43. Principles of Banking II #3
The trick was figuring out how to do so with no casualties. Stanley was less calculated than Ferrin, but that made him less predictable too.
“End the storm,” Stanley demanded.
“You don’t want that,” Gams crooned. “Stanley, love, what are you going to do when the armies lined up on the shore come to meet us here?”
“Tamora will be here first.”
“You can’t know that.”
Except that he absolutely could know that, if his bond with Tamora worked at all like my bond with Ciarán, or even the bond I’d shared with Galahad when he had been my nocturmancer.
If Stanley was so sure that Tamora would be here soon, then she must be nearby.
“Drop the storm. Last chance, Frozen God.” Stanley straightened up and better positioned the gun against Mom’s temple. A flash of lightning illuminated the scimitar tattoo on his arm.
Sparks flickered in Gams’s hands, and I wondered if she was going to risk Mom and fight Stanley, but then she dropped her arms. The wind died, and dusty snow settled over the ice. Clouds dispersed with a final peal of echoing thunder to reveal the star-studded Skalterran sky and its two moons.
Smoke and ash rose on the mountain peaks at our backs, and I could feel more pushing its way to the surface, ready to blow and destroy everything in its path.
“There she is.” Stanley grinned out at the sea where red steam highlighted the outline of Tamora’s armada. “And I’ve cleared the way for her.”
My mind raced, searching for a solution, but I couldn’t get past the pistol. A million ideas vied for my attention. Each of them carried the risk of a bullet in Mom’s head.
Mom’s shoulders heaved. Stanley was distracted looking out at Tamora’s waters, so he didn’t see Mom bracing herself for what she was about to.
My mother was strong and brave and would rather go down fighting than be used as collateral.
She snatched Stanley’s wrist in her grip as she ducked away from the barrel of the gun.
“You—!” Stanley cried. He wrestled against Mom, trying to gain the upper hand. As weak as he was in his real form, Mom was tiny and clearly exhausted after sustaining her chrysalis in the shop.
I raced across the ice, ready to help, ready to get shot if I needed to, but a figure stepped from within the Rift and beat me to them.
He wrapped his arm around Stanley, wrested the gun from his grip, and a shot rang out across the ice.
I slid to a stop as Stanley went limp in Maxwell Brenton’s arms and fell to the ice where he moved no more.
It was not the first time I’d seen death in Skalterra, but something about the easy brutality of Stanley’s end made my knees weak and my blood cold.
Mom staggered away from Maxwell, quaking hands rising to her mouth.
“Max?” she hissed. “What are you—?”
“Eliza,” Maxwell said with a curt nod. He raised the gun.
A second shot echoed across the bay.
I’d half-expected to feel the bite of a bullet piercing my stomach, but no pain came.
Then a gentle thud sounded behind me.
It was soft and muted, which was strange as it was the sound of my entire world crumpling to the ice.
Gams lay in a growing pool of blood, curled in over the gunshot wound in her stomach and gaping at the sky.
“What’ve you done?” Mom’s shriek sounded a million miles away, as did her ensuing struggle with Maxwell, as I ran to Gams and fell to the ice next to her.
“Gams,” I cried. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I can help.”
Her eyes found mine, but they were hazy and out of focus. I’d come so far. I’d done so much.
This was not how it would end.
I pressed my hands over the wound, feeling the warm stickiness of blood seep between my fingers.
I could heal her.
“The volcanoes, Wren.” Ciarán crouched next to me to place his hands over mine. “Your magick—”
I shook my head. “Then you do it!”
“I don’t know how.”
“Figure it out!” I looked up at Iseult, Orla, and Fana, desperate for someone to step forward and reveal they possessed the same advanced healing magick I had all along.
None of them did. They all stared down at me with stark, helpless faces.
Blood. There was so much blood. It spread through Gams’s dress, crimson against blue. Bile rose in my throat, and my stomach heaved.
The slap of a fist against skin sounded from the Rift, distracting me enough to keep down my rising vomit. Mom stood over Maxwell with flames in her hands.
He looked around at us as if just noticing we were there, then at the strange, two-mooned sky.
“Eliza?” He gasped. “I was just driving—how—”
“You shot my mother!” she screamed.
“No, I—” He found me on the ice where I crouched over Gams. “You! The blackouts, they are because of you!”
“Now, now, don’t give her too much credit!” A new voice, one that stole the breath from my lungs and filled me with dread, called out. “That little trick was one of my own discovery. Do you like it? A whole new way to control Nightmares.”
We’d all been so focused on Stanley, the armada, and Maxwell’s heroics and subsequent betrayal that none of us had noticed Ferrin Quillguard, hands in his pockets and goggles glinting on his head, as he strode towards us through the storm's lingering haze.