in me, I nod. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
Draven pushes the door open. For a split second, everything is so quiet that I wonder if Anu has already escaped her cell.
But we find her behind the iron bars, meditating above the ground, her eyes closed, but I know she knows we’re here.
Anu’s eyes snap open as we line up outside her cage, a predatory smile curving her lips as her eyes zoom straight in on Draven. “Come to ask me some more questions about who her father is?”
“You already told us. ”
“Did I, though?”
I try not to flinch at the sound of her voice.
“Don’t listen to her,” Draven says to me but doesn’t take his eyes off Anu as she floats down. As soon as her feet touch the ground, it rumbles.
“It’s over, Anu,” Vex says coldly. “We know you were bluffing about tying your life to Matilda’s.”
“Willing to risk her life, are you?”
“Yes,” I state, absolutely hating that she is ignoring me and talking about me like I’m not even here, but she knows that. She pretended to be my sister, who cared all those years. I confided my worst secrets and feelings to her. She knows me better than anyone. “I will die if it means getting rid of you !”
“I’m a goddess, and you’re children playing with power you don’t understand.”
“We understand enough,” Draven growls.
With a gesture, Vex unlocks the cell door.
Anu’s eyes widen slightly as the bars swing open. “Feeling brave, are we?”
“More like practical,” Luc says with a dangerous grin. “Can’t kill you properly if you’re locked up, can we?”
Anu laughs, the sound sending chills down my spine. “Kill me? You truly are delusional.”
Luc and Vex stride into the cell, magick already sparking. We surround her, and she doesn’t know which way to turn.
Anu’s eyes dart between us, her smile fading as she realises we’re serious. For a moment, uncertainty flashes across her face. Then her expression hardens.
“You want a fight?” she snarls. “Fine.”
She throws her hands out, and a shockwave of power slams into us. I stumble back, nearly losing my footing.
Luc retaliates first, hurling an orb of Hellfire at Anu. She deflects it with a wave of her hand, but Draven is there, sending his death magick coiling around her legs. She snarls and kicks free, but it gives Vex an opening to hit her with a blast of dark magickal energy. It takes me longer to gather the power. When I look at her, I see myself. I see that I was born from her. She is my mother, whether I want to admit it or not, whether I want to like it or not. And I’m not a fucking monster.
“Tilly,” Vex murmurs.
“Give me a minute,” I grit out.
“We don’t have a minute, petal,” Draven says.
Anu staggers, her eyes widening in shock as she realises how much stronger we have all become. “No, you don’t.” She recovers quickly, raising her hands. The air around us grows heavy and oppressive. I feel my knees start to buckle under the weight of her power.
“Enough games,” she hisses. “I am a goddess. You are nothing.”
The pressure increases. I gasp for breath, fighting to stay upright. Through blurring vision, I see the guys struggling too.
No. We can’t fail now.
I reach deep inside myself, tapping into that well of Praxian power. A raw, primal energy courses through me. Anu’s attack pressure eases as my strength counters it.
“I am not nothing,” I say. “I never was.”
I let the Praxian force flow out of me in a blinding wave of rainbow light. It slams into Anu, driving her back against the wall. She screams, a sound of pain and fury.
The guys recover quickly, adding their power to mine. Vex’s ancestral magick twines with my Praxian force, amplifying it. Luc’s Hellfire burns hot and fierce, while Draven’s death magick seeks out the cracks in Anu’s defences.
Anu fights back viciously, hurling bolts of energy that sizzle through the air. One catches Luc on the shoulder, and he stumbles but doesn’t fall.
“Is that the best you’ve got?” he taunts through gritted teeth.
Anu snarls and increases her efforts, but I can see the strain starting to show on her face. She’s powerful, but she’s outnumbered, and we’re not backing down. She can’t get to all of us at the same time, and she knows it.
We are a team.
Do it, Tilly. You have to. “It’s over,” I state and push back with the full force of the Praxian, which ripples innocently through the vault before it slams into her and rips at her cells. She screams as it unmakes her, the same way it did with Chris.
Anu’s scream echoes through the vault as the Praxian force tears into her. Her form unravels, her power spilling from the cracks in her skin.
But the Praxian power doesn’t falter.
Anu’s form collapses in on itself, imploding into a singularity of pure energy. For a heartbeat, that energy hangs suspended in the air, a miniature sun of compressed power. Then, it explodes outward in a shockwave that knocks us all flying backwards. I hit the wall behind me hard, banging my head and rattling my bones.
When the dust settles, there’s nothing left of Anu but a faint shimmer in the air where she once stood, which dissipates like mist in the sun.
We stare at the empty space, panting heavily. The silence is deafening.
“I’d say that was the menace downstairs checked off the list,” I say.
“I’d say you’re right,” Draven says, reaching me first as Luc and Vex pick themselves up.
Draven holds his hand out for me, and I grab it. He hauls me up and grins. “Nicely done, petal.”
“See? I said give me a minute.” I laugh, feeling slightly creeped out that I just killed my mother, and I’m laughing.
“Are you okay?” Vex says, rushing towards me and gripping my upper arms.
“I’m fine. Not dead, and apart from a sore head and bruised back, I’m not injured.”
“So she was lying,” Luc says with relief .
I give him a smile. “Guess so. So, do we report to Big B or carry on?”
“I think he probably knows,” Vex says. “I wouldn’t expect any congratulations or thanks, though. He is seriously in a mood about this.”
“I don’t blame him. We, well, me , brought a gigantic pile of shit to his door. He took me in, and I made his academy into an unsafe place. He has every right to be mad, and if he throws me out after we fix the magick, then I will have to accept that.”
“Nicely said, Miss Matilda,” Blackthorn says, appearing in the vault with us in a whisper of a magickal breeze.
“I’m sorry, Professor,” I say. “I truly am. I didn’t know any of this would happen, but it doesn’t excuse it.”
“Apology accepted,” he says. “But you are not out of the woods yet. You still have one more thing to do.”
“Yes, and we know how. Or at least in theory. If you don’t mind, we are going to have to be excused from the grounds for a while, though.”
“Oh?” he asks suspiciously.
“We need to go to Hell so that I can store some of the Praxian into a Hell cube imprisonment loop to ensure the syphons are powered up for eternity. In case anything happens to me. It’s a failsafe.”
“A Hell cube imprisonment loop? Ingenious. Well done. You have impressed me. You have permission to leave, but do remember that you have to come back and finish what you all started. ”
“Straight As,” I say, giving him a thumbs up. “We know.”
He nods once and drifts back out.
“So, does that mean we go now? I don’t even know how to channel the Praxian into the stones yet?” I ask after a beat.
“No, we need to figure that part out first,” Vex says. “We can’t do this half-cocked. If we mess it up, it will be catastrophically bad.”
I purse my lips, racking my brain.
And then an idea hits me. “Okay, first things first. How about we take just one of the syphons to connect directly to the Praxian magick in Hell? That syphon then connects to all the others. It keeps the ‘foundation stone’ safe being locked away with the power source, so the link can never be severed. That one stone can then channel to each individual stone for the various magickal classifications, which will be kept here, locked up under MistHallow’s care.
“In the chambers,” Vex states with a look of utter distaste.
“Huh?”
“They will be the safest downstairs. We all know it, and if we task the underground into keeping them safe, no fucker will ever find them.”
Clapping my hands, I grin at him. “You really are a smart one, aren’t you?”
“I try,” he says with a soft smirk. “So the first thing we need to do is pick a foundation stone from the bag. Then, we need to find stones for the individual classifications. Tilly, if you go upstairs, we’ll go and pick them out.”
“Err, no, you won’t,” I say with a grimace. “This is my doing, I will pick them out. I need to find the perfect ones that will be most compatible with the Praxian.”
“But they will syphon off your power,” he argues.
“So let it. Who is it going to go to? My dead parents, dead Chris, or dead Anu?”
“She’s got a point,” Luc says.
Vex glowers at me but then capitulates. “Okay, fine. But if you even squeak in pain, I will remove you so fast, your head will spin.”
“Deal,” I say. “No squeaking.”