22. Cheribelle #2
“You have to break the spell!” I cried, realizing I’d never actually told her my full thought, assuming she’d just be doing it naturally.
“I don’t know how! I’m just a dental hygienist!”
“Yes, you do!” I finished freeing Jackson with a grunt, and he leapt forward, exploding into his own wolf to help Chris take down Sergio before he threw any more volatile spell bottles into the fight. “It’s true love’s kiss!”
“What?” Paul blurted. It was the first time he’d paused to question me, which was wild considering I’d showed up to save the day with a children’s water gun. “Cherry, that’s not real!”
“Yes, it is. It’s gotta be!” I argued before looking back at the woman. “And if I’m wrong, don’t you want to kiss him one more time?”
That seemed to convince her, and the woman looked into Luther’s unfocused, bloodshot eyes. Her love for him radiated out of her and filled the entire tower.
I watched, more than a bit gobsmacked, as it bloomed into soft shades, all mixing together and expanding on each other in a beautiful orchestra of emotion.
Now, I understood the tempest I had been pulled into when I’d laid hands on Luther at the funeral had only been the slightest taste of what they felt for each other.
Pink clouds rained down prismatic glitter, gentle winds of periwinkle sent bubbles of winking gold drifting through the air. Gentle blue waves of trust, little petals of phthalo firmness surged between them.
It was beautiful, so beautiful I could find no words that would do it justice.
This is what true love looks like!
That was the last thought I had before a blast issued from the two and everyone in the room was knocked off their feet.
With all the fight-or-flight chemicals pumping through my system, I was surprised my heart didn’t pop from the whiplash.
I was sure we had just been attacked, but when I rolled onto my side and looked for a threat, I saw we were all frozen.
Well, all of us except for Luther and his lover, who were still kissing.
However, something had indeed changed. Instead of her clinging desperately to him, fighting to keep him in her arms, the giant alpha had her wrapped up in his embrace!
“Holy shit! That actually worked!” Paul cried as he got to his feet.
I wasn’t even offended. “It did! It actually did!”
Despite everything that had happened, despite all the pain, all the torment, despite the fact that I was sure I was missing a tooth and my face was covered in deep purple bruises, joy rushed through me, then a sense of triumph that I didn’t think was possible.
The Parracidas had tried to twist a beautiful love into something awful and wicked, but even with an ancient pact with a powerful, otherworldly entity, some things couldn’t be defeated.
But, of course, they couldn’t just admit defeat. No, that would be far too simple.
The matriarch let out a truly ear-piercing shriek as she picked herself up off the floor and saw Luther clinging to his rescued lover like the lifeline that she was. She and her husband were definitely two of a kind, because her pasty visage turned downright burgundy.
“You fools! You really think it’s that easy! I still have my magic! I still have the entity’s promise!”
She pulled a fancy hairpin out of her bun, revealing a small blade not unlike what I’d seen in a historical fashion exhibit. It was so small, I imagined that it couldn’t really do much damage to any of us, but as it turned out, she wasn’t planning on cutting us .
Instead, she sliced her own palm (which really is one of the stupidest places to cut yourself) and began to chant before slamming her bloody handprint into the floor. Suddenly, a barrier of shimmering light burst into being around the perimeter of the spell circle we were standing in.
Uh-oh…
Magic really seemed to have an issue with millennial pauses right at the beginning of things, because for a moment, nothing happened. But then, ever so slowly but unwaveringly, it began to scrunch inwards.
Are we about to be trash compacted?! Dude, this is just like Star Wars!
Yeah, but this isn’t the Death Star, and I very much doubt there’s an escape hatch in this spell circle!
Spoilsport. I was just saying...
“What is this?” I heard Jackson ask before reaching out to the encroaching barrier. And sure enough, it zapped him while physically forcing him back. “Ouch! That’s gonna really hurt if it makes contact with us.”
“You don’t say?” Chris snapped, and if I had the energy, I might have sighed. Big brothers and little brothers were always gonna be big brothers and little brothers, weren’t they?
“Cherry, I want you to climb onto my shoulders and try to get up onto one of the stakes, then to safety,” Paul said, sidling up close to me and keeping his voice low.
The lovebirds were still kissing each other, and I genuinely had no idea if they were aware of the barrier working inward to slowly crush us.
“And then I want you to run to safety so you can tell the detectives everything you learned here.”
“But what about you?” If there was one trope I absolutely hated, it was the noble sacrifice.
And maybe I was wrong, but I was getting real major martyr vibes from the shifter that I had grown quite fond of.
We had quite literally been through hell and back, and I had no intention of abandoning him when we were so close to the end of the line.
“Don’t worry about me. You have to warn everyone. Once our blood spills on this circle, the Parracidas won’t just have their wolf forms back, but I would put money on the fact that they’ll be able to use the alpha command on the entire Marchendi pack.
“Remember how many people were at the funeral? Multiply that exponentially, and that’s the kind of army they’ll suddenly have.
And I doubt they’ll stop at shifters. They’ll move on to other magical folks, and then to humans, and we all know that if that treaty is broken, every single magical person in the world will suffer the consequences. ”
My stomach dropped as my mind painted me a picture of exactly that happening. It was full of blood and the suffering of innocents and so many awful things, but at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to abandon the closest people I had to family since my mother died.
“Paul, if we were able to get over the top of the barrier so easily, all you guys would have to do is jump it. You’re wolf shifters, I’m sure you could make it. You know as well as I do that there’s no just going up and over.”
I was bluffing. No, I was lying in the exact way I had promised Paul I never would to him again. But what was he going to do? Hold it against me in the afterlife? The fact of the matter was, if the VanMarches were going down now, then my ship was sinking right along with them.
And it wasn’t as if the room had remained still while we argued. The barrier had come in closer and closer, until we were all in the center of the circle, our elbows nearly touching. It wouldn’t be long before we were forced body to body, then crushed entirely.
Man, we’d gotten so close. It was a shame to trip right at the finish line.
“Mother! Stop!” Sergio cried as he rushed over to his mother, his distress enveloping him like a spiky, vomit-colored blanket.
“Shut up, you oversized fool! We put everything into this plan, years of preparation, and you and your sister proved to be useless! We should have culled you when you were young, when we first realized how broken your brain was when you were born!”
I never expected to be offended on Sergio’s behalf , but that was exactly what happened. I also hadn’t expected Alexandria to whip around from where she was braced against the wall.
“You don’t talk to him that way!”
“Who do you think you are to give me orders?” Mrs. Parracida cried as the barrier containing us shrunk ever tighter. Hey, at least we were going out with one hell of a show. I’d never liked soap operas, but it turned out they were far more entertaining when happening in real time.
“This is enough, Mother!” Sergio said, and his disgusting blanket dissolved into fireworks of virulent anger and determination mixing together.
“This has all gone too far! Alexandria liked baking cakes. And I liked having my own job. We didn’t want to be servants anymore, but we didn’t want anybody to die for it! Why have you pushed this so far?”
“You dare to question me? Your IQ is lower than my shoe size, and you think you know better than me? No, I will not stop. And neither will your father! We have spent too many years toiling, sacrificing, and now you and your weak-willed sister want to?—”
She gave a shriek even more painful than the last, and I had to cover my ears.
I couldn’t imagine how much it was hurting the shifters around me.
However, it was hard to give that much of a flying fuck about my discomfort because the reason the woman was screaming was because her son had cut her hand off!
It happened so fast that I had to rub my eyes to make sure I was seeing it correctly—bad idea, since they were both bruised. But sure enough, the woman fell back, clutching at her bleeding forearm while her son kicked her hand far away from the edge of the circle.
The barrier fell, and suddenly there was nothing holding any of us back.
“You traitor! You idiot! Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I have many ideas, Mother. You just never saw fit to listen to them.”
“No, you don’t…” She sputtered several angry curses, and I watched, more than a bit fascinated, as her skin slowly closed over her open wound. It wasn’t like the rapid healing I’d seen from the wolves, but it was much faster than I healed.
“I’ll kill you!” Mr. Parracida said, finally popping out from behind the linen closet and running toward his son with what looked like a dagger. Man, their plans would have been a lot harder to foil if they’d opted to use guns.
None of us were really paying attention to all the blood Mrs. Parracida had shed. Why would we? But when that slowly spreading stream of scarlet Oh, another alliteration! Yay! hit the edge of the spell circle, every single bit of the room lit up, and the roof of the tower above us tore in two.
“What now ?” Chris groaned, and I was right there with him.
This particular light show, however, wasn’t for us. Mostly because the Parracida mother truly began shrieking, scuttling backward and tipping this way and that because of her missing hand.
“No! You can’t! You haven’t upheld your part of the bargain! We haven’t won!”
The sky above the broken roof turned pitch black, and a ghostly hand with sharp nails as long as my torso began to reach down.
It was like something out of my wildest dreams, sections of the hand completely transparent while others violently vacillated between colors almost like a graphics card glitching in a video game.
One moment it was an inky, frantic miasma, and the next it was translucent and barely visible in the corner of my vision.
“No! No! You promised!”
And that was when it spoke.
I’d seen a lot of crazy things in my life—one did when your mother was a locally famous psychic and gifted with precognition and your grandmother could talk to dead people—but nothing prepared me for the shuddering, blooming, yet also singing words that echoed through the air.
“You have broken the pact.”
“What? No, I haven’t! I gave you my wolf, sacrificed my own blood!” Wait, what now? “You haven’t given me the victory you promised yet!”
“You forget. See your heart. See your thoughts. You sought… a loophole. To break our covenant.”
“No, I didn’t! I swear I didn’t! My enemies! They—t-they?—”
“Enough, I grow bored.”
The screams that tore out of Mrs. Parracida were truly haunting, but I couldn’t look away as the hand slowly, leisurely even, descended. Was it a god? A spirit? A demon? I didn’t know. We could only watch and bear witness as it reached for the woman.
I braced myself for it to grab her, or maybe even swat her like a bug, but that never happened. Instead, one of the needle-sharp nails gently touched the top of her head.
And that was it.
One moment the woman was shrieking, begging for mercy, the next she began to glow and flicker in the same way as the arm before freezing entirely.
Her voice cut off in an eerily sharp stop, then, like a puff of wind went by, she turned to ash and crumbled into little more than a dust pile on the ground.
Holy-Capital-SHIT!
“No! My darling! My Arlene!”
Mr. Parracida collapsed to his knees, sobbing, but the disembodied arm reaching down from the heavens gave him no notice.
“Contract completed.”
It was uncanny in more ways than one, but as suddenly as it happened, the hand ascended and the sky cleared, leaving the starry night that had fallen since the Parracidas had attacked our hideout.
For a long, long moment, there was silence other than the weeping from Mr. Parracida and a faint wheezing from his father, who was, apparently, still alive.
“I guess she’d done enough backstabbing for a lifetime,” Sergio muttered before looking to us. “Truce?”
Luther slowly struggled forward, extending the stump where his arm had once been. Shockingly enough, Sergio rested his hand over it, almost like he was taking responsibility for the disfigurement.
“Truce,” Luther agreed.