Chapter 38
ISAAC
When I burst out of my prison back into the real world, two shimmering threads attached themselves to my wrists.
Pretty.
They ribboned through the air, linking me to a spectral Tony—the version who’d been inside me. He inspected his wrists, clearly furious he’d been ejected.
In your face, prick!
His unconscious body remained, well, sleeping, his chest rising and falling.
What a shame. I guess I wouldn’t be totally free from him until I rendered the real him a corpse.
Fine by me. But first, it was time to kick some shimmer witch arse.
I bathed the street in sunlight, which brought his buddies to their knees. Spectral Tony stayed upright, though, smirking like the King of Cockiness.
Ugh.
The fucker laughed and clapped his hands, a solar shadow coming at me in a blur of speed and blazing false light.
Shit! I jumped to the side, firing the Taser spell at Tony. He staggered back, limbs thrashing, and recovered within seconds.
Okay, this wasn’t going to be easy.
Hmmm. How to mortally wound a ghostly ex-boyfriend? Taser making him stumble was a positive sign.
“Surround!” he cried.
The shadows encircled me, spinning, sealing me inside a bright vortex.
Closing my eyes, I pushed down a spike of panic, remembering they were part of me. Spun from my essence, stolen from me.
Maybe.
I focused on them, calling them to me.
“I am the real Sun,” I said.
I felt their heat in response, hot fingers probing, curious about me.
“Join me here,” I added. “I’m the true master. He’s a fraud.”
Fingers, fingers, the faint trace of whispers and a hot wind rippling through my hair.
“Yes,” I said. “Fight with me. Let’s end him together.”
They returned to Tony in an instant, forming a line behind him and hopping from foot to foot, leaving me with a cold shiver.
Okay, so that theory was dead. They loved him more.
Tony smirked. “The wheels are in motion, babe. You can’t fight this.”
I hit him with a Trip spell. He stumbled, staying upright.
Hmmm. Resilient prick, wasn’t he?
Wait! The Binding Net! How could I have been so stupid?
I called its name, flinging the net at him. He countered it with super-duper reflexes, deflecting it back to me.
Trained to be quick on my feet, I cast the Deflect spell from my civilian witch bangle, sending the net into a car window, shattering the glass. Its car alarm wailed for attention.
Phew!
Tony tugged on the threads binding us. I resisted, yanking back. He didn’t move, only laughed, setting my teeth on edge.
“What do you want from me?” My sunlight dimmed, the threads starting to itch.
“To be inside you again.”
His followers got up off the ground, still clutching their crystals.
“Shut up!” I clapped back.
The solar figures jumped up and down, then swayed from side to side.
“I’m being serious. I want back in.” He pointed a finger at me. “To get my hands on the controls. Without you, there is no way of making this work.”
I threw another Trip spell at him. He barely rocked.
“Give it up, Isaac. There’s no way you can stop a train with no brakes. This can only end one way.”
“What a shame you’re tied to the tracks this train is on,” I tossed back.
He laughed, his people doing the same. The tips of their crystals sparkled.
“It’s sinful to desecrate a Hecate Crystal,” I said. “Did you destroy the garden at The Coral?”
He patted his belly, then tugged on the threads. It seemed we were at a stalemate here. I wasn’t budging, and neither was he. Meaning I just had to ride this out until I figured out how to bring the runaway train down on his head.
Whatever he meant to do with me wouldn’t go his way.
But why the belly rub?
“Are you saying you’ve been eating Hecate Crystals?” I asked.
Horrible understanding landed. “You…you have been, haven’t you?” It made sense as to why he was now part-witch, part wereleopard. An extreme course of action taken to make the magic possible, like the blood rituals of shadow spells.
A sickly bubble popped in the back of my throat.
Tony glanced at the house. “I’m becoming, Isaac. Eating the crystals is changing me, giving me access to power you can only dream of.”
This wasn’t happening.
“But I need your help. I need you to bring the next stage in my evolution.”
How was he eating them? He couldn’t just break one off and chow down on it like beef jerky. There must be some insane method he’d been using to make them digestible.
Another gross bubble popped.
“Let me lay this on the table for you,” he began. “After all, I want to be honest with the man I love.”
What a sickening thing to hear from a twisted lunatic.
“Sort of,” he added with a chuckle. “There’s no time for a full discussion, but know that I found a way to consume the crystals and absorb the power to become new.
You know, like how Kane Kingwood made a new form of magic?
Now it’s my turn.” He rolled his neck. “I’m becoming all things.
” He nodded at Blood House. “This is the next stage.”
My brain ached with horror. “You’re stealing the essence of other creatures to what? Become Frankenstein’s monster?”
He didn’t take that well, his face twisting with fury. “Don’t talk shit, babe. I’m beyond anything your tiny mind can comprehend.”
Didn’t supervillains always say something to that effect? “What’s the endgame?”
He grinned. “You’re made of true sunlight. These figures aren’t you, only replicas to mess you up a bit. Helping to grant me access to your magnificence.”
He’d seriously lost the plot.
“So either you go and kick the door down yourself and kill the vampires in there, or let me back in so I can do it.”
My belly went heavy with an iron presence. “You want…you…” Oh, shit. “I—” My brain couldn’t string words together to make a complete sentence.
“The essence of Shania, the head vampire of Coldharbour, is what I need. Her energy inside me will take me to the next level. She’s the head of a clan in one of the most magical cities on Earth. And difficult to kill. You know how vampires are. This is where you come in.”
This didn’t make sense to me, other than he’d lost it and was dangerous and wanted me to kill for him.
Absolutely fucking not!
And so, running on that fuel, I charged at him, landing a punch on his nose.
He howled, the bone crunching under my fist, blood spurting. Staggering back, he grabbed his nose, stunned by my move.
I wasn’t done.
I cast Freeze from my witchcop bangle, which failed. Well, I had to be a hundred percent sure it wouldn’t work. So, I went for physical attacks instead, punching him in the gut, then kneed him right in the family jewels.
He went down, whimpering my name.
Ha! Not so ghostly after all!
I kicked him in the belly, seeing red. Who the fuck did this prick think he was to come here and do this? To try using me to murder vampires and Hecate only knew what else. He wouldn’t be becoming anything other than a bleeding mess of pain on this road.
I kicked and kicked, my anger taking over. He curled into a ball to defend himself from the blows, which only made me work harder to pummel him.
I’ll kill him.
I’ll kill him and spare the world his menace.
But I made a stupid error. In losing myself to rage, I’d forgotten to defend myself against the other witches and those solar things.
First, I got hit with a Trip spell. My legs tangled themselves up with each other mid-kick and I went sprawling. I hit the asphalt, cracking my forehead when I landed.
Whoa! The stars I saw, all spinning and nauseating.
Pain shooting through me, I rolled onto my back only to be confronted with solar shadows looming above me, blazing brightly, reaching down for me.
Blood ran down my face, any slight movement making my brain lurch.
“Get away from me…” I warned them.
Darn it. How useless could one man be?
“You will not harm him any longer,” a voice to my left spoke.
The figures lifted me off the ground and I almost puked from the dizzy attack at the movement, just about holding it down.
They turned in a circle with me held above them, whispering, their words melting together in a chorus of scratchy whispers.
“Put…put me…”
Something sharp jabbed me in the side of the neck. My head flopped to the side, giving me an eyeful of a witch in white standing there with a small syringe in one hand, a crystal in the other.
“You won’t make us fail,” he told me.
My jaw seized shut, a stiffening iciness taking me over. A wicked headache consumed my skull, and the constant roll of nausea came in and out like the tide.
Shit. What now?
Tony got to his feet, his nose broken out of joint, blood all over his white clothes. But he grinned, baring those blood-stained gnashers.
“Now, where were we?” he said.
With no ability to counter him, I watched him throw his arms in the air, white magic swirling around his hands.
His people held their crystals above their heads with both hands, forming a circle around us.
Where was the High Coven? Surely this magic had pinged an alert on their systems.
Tony lowered his arms, gliding over to me, triumph emanating from him. “No one’s coming, babe. It’s just us here.”
Had he read my mind?
He pressed the back of his hand against my cheek. My skin crawled with a billion bugs, my stomach roiling from his sickly warm touch.
Get off me!
“Don’t worry, I can’t take your power,” he added, stroking me.
What a fucking monster. Shame on me for texting him, considering being with him again.
The solar pricks lowered me to the ground.
“Only use it,” Tony continued. “Even if you hadn’t texted me, I was always going to come for you.
I need you, and you’ll need me. You’ll see my becoming and you’ll beg to be on my arm.
” He crouched down and kissed my mouth. If it wasn’t for the filth coursing through my system, I’d be breaking every bone in his body.
“Delicious,” he said. “You’ll be giving me plenty of kisses before long, babe. And you don’t need to beg me. I love you. I love you so much.”
If only I could scream and puke and peel his face from his fucking skull.
Tony stepped back, the magic in his hands richer. He lifted his hands and cried, “Rejoin!”
And just like that, he was back in control of my body.