Chapter Forty-Two #2
What if…? She stared out across the meadow at Cordelia and her mud creatures.
If Cordelia were gone, her spell would go with her.
The mud creatures should disappear, sliding back into the earth they’d come from.
And while Isobella didn’t think she had the power or the magic to best Cordelia, what if she could banish her?
Force her from the past and confine her to the future, to the twenty-first century.
Where the Langeais wolves and the coven had united.
Where there were powerful blood witches—an entire coven of witches—like Annabelle.
The mud creatures pulled another keep guard from his horse. It was worth a try. It might be the only chance they had.
Isobella shoved Edmond’s surcoat at him and slipped to the ground.
She pulled off her boots as both Edmond and Aubert dismounted, and Edmond led the horses out of the way.
Mud squelched up between her toes. Good.
She would need as much connection to the earth, to the elements as she could get.
She would also need the power of her blood.
Werewolf blood. Cordelia was no dandelion or creeping Charlie.
She was more of a thistle on steroids. “I need a blade.”
Aubert handed her one, hilt first. She took it and sliced open her palm. She steadied herself, fixed the spell in her mind, with a few additions specific to what she needed. It was a spell she’d used many times at the nursery, but it had never been more important she get it right than now.
Then Isobella plunged her hand, bleeding palm and all, into the mud. She didn’t look out onto the battlefield. She focused within. On the words, on the intent.
“Banish thee from soil and sight,
So curse’s bounty needs not fight.”
Aubert crowded her. “Something is happening. It is working.”
She glanced up. Cordelia’s mud creatures stood frozen.
Sightless, as one, they turned toward her. Then they were on the move again, sloshing and bubbling like some primordial swamp, until they were together and they somehow congealed into one huge mucky gelatinous pile of stinking rotten mud.
She gaped at it. “You call that working?”
Shit. It was moving in her direction. The thing was big enough to swallow a damn bus, and it was growing bigger by the minute.
Edmond abandoned the horses and rushed to her side, his sword drawn. “It is working. She is focused on you. You are the threat now.”
Isobella closed her eyes. She could do this. She had to do this, or they were all dead, consumed by a mud monster.
“Take this scourge, Cordelia King
Remove her bite, her grip, her sting.”
The rasp of Aubert drawing his sword, and a horrible sloshing, belching noise snapped her eyes open.
It was halfway between them and Cordelia now.
The Langeais wolves and Lothair and his remaining guards harrowed its sides, darting in and out, slashing at it.
Mud sloughed off it, but it did not slow.
Behind it, Gaharet, his sword raised, rode straight for Cordelia.
He got within two horse lengths of her before an invisible force threw him backward off his horse.
He landed heavily but was back on his feet in an instant, scrabbling for his sword in the mud.
“I would die for you, chaton.” Edmond took a protective stance in front of her. “But I would rather it not be today.”
“You can do this,” shouted Aubert. His large hand rested on her shoulder, its warmth seeping through her saturated clothing and sending sparks across her skin. “I believe in you.”
Rain stung her cheeks, her eyes, and plastered her hair to her skull, and Cordelia’s mud monster loomed ever closer, but for a moment she lost herself in Aubert’s brown eyes. He believed in her?
Lothair bellowed out a battle cry as he charged his horse at Cordelia. It snapped Isobella’s focus back to the battle, to her task. She dug deep, called on all her witch training, on the strength of her wolf, and channeled everything she had into her palm and into the earth.
“Restrict her reach and her might
From this place, this day, this past.
To where wolves and witches unite to fight
This skip through time to be her last
So mote it be.”
The rain stopped, and the sudden silence was deafening.
It didn’t last. An unholy screech rose from Cordelia.
She slumped to her knees in the mud-splattered grass of the meadow.
She cursed Isobella, threatened her. Promised to make her pay, but it was too late.
The ground rumbled and the trees in the forest shook.
Then Cordelia was gone. No flash of light, no flames, no sucking in of the surroundings as time ripped open and took her with it. She was simply no longer there.
Isobella pulled her hand free of the mud and got to her feet.
Cordelia’s monster towered over them, as big as a three-story apartment block, but it was no longer moving.
The chevaliers reined in their horses, watching it with the wariness of experienced warriors, ready should it move again.
Then, in one big gush of mud, it collapsed to the ground.
“Did you see that thing?” Remi dashed past them to the edge of the trees. “All sticky, oozing mud, swallowing up that keep guard. Two of them? And then it went sploosh.” He gestured with his arms, imitating the destruction of Cordelia’s mud creature.
“Yes.” Aubert gathered his horse and flicked the reins over its head. “We saw it.”
She wiped the mud from her hand on her sodden dress then collected her boots, grimacing as she shoved her muddy feet back into them. Aubert had said he believed in her. Had he meant it?
Aubert mounted up and sat in the saddle, staring out onto the meadow, refusing to look at her. “I guess the rain was Cordelia’s doing, too.”
Isobella turned away. Maybe not. Maybe he’d only said it to give her the courage she’d needed to do what had to be done. Because their lives had all been in her hands.
Gaharet rounded up his horse and the warriors made their way back to them, giving the massive mud pile a wide berth. Lothair’s guards, leading the spare horses from the men they’d lost, were wide-eyed and jumpy. She couldn’t blame them. Mud monsters were a new one for her, too.
Lothair, with the look of a man questioning the foundation of his beliefs, stared out over the meadow. “Where did she go?”
Isobella settled in her saddle. “I sent her back.”
“To where?”
The shake of Gaharet’s head was negligible, but she got the message. “To where she came from, I guess.” She shrugged. “Wherever that may be.”
Lothair narrowed his eyes on Gaharet. “When we get to your keep, you and I are going to have a long talk about keeping secrets from me.”
Gaharet wheeled his horse around. “Then to my keep we shall go.”
“Let us hope there are no more surprises.” Edmond mounted up, then draped his surcoat over her again. “You were amazing. You saved our lives back there.” He leaned in close enough Lothair and his guards would not hear him. “Where did she go? Is she dead?”
Isobella shook her head and nudged her horse into a trot, and Edmond and Aubert kept pace with her.
“I wasn’t strong enough. I banished her back to the twenty-first century.
” She kept her voice low. “And I made it so she can’t travel through time anymore.
She’s stuck there. My coven is strong, and so are the Langeais wolves.
They’ll have a better chance of defeating her. ”
“One more thing to put in our father’s journal,” murmured D’Artagnon.
Gaharet glanced over his shoulder at her and nodded.
He’d heard their whispered conversation, and he approved.
She’d done something right. She glanced at Aubert, still brooding.
He’d said he’d believed in her. Maybe he did, but believing in her ability to use magic and trusting her enough to be his mate…
Isobella huddled down in Edmond’s surcoat. They were two different things.