Chapter 33 Fireworks #2
He was dragging himself back to his feet, looking for her in the dark, when another explosion overhead lit her up so that he saw her face.
Her eyes were open, wide, pale green, and now writhing with magic.
Black, wavy hair cascaded down her shoulders once more, the blonde erased.
Her coat was gone. Her cheekbones and mouth were hers again, and he could see the green crystal hanging around her neck, having fallen out of her dress, which clung to her figure.
The golden snake bracelet he’d given her writhed on her arm.
Looking at her real face disoriented him at first, but then he saw her staring at him, too, and looked down at his hands, then touched his hair.
Fuck. Both of them were visible.
Someone had hit them with a unveiling spell of some kind, probably while he stood up on that fountain. He should have leapt faster.
It was too late to worry about that now.
He ran up to her, still struggling with the pain in his side and not moving as fast as he should be.
He caught hold of her waist and hauled her the rest of the way to her feet.
She gripped his fingers when he took her hand, and her legs paced his as they began to run, their footsteps pounding across the stone.
She ran as fast as he did, given his injury, and he fought to move them faster, looking for an alley, any place they could hide long enough for him to phase.
“What about the others?” she asked, her voice breathless.
“I’ll come back for them.”
He felt her not liking that, but he also felt her let it go.
He glimpsed a dark figure to his right, realized he knew it.
“Chhooraah,” he hissed, combining it with another spell without thought, both with the mudra and with an extra push from his magic. “Multa glacies ferrosi.”
Ice knives flew from his fingertips and embedded in the chest of the witch standing there. She let out a pained gasp and staggered. An instant later, she fell to her knees, grasping at the knives, trying to pull then out before they made it to her heart.
It was unlikely she’d survive without help. His aim had struck true. She would die in the next two minutes unless another sorcerer could help her reverse the spell.
He struggled to feel anything at all about that.
She’d been another of Malefic’s acolytes, and one Caelum had been reasonably sure his father had been sleeping with this past summer.
He had only a few recollections of seeing her around the house, but he’d definitely gotten that impression from the way she stared at Malefic, and the number of times they’d both disappeared into some other part of the castle.
In any case, she was young, probably only in her late twenties.
She was also pretty, reasonably talented with magic, and positively vile.
Caelum already had a second charge of magic coiled in his hand, ready to use, but he flinched when Leda suddenly muttered a cast and flung a brightly-lit ball of magic at a shadow on the opposite side of the street from where he’d likely murdered Felicity Exeger with a modified ice spell.
Caelum recognized that face, too, right as the spell exploded onto the tall mage’s coat, and immediately set it ablaze with red and gold fire.
The mage’s hair caught fire next, including his beard, and he screamed.
Bloodfyre.
It was a dangerous spell, one he’d shown Leda only once, and specifically described to her as a “desperate, last resort, I’m in serious shite,” type of spell.
He’d noticed almost from the beginning that she had a talent for fire spells, and thought it would be a good one for her to have in her repertoire.
She struck him as a true natural when it came to lighting things on fire.
Caelum himself had always done better with cold things.
Watching the mage burn, he was damned glad he’d taught it to her.
Warrick Panzen, Pants’s father, was a brute, and positively vicious with dark magic.
That Leda had managed to see him so quickly, surprise him, and hit him with such a devastating spell, likely saved both of them a significant amount of pain.
Caelum himself had been so wrapped up in dealing with Felicity, and finding them a place to phase, he’d missed seeing that fucker altogether, so he couldn’t feel any pity, even when the tall mage began screaming louder.
Like Felicity, Panzen didn’t have much time.
Bloodfyre didn’t just burn its targets like a regular incendiary spell.
It consumed them. Once it touched even a molecule of a victim’s blood, it couldn’t be put out, couldn’t be stopped, or slowed down, certainly not by the victim themselves.
It wouldn’t stop burning until it had consumed every drop of living blood that matched that of its target.
There was some chance others in Dark Cathedral could save him.
That would only be true if they got to him in time, and if they had sufficient skill.
Caelum figured Panzen had about ninety seconds to bridge those odds.
He snapped his hand into two more mudras, and the window on a nearby storefront shattered. Usually, he’d use more finesse, find a door to unlock, but he didn’t want to fuck around with protection spells, and he knew most of the shops would likely have those.
He leapt up on the windowsill and dragged Leda in after him.
They stumbled through the window display together. Leda got briefly half-strangled by a magical shawl that had been dancing enticingly for passersby, and Caelum had to shove his way past a dancing suit of clothing made of green and black thread.
He caught her hand again on the other side, and pulled her across the store’s main sales floor.
His eyes darted around, looked for a place they could hide, even for a few seconds.
He found it without slowing down his steps.
A doorway, barely visible in the wall, stood just on the other side of an ancient cash register with brass buttons.
It would do.
He hung a right through the opening in the counter, through the beaded opening, and into the storage room beyond, filled with boxes and shelves covered in clothes and shoes.
Wrapping his arms around Leda, he looked her in the face.
“Hold on,” he muttered.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, and gripped him tightly.
He barely paused to gather his magic, then phased them through the stone wall.