CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
GISELLA
A point dug into my skin, scratching me enough to draw a sharp gasp from my lips. I covered the pain filled sound with a cough, disguising the slip, lest Amy notice us. Hopefully she had enough conversations running about her head to not notice my faux pas .
The knife slipped from Sebastian’s sleeve, dropping into his hand. Before I could argue, he lunged forward without so much as a step backward in preparation. I saw for the first time what an efficient killer he made. The blade, a curved, horrid thing, left his hand and circled through the air, aimed in a neat line at Amy.
A wry smile crossed her pretty face, and she shook her head as though berating wayward children who had stepped out of line. She raised a hand, and the thing flung back toward us.
Dolion lurched, steel glancing from his stone chest in a clatter and clang. The knife bounced off him and disappeared into the hedge.
Amy turned her back to us, presenting an opportunity I knew Sebastian wouldn’t waste. He blurred forward, leaping in an inhuman lurch as he had the night on the jetty. Red mixed with black, swirling around each other.
I pressed forward, but my own movements were sluggish, caught in a web Amy had spun around me while I processed events too far from my frame of reference to understand as Sebastian and Dolion did.
Around me, arms began to raise. Everything moved so slowly, I knew we would never reach the two entwined in their deadly battle before one met their end. While their movements were at such an unfathomable speed, ours were lethargic. I closed my eyes, never having imagined the limitlessness of Amy’s power.
Wind whipped around us in a maelstrom of grit and silver. Then the air cleared, and Amy stood before me. Sebastian lay unmoving at her feet. Immobilized as I had been before by her hand, I couldn’t even reach out for him.
Grief clogged my throat, making my next breath as impossible as the ones that never left his body. Can an already dead man bleed? I didn’t know the answer to that question, or any other.
Her magic tightened around me, crippling at such proximity. If I had thought her powerful when she had me wrap my own neck in a noose from a distance, it had nothing on the raw strength she had in person.
How could I not see what you were when I lived beside you for months on end?
I screamed the words inside my head until she shut down that, too, deadening my fear to a muffled echo. Red lips parted in a wide smile and the tongue that licked them was anything but human.
“I shall enjoy devouring you, too,” she purred. Her lithe fingers hooked into claws, reaching for me.
My stomach roiled, but death might be preferable to a life without the man I loved. “I can’t fight you,” I whispered, numbed lips slurring the words.
Her smile widened, long fangs extending past her lips.
And I loved you, too.
A crunch on gravel drive gave her pause, the sound originating from behind her. So out of place in the midst of her conquest, the small patter of slippered feet halted Amy’s movement. Her head turned, refocusing on the newcomer.
I blinked, part of her spell easing away in her distraction. She revolved on her heel to display Minette, a vague smile on her sweet face, offering up a tray of champagne. Her eyes hooded, docile in her dreamlike state. She wobbled toward Amy over the loose stones, all expression removed from her face.
I stared at her wildly; how could she have missed what was happening here? Had Charleton been remiss in his instructions? Amy had gotten into everyone’s head, even the wolves. What could I expect of the staff who had no defense from such an unknown, powerful force?
I’m so sorry.
I will take it all, Gisella. He was never worth it. And you will see.
Our thoughts collided, the words mingling into an insensible knot inside my mind. Ignoring Minette, Amy raised her arms over her head, her nails elongating into vicious talons that glowed and smoked as she gloated at me. Heat emanated from Minette’s direction. The glasses bubbled and overflowed, and I knew Amy had her hand in what happened to my poor maid.
She stood vapid and relaxed, as though the liquid she carried wasn’t boiling on her tray. Orange flame flashed in the crystal glasses, and they shattered as one in a cacophony that drowned out Amy’s horrible laughter. Glass struck Minette’s face, slicing into her flawless skin in a thousand cuts, but still, she didn’t react.
The fire bloomed into a hideous thing of many heads, slicing through the crowd and felling wolves in its haste to engulf the house. The man beside shifted, did, or tried to. Dolion’s stunted roar mingled with the scream of glass as it flung outward in every direction.
Minette’s eyes cleared, and she sent a single, hard look in Dolion’s direction.
She slipped her hand from beneath her tray, a thin, honed blade in her palm, and swept it in a wide arc. Red flung in a hundred directions, mingling with the shattered glass as her as the knife buried itself in Amy’s neck.
Scarlett, not of the sorcerer’s dress, coated her skin. Her arms windmilled, smoking talons flashing as she fell, and a fresh spray of life coated my face. One slowed instance, and an eternal life was snuffed from their earth with no one left to mourn her passing.
I stared down at my husband, so still by my feet. Smoke poured around us, obscuring everything.
My eyes watered. I covered my eyes and mouth with limbs and a mind that were my own again. Relief came in the form of my own freedom until the horror around us sank into my awareness.
Screams ricocheted from the drive as people rushed from the house that billowed smoke and flame as though the very demons of hell itself walked the earth. I caught glimpses of faces blackened with soot and eyes white with fear as the townsfolk tore away from the house, Sebastian’s name on too many lips.
We sought to save ourselves, but instead I have condemned you.
I closed my eyes, stumbling forward. “I’m sorry, Sebastian.” It wouldn’t matter if he were dead. Charleton wouldn't speak out about his master; his loyalty ran true. Dolion would run, without his friend as a solid base to rely upon. Grief bloomed in my heart.
But I loved you.
“I love you, too.” Sebastian wheezed at my feet, lumbering to his knees.
That seemed to be as far as he could go for the moment, but for me, it was more than enough. I flung myself at him, rocking us both back almost to the pebbles scattered with blood and smoke.
“She killed you!” I might have screamed the words at him in my head and aloud at the same time. He winced, but I didn’t care. “I watched you fall. You weren't breathing.” Tears tracked down my face, heating on my skin from the flames that devoured the house behind us.
“I don’t breathe, Gella.” His expression lightened with a crooked smile. “It’s hard to kill someone that’s already dead.”
I nodded, sobbing and choking the unused grief that bubbled over as my fear dissipated. “It’s done?’ I gasped. “She’s gone?” I tried to turn around, but Sebastian held me tight.
“No, don’t look,” he murmured. “It’s done. You’re free.”
I peered up at him. “And you?” Are we still safe, together?
Sebastian smiled. Always, Gella.
The last of the guests ran screaming down the hill as I huddled into his chest.
“Well, that’s a whole new problem,” Sebastian sighed. “Which continent would you like to try next? Dolion?”
The stone man didn’t answer, and in one brief moment of clarity, I knew I had used my grief too early.
I cried out for the stone man, but he said nothing as I stumbled through smoke, tripping over the bodies of wolves, though I never spotted Granny Smythe amongst them.
“This will require quite the cleanup.” Charleton appeared at my side.
He rolled bodies, checking each for signs of life as I made my way through the knot of horror Amy’s darkness had brought upon us. Turning in circles, I still couldn’t find the stone man.
Would he have gone back in, to check the rooms?
Being stone, I doubted fire could hurt him any more than the blade Amy tossed his way. Perhaps it had hurt him and he lay somewhere, dying. The thought of more loss broke my heart, and my tears ran fresh through the gore that covered my face.
“Dolion?” I stumbled over something solid, something warm, but wrong.
Dolion. It had to be.
Sebastian. Help me.
I felt around him, trying to lift him, but instead of a velvet suit, my hands tangled in lace, sank into a mass of ringlets, turned dark with ash and blood.
Not Minette. Anyone but her.
My friend.
“My God,” I choked. My heart swelled in my chest, obliterating the scream that lodged higher up. “No?—”
I told you not to swear.
“Sebastian, help me!” I whispered into her hair, tears streaming down my face.
You faced vampires and wolves and witches with me.
You met a stone man, and I think you fell in love even if you never told me.
I slid shaking hands beneath the figure below me and tried to lift her thin frame, her face waxy and covered in a hundred cuts from what she suffered to free us. Everything seemed so heavy. She slipped from my frozen hands, rolling on the gravel, listless. Lifeless. I flailed and hit something hard, tears and smoke obscuring my vision.
“I have her.” Dolion’s disembodied voice was muted in the hazy smoke.
Hands gripped me as I dropped to my knees, the little of the world I could see titling crazily about me.
Not Minette.
I didn’t know whose thought it was, or if the grief that broke apart in my heart was mine or someone else’s. The howl that reverberated inside my ears came from the man at my side.
Oh, Minette. He loved you, too.
My breath wheezed in my chest, and smoke and shadows became one.
“Gella.” Sebastian’s dark eyes peered in at me as though from a distance. His hair hung around his face, dark shadows smudging around his neck and shirt. His coat was nowhere to be seen. He stroked my cheek with ash smudged fingers. “Can you breathe?”
“I wouldn't be sitting up if I couldn't,” I gasped, then hacked as my lungs jumped into my throat. Salty tears ran fresh down my cheeks, and God alone knew how I looked. “Wait. Minette—I found her?—”
I hacked again, unable to get a full breath in, my throat raw beneath the strain of the smoke, barely recovered from the previous injury, though that no longer seemed important. His arms wound tight around me, crushing me to his chest as he turned, placing me with gentle hands on the ground at Minette’s side.
Pale curls stained red framed my maid’s face. A slash decorated her throat in a gruesome parody of a necklace, the edges darkened as though burned. I knew if I checked Amy’s monstrous hands where she had turned her fingers into talons, I would find the same strange burns there too. Shards of crystal from the champagne glasses lodged deep in Minette’s serene face. No new blood ran from her wounds, her body as still as Sebastian’s at daybreak.
Dolion knelt beside her, his hand hovering over her chest, unmoving. Every inch of him had turned to stone, his expression untwisted and so much more…human.
“Dolion?” I whispered, reaching for him, but Sebastian caught my hand, drawing me back.
“Leave him be,” he murmured into my hair as my heart wrenched for the tiny maid who had saved us all. “We will see if he returns to us.”
“Returns?” I couldn’t tear my eyes from their twin still forms.
“Without a heart, a gargoyle won’t live. His is broken. We will see if he can… mend.” Sebastian’s voice took on a deep timbre, and I realized I wasn’t the only one grieving the loss of a dear friend. His was a poor explanation of the stone man’s grief, but I understood what Sebastian was saying.
I blinked back another cascade of tears but had little control over them. As the drive cleared of bodies, my mind began to take stock. “Where is Amy?”
“The remaining wolves took her. Payment. For Granny Smythe.”
“Oh. It’s done.”
He had said so before, when I’d asked but nothing from then had sunk in. Reality turned with the death of a loved one, reorganizing my perceptions of what was important. It felt as though this should be a big moment, but instead, I was numb.
As I had been when this all started.
Empty.
I stared at the house, no more than a charred skeleton against a muted sky. The back of the building appeared to have collapsed altogether. I swayed in Sebastian’s arms, lacking the energy to ask anything more.
Charleton crouched before me, proffering a square of clean cloth that looked as though it might have been torn from the inside of his jacket. I took it gratefully, unable to give him even the faintest smile in thanks.
“Was this all worth it?” I whispered hoarsely.
Charleton looked at my maid and Dolion for a long moment. Then he knelt, his arms sliding beneath Minette’s empty form. When I thought he might lift her body and take her to be buried somewhere, he shifted her closer to Dolion, tucking her against him in a cold, lifeless embrace. Then he stood. Shoulders bowed, he took a silent moment of respect and retreated toward the broken house.
Somehow, Charleton’s silence meant more than anything else that had happened.
Sebastian traced beneath my lashes, his lips following his fingers with gentle kisses. “We don’t always have choices, Gella. But the ones we get, we make the most of.”
He swept his arms beneath me, carrying me across the drive to the garden, and placed me on the lawn. Wrapping his jacket around my shoulders, he left me to watch over our friends as he headed inside the remnants of the house where the stone foundations hadn’t burned, returning with Charleton and a few other townsmen I didn’t recognize. They spoke quietly and began to clean up the broken bodies of a witch and the people who detested her in death almost as much as they had in life.
I knew then that what we had forged together through magic and love would last forever. I would have given up the sun for the monster who loved me back, but he wasn’t that sort of man he had become. I was far from the displaced orphan who had mounted the docks in New Orleans so many weeks ago, thrust into an uncertain life where worries of love were the farthest thing from my mind. In Sebastian I had discovered acceptance, endurance and adoration.
In him, I found family.