Chapter 31 #2
“I once stabbed a date,” she said. “He didn’t like it, so I killed him. But Mari, I think the Smith liked you stabbing him. He looks obsessed.”
Not in a good way.
“You probably shouldn’t have done it,” she said, “unless you’re into revenge torture. Is that what you like?”
I swallowed, my throat horribly dry. I couldn’t look away from Finn. I was searching his features for knots, for ropes, for illusion. This couldn’t be him. He’d never look at me like . . . like he wanted to devour my screams and bathe in my pain. Like he lived to hate me.
“Is that Finn?” Luvic asked in a low whisper, maybe hoping it was someone else cloaked in illusion.
“Yes. It’s him,” I said, my voice breaking. “He’s . . . he hates us. Me.”
I could feel it rolling off him like heat radiating from the sidewalk on a scorching summer day. Worse. It was the heat of hell’s coals, peeling the skin off your bones.
My heart thudded.
Was that what it took? A death. A stabbing. A crown. Was that what had made the man who’d promised to love me into the next life hate me with a burning rage I could feel in my soul?
I blew out a shuddering breath, and Finn, only half a block away, smiled.
“If we kill him,” Last asked, bouncing on her toes, “could we move into his house? Mine burned down.”
She tapped her thumb and fingers together.
“No,” Luvic said. “We’re not going to engage. This isn’t the time. We’ll be civil. No stabbing. No fighting. No conjuring. Just . . . nod and walk on by. Nod and walk on by.”
I clutched the glass bottle of Furtig. Just nod and walk on by. Okay.
Finn slowed, tilting his head as he stared at Luvic’s arm draped over my shoulder.
Then he paused five feet away and slowly, cruelly, cast his gaze from my feet all the way to my face.
His lip curled as he inspected me, until he finally paused, looking into my eyes.
My skin flushed from ice-cold to hot-poker heat, and my cheeks stung.
He smirked at my red cheeks. “Hello, Mari. Luvic.” He ignored Last, and she sniffed. “You’re looking . . . friendly.”
Luvic stiffened, and I thought he might remove his arm from my shoulder, prepare to conjure, but instead, he forced himself to relax. He put on his slow, stage-worthy Bard smile. “Nice seeing you, Alterra.”
“Smith.”
Luvic tilted his head in acknowledgment. “Smith. Haven’t seen you since the night you came back—”
“From the dead.” Finn smiled and then added, “And threatened to kill you all.”
He finally shifted his gaze to Last and then back to Luvic again.
There was a strange, twisted feel coming from him. It made me want to step back or look away. I searched for illusion again—this couldn’t be Finn—but no, it was. There was no conjuring here.
He looked the same as he had on top of the lighthouse. There, I’d been distracted by the tsunami and Jacob and Darin and Justice, but now, I wasn’t distracted.
My first instinct after waking up a mine—when I’d felt the earthquake—was that Finn had come back wrong. My instinct had been right.
“Did you get my message?” he asked, turning to me.
Around us, sirens still sounded intermittently, and police shouted, pushing people back from the sidewalks surrounding the subway.
Pedestrians flowed around us, and I realized—with some surprise—Luvic had conjured an illusion over us, a barricade, so people would walk around us, not noticing the four of us in their midst.
A hot breeze blew past, ruffling Finn’s black hair and sending the ends over his forehead. I knew the silky feel of his hair. How to smooth the lines from his forehead when he worried about me or Luvic or the people he cared about. I knew the weight of him over and around me. I knew him.
I searched for any of that and couldn’t find it.
I tapped inside myself, searching for the golden rope wrapped to infinity around my heart. It, at least, was still there.
I shook my head. “What message?”
Finn lifted his eyebrows. “The one I sent with your friend after I stabbed him through the heart. Sound familiar? I’ll destroy everything and everyone—”
Luvic stiffened.
Then it all happened at once.
Finn twisted his hand and shot a fireball at us. Last conjured a swarm of killer wasps. Luvic threw a wall of water. The wasps burned in the fire, and the fire was swallowed by water. The water turned to steam.
The whole time, I watched Finn’s eyes, searching for the man I loved. He wasn’t there. He wanted us dead.
Was this what he saw when he looked at me? Jagger’s creature? A woman with no feeling and no love?
He stepped forward, conjuring a sword of blue fire. It was the same as Wolfgang’s. The one he’d thrust through Finn’s guts, cutting him open when he was only fifteen.
He moved with the wild grace he’d always had. The killing grace.
Luvic pushed me aside. He held out his hand. “Finn—”
Finn swung. Luvic jumped back.
The sword swept in a violent arc, the blue fire spitting like a welding torch. It hissed and singed the air. The blade shot past Luvic and then continued, barring down on me.
I stared at Finn. Saw he was . . . he wasn’t going to turn aside. He was going to let the fire slice through me.
I saw it then. What I’d missed before.
This was Finn. It was him. It had always been him.
This was Finn when he was a Smith—a full Smith, a conjurer, the one who wore the crown.
He was wrath. He was vengeance. He was . . . revenge.
He was a man without mercy. Without forgiveness.
I stepped outside of myself and yanked the knots that held the fire sword together. It unraveled in Finn’s hands. His forward momentum continued, and he spun toward me. I lifted the bottle of Furtig and smashed it against his head.
The clear glass shattered, and the spirits screamed as they showered over him.
He dropped to his knees and gripped his skull, blood and Furtig mixing. The spirits hissed and crackled, and the cut on his forehead foamed as if the Furtig were hydrogen peroxide set to a festering wound.
Luvic grabbed my arm. “Time to go.”
Last twisted her hand and dropped a dumpster’s worth of dirt on top of Finn. Then she opened the ground and let it swallow him.
We ran.
And this time, when Luvic pulled me away from a man I loved, I didn’t fight him.