Chapter Forty-Five
I felt my grip on the army falter at the same time that reinforcements flooded the field from the base below, as if the earth was vomiting up the dregs of the magical world. But these dregs could fight. And so could whatever had grabbed me.
It was Bleddyn, although it didn’t smell like him.
It didn’t smell like anyone I’d ever met, but my counterpart didn’t agree.
She knew this scent, had followed it through an underground labyrinth steeped in magic, a Pythian Court with strange odors everywhere, a city unlike anything she’d ever known, and a desert.
And that was in my time.
But they had met before, and he remembered as well as she did.
“No clan this time,” the gravelly voice, so different than his usual one, said. “No advantage to tip the scales. Just you and me.”
“Yes,” she hissed, and jumped him.
That... was not a great idea. Because Bleddyn was in Relic form, too, and with both eyes instead of the single one I’d left him.
His altered form must have healed that wound, although he still had the scar.
I guessed he must have been among the clan leaders who’d taken the potion that night at Dante’s, yet he seemed immune to Cyrus’s call—or mine.
Even worse, he was huge, and I was still at maybe sixty percent, and that had been before running halfway across the desert!
It wasn’t going to be enough, and not just where she and I were concerned.
Without our coordination, the wolf formation had fallen apart and was being attacked by the new flood of mages and their bastard wards.
And while I didn’t know where a bunch of ragtag soldiers had boosted a God-Killer, it didn’t look like they had any more, or that the Corps was with them.
We were all going to die here.
Only my counterpart seemed oblivious to reality, including in our own fight. Which lasted less than ten seconds before we were picked up and flung into the burning shell of a camper van, slamming back through blazing walls, and onto a fiery mattress. And in a moment, we were fiery, too.
But she was immediately back up and ready to rumble, smoking fur and all, tearing through the back wall, snatching up a heavy motorcycle, and launching it at Bleddyn’s head.
Only to have him bat it aside and come straight through the burning remains of the camper, without so much as breaking stride.
He leaped, and I ducked, wrenching control away from her long enough to flatten us to the ground and let him fly overhead.
He ended up in the middle of a fight between a Were and a couple of mages, while I stopped, dropped, and rolled before we burned to death.
“Let me try talking to him!” I yelled as she growled at me.
“No talk. He dies.”
“Yeah, but—” I said, and then he was on us again, having already slaughtered both the Were and his own magical allies and come back for more. “Bleddyn!” I yelled. “That thing will kill you!”
“Ha!” He grabbed us, but she brought both fists down on his cranium, stunning him enough to loosen his hold. At which point I scrambled away, despite her howling for blood in my head, because closing with this thing was suicide.
“It’s true!” I insisted to him, still trying to talk even as he shook off the blow and stalked us across the battlefield.
A mage targeted me, and I sent his own spell ricocheting back at him, which set him alight in strange, black flames.
“He’s going to hang all this on you,” I yelled, “and have every clansman, every Silver Circle mage, every ally they have chasing you down! Meanwhile, he’ll flit off to another host, while you are butchered! ”
That did not appear to make the impression I’d hoped, so I sent a magical lasso to wrap around him a few dozen times, to give me another shot at talking him down.
And of possibly not dying for a few more seconds.
But, instead, he threw a counterspell that met mine mid-air and grounded my curse in a blast of sand.
“What the—”
He laughed. “Didn’t expect that, did you?”
I stared at him. “No.”
“I was there that day,” he said, casually using more magic to send several large, burning pieces of debris at my head, which I had to expend power to redirect. “When you took down Grayshadow. Remember him?”
Vividly. He was a Were who had started taking Punch to try to awaken the magical blood from his ancestry, and he’d succeeded. Luckily, he wasn’t trained to understand his new power, allowing me to get the drop on him before he wreaked havoc.
“He thought he was gonna get strong enough to challenge Sebastian,” Bleddyn sneered. “Only that didn’t happen. ‘Cause he met another Were who also had magic, and you annihilated him that day!”
It was insane. He actually sounded admiring, even while sending a flood of acid at me from the wrecked fire truck’s deadly hose. I evaded, or rather, my counterpart did, with a balletic backflip more than two stories high that had him grinning wider.
“It was a revelation,” he told me, while backing me around the battlefield. “I didn’t know that Weres could be mages. I’d heard you were Laurentia of Lobizon’s daughter, but figured you could access your magic ‘cause you weren’t really one of us. You’d never Changed.
“But then a month ago, you did—I saw it with my own eyes. But you could still use magic, even in Were form. That made you powerful, and I wanted that power!”
“Looks like you got it,” I breathed, as we both jumped aside to keep from getting fried by another torrent of electricity.
They were still spearing down, thick and fast, all over the field, like purple columns of death that left great black scorch marks on the desert sand, with the only warning a scant few seconds of hair-raising static.
The Black Circle mages seemed to be avoiding them, as if they knew something we didn’t, and there was none of the usual ground currents or blast waves to cause the effects to spread out of their zone.
But if you were underneath one of the strikes, or within maybe ten feet, where the small but lethal filaments reached, you were dead.
Leaving everyone else having to fight through a lightning storm.
This strike hit an already burning truck, dusting part of it to ash and sending the remaining pieces exploding outward, although Bleddyn barely seemed to notice.
But my counterpart did, and something about it caught her interest. That gave me a small amount of relief, because she stopped trying to force me to jump him every minute.
Only that left the question of what she was doing instead, and why wasn’t I reassured?
“My father never believed in me,” Bleddyn was saying, as if nothing had happened.
“That ‘big oaf’, he called me. Dumb, slow-moving, useless in and out of the challenge circle. That’s why he insisted on fighting Sebastian himself, even when he knew Cyrus was standing in for his brother.
He didn’t think I could win, and maybe I couldn’t have.
“But neither could he.
“And after it was all over, everybody started rallying around Farkas, as if I didn’t exist. Not that he challenged me for the top spot—oh, no, he was smarter than that. I might not have been able to beat Cyrus, but I could tear his scrawny ass apart!”
“That’s a bet,” I agreed, as he batted aside the half dozen weapons I’d enchanted on the fly and sent blasting at his head.
“But everyone started acting like he had and that he’d won,” he complained, crushing a levitating gun into a ball of metal and throwing it away. “They turned to him to decide things, to lead the clan in all but name, to determine revenge—
“Which was nothing! Farkas was going to knuckle under and crawl, at least until the war was over. Was going to submit.”
“But not you,” I said, as a bunch of Weres stampeded in between us, chasing some fleeing mages, and then a tent came flying at me hot on their heels. Bleddyn had used them as cover, so it was on me almost before I saw it in the darkness.
It tried to wrap me up and blind me long enough for him to end this, and was incinerated for its trouble. But the effort left me gasping and wondering how long I could keep this up. He was draining me.
“Hell, no!” he said, “He was my father! I might have hated the bastard, but this wasn’t about love; it was about pride, clan pride. To forgo revenge would have marked us as second, as followers, as lesser, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“But the wolves who came to talk to me didn’t know shit. I could challenge, but I couldn’t take Cyrus or Sebastian, and if I appointed someone else as my champion, could they do better? After what people had seen Cyrus become, could anyone?
“And if they lost, there was a good chance those same people would turn on me, name me a coward and troublemaker, and let me take the blame. And I knew better than to think Farkas would bring his faction to my rescue when I saw the way he looked at me.
“He could hardly keep from sneering when I was clan leader! Me! Not him!”
A lone mage ran by, not attacking, but looking panicked, as if fleeing another fight. He was probably trying to reach the hole in the outer ward caused by the God Killer, which was still flapping open, letting in glimpses of bright sunlight. But he never made it.
Almost casually, Bleddyn reached out, and the next second, the man’s chest was torn open, and he was missing something.
Something that the leader of Rand stuffed down the way a kid would eat a candy bar.
The mage fell over, Bleddyn wiped his bloody mouth, and sent a couple dozen pieces of heavy-duty trash at me, all at once.
Almost like the heart he’d just consumed had strengthened him.
Almost exactly like.
And shit.
I fought off the latest attack, but my magic was getting low, and my stamina lower. But he could replenish his whenever he chose, so my odds were only going to get worse. I had to come up with something fast, and that gap in the shield was looking better all the time.