Chapter 21 #2
“Remember me now, Violet?” the woman said. She had a smug smile, beautiful as she was, with dark hair and glittering eyes.
Violet pushed harder, and the lever finally moved with a rusty sound. “No, I don’t.”
The smile vanished. “Pilar Garza. Oh, you probably thought I’d died when your family massacred mine. I was gone that day. Lucky me.” Her smile returned, brittle this time.
Violet’s gaze kept shifting to her mother as she took one step at a time, drawing closer.
She thought she saw the outline of Kade’s bubble behind Pilar and her mother.
She couldn’t afford to look too hard and draw Pilar’s attention to him.
“You seem to forget that someone in your family killed my father. We did not attack you unprovoked. But this isn’t about our families, is it? ”
“Of course it is. And how much I hate you. Have always hated you.”
“Because I was better at wrestling than you were when we were, what, fourteen? Because when you tried to distract me, I didn’t get my arm torn off? Because you were shunned and banned due to your bad behavior?”
“Your father killed mine!”
“That was your doing. You pouted and sulked so much that your father challenged mine to the Conference Room. Your father wasn’t supposed to die in there.
” Mostly the Conference Room was about brute force, releasing aggression, not duels to the death.
“Your father tried to kill mine. He had to protect himself.”
Pilar gave her a cruel smile. “Do you want to know why your father was on our property? I saw him at the edge, calling for one of your pigs. I pretended to be hurt, and he came over to help me. I stabbed him. And while he bled out, I remembered seeing you two at the store laughing together. He put his arm around your shoulders, and you leaned into him. And I thought about how I didn’t have my father anymore, and now you wouldn’t either. ”
Her father had been tricked. He’d been trying to help her and was killed for it. Violet saw the shock register on her ma’s face, too. She focused on Pilar. “You caused the deaths of your whole family,” Violet said. “You started a war.”
Pilar pointed, jerking Violet’s ma off balance. “You started it!”
Violet knew there was no point in reasoning with a woman who could only rationalize her own actions. She buried her shock and anger. “Let my mother go. You said we were making a deal. Me for her.”
“Vee, no, damn it!” her ma said. “I’ve lived a long life. You are not giving yours for mine.”
But Violet didn’t intend to give her life. “I’m a big girl, Ma. I make my own decisions. And I already made the deal. You and Daddy taught me to live up to my word, after all.” She focused on Pilar again. “Since you’ve been so forthcoming, I have a revelation for you as well. Ferro’s dead.”
Pilar stumbled, which shoved Violet’s mother into the railing along the boardwalk. “You didn’t kill Ferro. He’s in Miami.”
“He’s lying in the woods. He came to kill me. Seems the two of you don’t like me much. I’ll try not to take it to heart. Someone I care about very much recently gave me that advice, not to take things too personally.”
Pilar lifted her chin. “You couldn’t kill Ferro. He’s much more powerful than you will ever be.”
“I got lucky.” Violet wasn’t going to mention Kade’s part. Let her continue thinking he was insane. She approached Pilar slowly, her hands out at her sides. “He took you in, didn’t he? That’s how you came together with this plan of yours to save Drakos.”
Her eyes widened. “How…”
“Because Drakos came to Ferro as we fought. And funny, I thought he’d save Ferro as he lay dying and begging for help.
Instead, he chastised him for not waiting.
He was going to finish him, Breathe him.
That’s the only way he can take the power you’ve been accumulating.
So do you really want to throw everything away for a god who’s betrayed you? ”
“You’re lying! Drakos is going to make me immortal.”
Violet thought about that girl Pilar had intended to kill.
“You hate us all in the Fringe so much that you’d set us up to kill one another?
Leave more children without parents when you know how painful that is?
” She hoped Jessup had pushed aside his bloodlust and gotten the others to listen.
“You were going to kill Kaitlyn. A child! That’s against the rules.
My clan never killed any Garza children. ”
“Only because there were none at the time. Saving a god is more important than any child’s life. Certainly more important than any of you Fringers. All they’ll be good for is the power I Breathe from those who survive the clan wars. They will be the most powerful and worthy of my time and effort.”
Violet hoped they heard that. She now stood directly in front of Pilar. She had to fight not to look when she saw Kade appear as the orb evaporated.
“Let her go.” Violet held out her hand. “And put the other cuff on me.”
Pilar pushed her mother away and reached the open cuff toward Violet’s wrist. As the metal touched her skin, Pilar gasped and looked down at the tip of Kade’s blade protruding from her chest. Blue shards of magick came off the bloody blade and pulsed through her body.
She snapped the cuff closed and Catalyzed.
With all her power, she’d heal fast in Dragon form.
She flicked her tail at Kade, who didn’t move quite fast enough because his focus was on the cuff around Violet’s wrist. He was thrown to the edge of the walkway, the railing stopping him from falling over the edge. Pilar inhaled, ready to incinerate him.
Violet unlatched one of the gates and pushed Pilar through the opening and into the gator pit.
She landed with a splash, and then Violet heard several other splashes as the gators moved toward her.
Pilar blasted a torrent of flames at the creatures to keep them at bay.
She turned and smashed into the walkway that led through the center of the building, sending Violet stumbling down the slanted boards and into the water.
Oh, crap. The sight of her usually signaled the arrival of food to the gators.
If she didn’t have Gator Chow to offer them, they’d take her instead.
She couldn’t Catalyze with the damned cuff on.
Vigorous pushing at it couldn’t nudge it past her wrist bone.
Four gators swished through the water toward her, their mouths partially open.
Kade Changed into the largest gator she’d ever seen and threw himself into the muddy melee of tails and teeth and fangs and fire. He charged toward her, stepping on other gators and pushing them beneath the water.
Pilar, blood still gushing from the wound in her chest, tried to climb up the broken walkway.
Gators pulled at her tail. She was too big for any one gator to tussle with, but the beasts didn’t care.
Several of them were fighting over her. She kept them at bay with her periodic bursts of flame, but one managed to take a chunk out of her tail.
She howled in pain, screaming obscenities.
Violet tried to climb out of the water, barely clinging to one of the boards. Her feet kept slipping on the wet wood.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Pilar reached out and knocked her off, sending Violet face-first into the water.
One gator clamped its mouth around her arm, its teeth puncturing her skin.
It would do the death roll with her, spinning her around and pinning her to the bottom of the pen.
Her scream was drowned out by the water in her mouth.
Suddenly the gator released her, and then another one took her into its massive jaws. With teeth as soft as pillows.
Kade.
He set her on the intact portion of the walkway and then turned to Pilar, precariously balanced on the broken boards.
She kicked at the encroaching gators, which were even more fueled by the blood in the water.
Kade lunged at her from one of the narrow catwalks that ran perpendicular to the main walkway.
Pilar sent a blast of Obsidian Dragon magick at him.
A black oily cloud smothered the huge gator.
Kade dropped the illusion, becoming man and slipping out of the cloud’s grasp.
Pilar shot a plume of fiery spikes at him.
He dropped to a crouch as they flew over his head and singed his hair.
He staggered back upright, fatigue clear in his expression.
Pilar moved slower, too. But she seemed as determined as Kade to win.
While the two fought, Violet climbed over the broken parts of the walkway behind Pilar.
The shards of wood bit into her skin as she used them for handholds.
Kade drew his dagger and sent an arc of lightning at Pilar’s throat.
Pilar blocked it with her black cloud, now using it as a shield.
Kade’s bolts shredded the shield, but he wielded his magick dagger as though it weighed fifty pounds.
Violet was only inches from Pilar when she lost her footing as one of the boards shifted with her movements.
Before Violet could get a solid grip on the boards, she spotted an insidious black stream snaking its way over the thrashing water toward Kade’s feet.
It started to wrap around his ankles. If it knocked him off-balance, he’d fall into the bay on the other side, where the largest alligators lived.
Violet reached out with her cuffed hand and grabbed Pilar’s wing, the only thing she could reach.
Pilar’s magick evaporated because of the Lucifer’s Gold, and she became a naked human holding on to the top of the slanted walkway.
The gash on her tail translated to a deep cut at her tailbone.
Violet gripped her upper arm to keep her from falling.
“Drakos, save me!” Pilar screamed, looking up.
“Don’t be stupid,” Violet said. “I told you what happened to Ferro.”