Chapter Twenty-Two
Whoosh!
Mardi Gras-colored flames encapsulated Floyd’s black SUV—purple, green, and gold flames scorching the paint, melting the tires, and cracking the windows.
“What the hell?” Floyd made as if to approach the car, but as horrible as the wolf was, he hadn’t stayed alive this long by jumping the gun. He rounded on me, instead. “You lying bitch, your gnome is around here. Where’s he hiding?”
“Cecil is not my gnome,” I said, somewhat dizzily, since my head was still whirring from his punch. “He’s my partner. Which is to say, he’s his own person who hates you with full autonomy.”
BOOM!
“Come out here, you little fae bastard,” Floyd shrieked.
Behind him, explosions went off in phases preceded by sound effects that reminded me of a superhero comic book. The tires first, then what looked like the suspension or shocks, maybe. I didn’t know much about cars, but the things supposed to keep it from sagging were no longer functioning.
BOOM!
The engine—
BOOM!
—and finally the body, which crumpled in on itself, the paint melting into a sticky mess of purple, green, and gold.
I was never chastising Cecil for blowing up the dumpster again. In fact, I was going to buy him his own.
Smoke billowed through the lot. Had I been able to feel irritation, I might’ve coughed.
Fennel, who’d likely been helping Cecil plant his hex patches, bombs, whatever, streaked across the lot in my direction.
I held up a hand, warning him back. Floyd wasn’t Nameless.
He wouldn’t go down from a clawed-out tongue, and he was spitting mad at my partners and me.
Floyd let out a howl that popped my ears then stuck out his chest. Fur carpeted the flesh I could see, and his muscles pumped up to twice their size. Sharp teeth protruded from jaws too large for a human face. He was still on two legs, but only just.
“Godsdamn it, where’s that fucking gnome?” he roared.
Rory howled—hers plaintive rather than pissed—and pushed her trembling limbs off the ground until she was standing on all fours. Saliva dripped down her jaws.
Floyd whipped around, gaze lasering in on her.
A garbled chorus of howls sounded in the distance.
Something was coming.
Floyd spun around, his wolf bursting out of him. It was an undeniable truth that Ronan had gotten at least some of his strength from the man. Thank the gods that was where Floyd’s influence on his life had ended.
Rory howled again, her song heartbreaking, her voice cracking at the end.
More of the garbled howls rang out in the night, and a group of wolves emerged from the fog-like smoke boiling out of the destroyed SUV.
Eight wolves.
Eight unhealthy wolves.
Eight unhealthy and unpleasantly familiar wolves.
“Surround the bastard,” a woman yelled. Her voice was like an echo in a canyon, sonorous and booming.
The wolves looked around. Some at Floyd, some at Rory, and some at me. One scratched his head with his hind leg. One stopped to pee on Floyd’s melted rear tire.
“Good graves, I forgot you’ve all got brain damage. Surround THAT bastard—Alpha Pallás. The male wolf.”
Ida strode up behind the wolves, a legendary-level badass in lime green sneakers and matching sleeveless pants set, her eyes flashing like lightning streaking across a desert night sky as she commanded the pack of…
“Are those the wolves I killed this morning? How in the world did you get them here?”
“Crammed them all into my LTD—I fit three in the trunk. Now, don’t distract me, Betty. These guys have been decomposing all day—plus you fried the hell out of their brains, and we weren’t dealing with NASA scientists in the first place, were we?”
She glanced over at the bodies of Nameless and Krane. “Ooo, looks like we have two more. Headless ones are always a challenge, but I’ve animated worse.”
One dead wolf growled. Charged.
Floyd batted it away with the effort he would’ve used on a buzzing fly. It crashed into the side of the smoldering SUV.
“Coordinate.” Despite her flippant asides, when she spoke to the wolves, Ida’s voice conveyed the solemnity of a general leading an army into battle. “Attack together.”
Four of the brainless wolves leapt simultaneously at Floyd’s head. One sank teeth into his throat, one dug claws into his back, one went for his rear legs, and the other went for his … tail?
Ida threw commands at the reanimated wolves. “Drop the tail and go for the belly. Retreat. Regroup. Attack.”
The wolves did as Ida commanded.
In life, these had been strong alphas. In death, they were nearly unstoppable. Until Ida released them, they would continue to fight as long as they had arms, legs, torsos, teeth. This was necromancer magic, and it was stunning to behold.
Floyd stomped the skull of one of his late pack members and donkey-kicked a hole in another’s chest. Now fully shifted, his wolf was twice the size of Aurora’s, a fact that became even more apparent when she milled among the dead wolves, awaiting her own turn to strike.
“Rory, stay out of the way.”
She heard me, because she shook her head. Great. She was as stubborn as her brother.
I stumble-ran into the motel room and crashed to my knees by the circle I’d created to contain Gnath. I put out my hands, and the Siete Saguaro soil separated from the salt it had been mixed with and flew to me like iron shavings to a magnet. I absorbed it all.
“No. Don’t use it to heal me,” I said when my witch side tried to intervene. “I need the power.”
I ran back outside and circled behind the wolves—and creepily, the two headless men—all the while spooling my magic, holding it at the ready.
Hurry, Ronan.
It wasn’t long before Ida’s wolves lay convulsing like broken toys with dying batteries.
The headless men hadn’t lasted two seconds, their bodies crushed to paste under Floyd’s paws.
Bits of wolf twitched on the asphalt in clumps of coagulated blood and body fluids then went still as she extracted her power from their bodies.
Rory’s wolf stiffened, ears back, teeth bared. She was going to attack, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. Worse yet, she was going to lose.
Floyd was just too powerful.
I pooled all the magic in my body and thrust it into one purpose. My injuries ignored, fresh blood trickled down my sides and my head rang like a bell hit with a sledgehammer.
Ah, Ronan. This witch is about to make your life a whole lot more complicated.
I raised my hands until they were in line with Floyd’s heart. Oblivion’s cold, black fingers walked into the edges of my vision as I pulled more and more magic. I’d need it. The alpha leader was far stronger than the wolves from earlier.
This was it. One chance.
Floyd lifted his gaze from his daughter, cruel yellow eyes latching onto mine. A quick pivot, and he was facing me. Rory banked left, putting herself between us. Floyd pushed back on his haunches, flattened his ears, and snapped his teeth.
He leapt.
Over Rory’s head and straight at me.
Time slowed.
Ida’s scream mingled with Cecil’s screech. Fennel’s reeoow mixed with Rory’s anguished bark. None of them would be strong enough or fast enough to stop him.
He landed chest-first, all four legs braced—not to minimize the collision, but to maximize it.
As his full weight bore down on me, I shoved my hands against his chest and shot the magic I’d been revving up into his body with a crack so loud it made Cecil’s SUV explosion sound like the strike of a match.
I hit the asphalt on my back.
The gods must’ve decided to be cruel tonight, because I didn’t lose consciousness.
I had the wind knocked out of me, my head slammed against the hard ground, and the claw injuries on my sides splintered across my abdomen and lower back like cracks in glass.
My diaphragm wasn’t working, and I couldn’t cry out, but no one told my mouth, because it fell open in a frozen scream.
Fur filled my mouth as Floyd’s massive body crushed mine. Bones were broken. Blood gushed from my sides. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet.
And then, he was gone.
Snarling howls unfurled in the parking lot. They echoed against the motel walls like aftershocks following a massive earthquake and coincided with Ronan Mack-Trucking Floyd’s wolf into the wall outside the room where I’d killed Gnath.
In hybrid form, yet as wolf as he could be while standing on two legs, Ronan stalked over to his father’s body.
Floyd wasn’t moving.
Ronan howled, a song of fury and sorrow, with a little thwarted vengeance in the mix. In the distance, a chorus of wolves returned the song. The song grew louder as they drew closer. They were headed our way preternaturally fast, and I had no idea if they were friend or foe.
A purple hat poked into my vision to my right, blocking my view. A furred black tail. The hot breath of a wolf on my arm. Rory. I tried to turn my head, but I couldn’t seem to move.
“Here, let me put it on her,” Ida said.
I shivered at the cold kiss of metal on my neck. Magic spread through me like a drug, chasing away the worst of the agony and giving me my breath back. Thank the goddesses for heal charms—and well-placed demon apathy.
Ronan backed away from his father’s body and stood over me.
A trenchlike claw mark down his right arm was weeping blood, and I wondered who he'd been fighting before he got here. But looking at him then, it was as if every battle he’d ever fought lived on his face—carved into the creases around his eyes, etched into the jut of his jaw, hollowed into his cheeks.
A lifetime of being broken by the people he loved.
“Is he…?” I rasped.
Ronan snapped a nod. “Dead.”
“Did you…” I didn’t want to say the words, because I already knew the answer. Ronan had already answered it with his expression.
“Not me.”
Aurora drew in a sharp breath. Ida made a sympathetic sound, Cecil snuggled close to the nook between my ear and shoulder, and Fennel sat still, not a hair on his body stirring.
“I’m sorry,” I said.