Chapter 39 The Hybrid
The Hybrid
Iopened my eyes, fighting to breathe. I found myself face-down in the snow, gasping in ice-cold air as I struggled to get up.
Something had hit me in the side under my ribs, something that burned and prickled, bringing a pain so intense I fought to breathe through it.
I felt it, catalogued it, but barely noticed beyond feeling it as something in my way.
My mind was elsewhere already. It searched past my dazed thoughts, frantic.
My eyes scanned over the ground, looking for him.
I had to find him.
They’d hit him, hard.
That wash of flame reminded me of what had rebounded off Malefic in Bones’s room, and nearly killed him before the winter break.
Like that other spell, it had been intense enough to blind me, and even though I hadn’t been the target, my whole body hurt just from being that close to it when it hit its target.
The sheer power of it vibrated my bones and flesh.
It wasn’t what hurt my side.
That they’d done to slow me down.
I didn’t stop to question how I knew that.
I gasped, and struggled to get up to my feet.
I saw him then, and let out a strangled cry.
He was maybe twenty yards from me.
He was lying still. He didn’t move at all while I stared.
Blood was dripping down the side of his face.
I dragged myself up from the snow, without taking my eyes off him.
A crowd was closing in around him, wearing black robes.
They were closer to him than I was. They were so close my heart pounded violently in my chest. They’d dragged him away from me already, or dragged me back.
Whatever had happened in those seconds my mind swam back to consciousness, fifty or sixty feet opened up between us.
I must have been knocked unconscious.
Again, my mind noted that, without spending another second on it.
There were at least eight of them around him, maybe more. Others stood at more of a distance, magic sparkling and glowing in their hands as they formed a perimeter around Bones and the mages and witches who approached him.
My eyes didn’t stop to count, or even to look around at them.
I couldn’t tear my focus off Bones, or what they were doing to him, now that they were close enough.
I’d already begun to limp in their direction.
I limped faster when I saw one of them fitting what looked like an iron collar around his neck.
Whoever did it, their ring-covered hands and long fingers performed a mudra with an elegance that mesmerized me, and when they finished, the iron-looking collar began to glow.
For the first time, I saw Bones move.
His eyes flashed open. He let out a shocked cry.
The mage standing over him backhanded him, rocking his neck and head sideways, maybe to shut him up, or maybe just to distract him.
Either way, it seemed to work.
The lightning I’d seen forming around him abruptly died.
Bones groaned then, grimacing in pain. His eyes flickered open again, but he didn’t look totally conscious either.
His long, pale fingers gripped the edge of the collar, as if trying to tear it off.
He looked more like someone who’d been completely under, who’d been only briefly pulled out of it by blinding, unrelenting pain.
His back arched as I thought it. I saw him writhe as his lips parted, but the collar only sparked brighter, turning a menacing shade of blood red.
It seemed beyond him to make a sound now.
He couldn’t seem to breathe properly, much less scream.
The mage who’d put it on him straightened, and stepped back. I saw him gesture at several of the others, using some form of signing I didn’t know, right before he turned, and the hood fell back from his face and head.
Black hair cascaded down his head, as straight as if it had been ironed.
Silver eyes stared at me above cut, high cheekbones.
The stark, nightmarish familiarity of his features stabbed into my chest.
Malefic Bones.
I think something like a scream bubbled out of my lips.
He saw me standing there, but his expression didn’t move. I noticed the black, metal-looking arm that hung limply on one side, right before my eyes snapped back to his.
My reaction wasn’t logical in any way.
I geared up into my sun primal and threw a mudra his way, hissing out words without thought. It ended up being the same spell I’d used the night before, on that mage who tried to ambush me and Bones by the tailor’s shop.
“Raktaagni lakshyam!”
I put a lot more of myself into it than I had the night before.
Malefic Bones made a sharp, sideways movement, dancing to my left as though his feet floated on a pocket of air.
The spell I’d sent bounced away from him, moving in the opposite direction, and clearly hitting some kind of shield.
Whatever it was, it had been erected before I’d gotten the spell out of my throat.
Bones had been right.
Surprising him wouldn’t work a second time.
A smile found those cruel lips. “Mrs. Bones,” he called out, his voice almost friendly. “Rather impressive Bloodfyre curse. Did my son teach you that?”
I flinched, staring at him.
Shock turned my blood to ice as his words penetrated.
For a long few seconds, I couldn’t move. Somehow, his words, his tone, all of it, smashed into my mind and magic in a resounding, cataclysmic way, cracking open the last of my resistance and exposing a singular truth I’d somehow already known.
I’d known.
Bones had known, too.
Even if he hadn’t said it to me, over and over last night, I would have known that he knew. He hadn’t managed to force out the words, not in the Black Tower, nor on our one and only date, but I could feel it now, as visceral as the wind.
He’d definitely known.
“I suppose I should welcome you to the family, daughter,” Malefic sneered, his voice shifting a few shades colder. “I admit, I was a little hurt I wasn’t invited to witness the sacrament. I suppose we will have to come up with our own ritual, you and I, to mark the occasion.”
I didn’t answer that, either.
I looked up to the Mansion, to the students and teachers who must be inside, but the front doors were closed. All of the lights were out in the main building and I had no idea what it meant. Was it an illusion? A chimaera?
Had Malefic found some way to lock everyone else out of his triumphant return?
“They can’t help you,” he said darkly, a cruel humor in his words. “And I’m afraid your sorcery won’t work on me this time, either, little witch, impressive though it may be.”
My throat closed as I stared at him across that endless-feeling expanse.
The snow was coming down harder now.
I looked around at the other faces with him, and realized in shock that the mages and witches who stood with him, dressed in black robes, included a lot of faces and bodies I knew.
My eyes stopped on the features of students I vaguely recognized from my classes.
I saw a mage I’d had as a lab partner in alchemy, who’d told me funny stories about working in a private bestiary over the summer.
I saw students I knew from the Valarian dining hall, and from Frumpy’s, and the library, and from my Theosophy and Seeing Arts courses.
I also saw a young witch with red hair and freckles I recognized from more recently. It took me a second to place her, before I realized I knew her from the images Bones sent me of the ritual he’d witnessed under the church in Tunis.
Rebecca Whitehorse.
She was Yorick Orrin’s wife now.
There were so many of them.
Some I’d seen eating just now, at one of the tables during the New Year’s Day Brunch. Some of them had jeered at me and Bones, while others might have laughed, or even clapped.
Two of them were now holding Bones’s arms, standing on either side of him.
His head lolled as they began to drag him, and I realized his eyes had closed.
The collar he wore continued to glow with sparking magic, but he’d fallen unconscious again.
The pain must have knocked him out. They were pulling him in the direction of the Promenade and the forest, leaving a streak of blood in their wake.
That broken stripe of red was enough to snap me out of my paralysis.
My sun primal flared under the storm-black sky, and I felt something in me seem to crack in half.
I don’t think I said any incantations that time.
I don’t think I performed any mudras, either.
I slammed outward with both hands, and a coil of blue and gold magic left my palms like a pulse of liquid fire. I didn’t aim it at Malefic. I aimed it at the two mages dragging my… dragging my… my husband… across the frozen snow into the dark.
I saw it slam into both of them.
Some part of me nudged the stream as it was about to reach where they were.
That nudge split the column of fire in half, exploding it outwards until both of them were engulfed in the blue and gold flames.
The vibrating plasma never stopped passing through my palms and fingers, and the fire blossomed higher, even as it threw them clear of Bones.
There was a strangely time-locked, reality-tilting silence.
Right before both of them began to scream.
The group in front of me scattered so quickly, it jerked my mind off the two I’d just attacked, and onto the nearer threat.
In my periphery, I saw them move all at once, like a herd of elk suddenly faced with a wolf.
I tracked them all, one by one, as individuals, even as I screamed, drawing another flood of seething plasma down from the sun primal over me.
I hit into a line of scattering witches and witches, enveloping them in flames.
I drew back my other arm, filling that with a second flood of plasma even as I saw Malefic Bones stumble backwards, his silver eyes suddenly wide.
He stared at the magic in my hands, his mouth agape.
Then it snapped shut, and he turned to the others, screaming out commands in a language I didn’t know, yet knew nonetheless. Without ever having heard it before, I knew without a doubt that he spoke Ancient Egyptian.