Chapter 20
~Winter~
There’d been no time to get our bearings.
Blurs of motion filled my vision, just before two dozen agents of The Shadowed, their black robes whipping around them, burst into formation in front of the three of us, forming a double wall.
More blurs, and then fifty-odd vampires blurred into the immediate area facing off with them, snarling and hissing.
Clan Languim.
They were all in dark tailored suits, not robed or hiding their identities like Grandpa’s agents.
Each of them held a glowing orange sphere on their palms. My gut twisted, knowing that they were balls of spelled sunlight. The fact the clan members were able to touch them when they were vampires meant they’d been calibrated for their use.
One of the members at the front with spiky green hair sneered at me. “These are gifts from Temperance, death incarnate.”
“You are making a grave mistake,” Grandpa rumbled dangerously as he stood flanking his unit. “You stand on the verge of doing something that cannot be undone.”
“You’re the one making a mistake!” the guy yelled back.
“You’re an Ancient fucking vampire protecting an unhinged, unstable necromancer—the greatest threat to our kind above all else.
So many of his abilities harm the death-touched.
You have a responsibility as Commander of The Shadowed to see beyond him being your grandson, Remnant! ”
“This is about power for you, little more than that. Certainly not responsibility. You have not come here to protect all vampirekind.” He hissed. “I am already seeing to our survival, as I have done for centuries. How dare you challenge that?”
“Knee-jerk move also,” Evira called out. “Coming at the son of the Almighty Necromancer while claiming you’re guarding against Necromancy being used on vampirekind. Inviting it instead, don’t you think?”
The apparent leader of the clan dipped his head a little at Evira. “You are currently an outlier, but your people will respond in kind alongside us. Your father is the single force that holds them at bay. But that won’t last. Not if he knows what’s good for his leadership.”
Vampires and dragons didn’t exactly mesh well with the death-touched versus life issue. The fact he thought that would be transcended because of this situation, because of their fear toward me… it was bad.
Really, deeply, bad.
The Shadowed agents snarled at the clan.
The clan moved in.
No.
This was not happening.
I teleported in front of The Shadowed protection, then called my amber power.
The sharp visual jolted the clan, drawing their full attention to me.
“It’s nothing personal,” the leader said. Then he sneered at me. “Corpse boy.”
I heard Grandpa snarl.
The leader went on, “The power you wield, being unkillable, all that Necromancy… it’s too fucking dangerous to our kind. With this True Celestial bastard in play now, it’s dangerous to everyone. We’re allied with Temperance to contain you. The way it always should’ve been.”
“I’m not just a necromancer.”
He frowned.
I abruptly snuffed out my necromantic power, then swept a rush of my Wraith frost along their frontlines.
“I’m also Wraith.”
Gasps and cries sounded as my magic worked its will, containing all their orbs within fields of thick frost within moments.
I didn’t stop there, and I pushed my frost into them, beginning to nullify the manufactured sunlight itself.
I grunted, because it took some strain.
Zayn would be the best fit for this. He could use his magical Ifrit flame to interfere with the substance, then even siphon its power from the source.
For me, this was like trying to put out dragon flame.
I saw Evira moving to assist, but with her being an ice dragon, it would be the same strain as me doing it, and she obviously realized that and did something else instead.
Latching onto my frost signature, she jerked all the orbs from the vampires, and drew them toward her.
When they were a few feet out, she thrust her free hand down at the ground.
A rush of frost stabbed deep into it, driving a hole through the earth and filling it up with a mixture of her glacial magic and ice.
She forced the orbs into it, burying them deep within all that ice.
Holy. Hell.
She was incredible.
In the next second, Grandpa darted past his agents in a barely perceptible blur, ripped through all the vampires, and snapped their necks in quick succession.
I reached out a hand to her—but I never made contact.
A sudden rush of power jolted me, had Grandpa calling out a warning to his agents, and me spinning because I couldn’t discern where it was coming from.
The reason for that became clear in the next second when another burst of vampires filled the area.
Seventy of them.
But they weren’t decked out like that clan had been—all in varying forms of dress instead.
In the next beat, more bursts of speed brought thirty wolves lining up alongside them.
Eruptions of teleportation all over had magic-wielders of all sorts joining.
There was one thing despite the lack of a uniformed look that tied them together—a glinting black T etched into the back of their right hands.
“Temperance,” I choked.
There was no verbal sparring, no introduction—they just acted.
In the very next second, they rushed The Shadowed.
Something lashed at me, and I hissed as an awful chill shot through me.
I spun to see one of those Nihilumbra binds snapped to my right wrist.
Grandpa was there in the next second tugging at it with the full force of his Ancient vampire strength. I yelled for him to stop as I saw it desiccating his fingers.
But he didn’t.
He kept going until flesh desiccated to bone, then bone almost turned to ash.
Just before that happened, he managed to rip it off me—but then he was slammed into by a dozen Temperance soldiers at once and driven down to the ground.
I heard them calling out orders about not actually killing him because he was vital to the supernatural world.
That chill the Nihilumbra bind had caused collided with what Ruxnoth had afflicted me with, setting it off or something, and then I was stumbling and shuddering.
I went to call my amber power, but then another bind lashed through the air like a fucking whip, and I had to dodge before I could invoke my power.
That dodge wasn’t enough in my current state, and it hit me.
But before it could snap to my wrist, a blast of dragon ice tore into it, sending it spinning out of range, and slamming back into two approaching werewolf-sorcerers who’d been wielding it.
Evira shot out her hand toward me to bolster me, but once again, we never managed to make actual contact, because she was blasted away from me by magic and flame from ten Temperance combatants.
I screamed as she went hurtling three hundred feet into the distance and crashed into the main campus building, the impact driving her right through the wall.
Even more chaos erupted then, students screaming and rushing out through the wreckage and debris, professors and administration speeding and teleporting to the scene of destruction, then noting the battle taking place here on the campus grounds.
The Loxley Academy threat alarm went off in the next moment, a fucking siren blaring through the noise of the battlefield.
“Evira!” I bellowed across the distance. “Evira! No!”
I staggered and called my shadows.
I sent them rushing into the army, downing two dozen of them and clearing the way.
Evira... my little dragon… I needed to… she was… I needed to reach her now. Now!
I caught sight of Grandpa bursting up from beneath twenty attackers at once, sending them all flying out in different directions.
I saw his skin was healed now, but he kept being rushed, the enemy knowing all too well how dangerous he was.
This wouldn’t stop all the while I remained here.
Even overcoming this onslaught… more would come.
Grandpa thought spiriting me away to a safe haven would be enough.
They all did.
Everyone who loved me.
But this… it was proof of the direct opposite.
It was proof that the hope had gone out there.
It was done.
Ruxnoth had seen to that.
It was fucking done.
I knew what I had to do.
But first I needed to make sure Evira was okay. Needed to lay eyes on her, touch her, hear her voice.
One last time.
I wanted that with Zayn and Vax, too, but that wasn’t possible right now.
I pushed across the battlefield, using my shadows to continue to clear the way, then blasts of my Wraith frost for particularly stubborn opponents.
But then a fusillade of blasts hit my back.
I gritted my teeth as they jolted me and threatened to drive beyond skin deep.
Fuck. I had no choice.
They didn’t see that they were bringing this about. I didn’t want this. I never fucking had.
I sucked in a breath, then called on the very thing they were so afraid of—my Necromancy.
My power flared violently on either palm, then I slammed my fists into the ground, sending out a shockwave that ripped into sixty soldiers like a brutal tidal wave. It drove them all back with heavy force, knocking half of them out on contact.
I snapped my hand up and invoked Undead Domination, latching onto every single hostile with death-touched natures.
I levitated them high into the sky, noting over thirty of them held there at my will in my amber film.
At my mercy.
All that cold and weakness Ruxnoth had caused in me went away.
Only strength and power remained.
A familiar cry caught my attention, and I swung my head to see Evira in dragon form soaring from the wreckage like a glacial phoenix, headed back to the battlefield.
No—directly to me.
She rained down a whole slew of magical icicles, tearing into the soldiers as she soared overhead, then even erecting ice walls around Grandpa and his agents to assist.
And then she went to snatch me up in her paw.
I stepped back out of reach.
She landed right in front of me, tilting her gorgeous dragon head in question.