Chapter 14 #2
“I’m the only one left except for your mother, and I should thank her.
I hated sharing my world with others.” He steps forward.
“Did she tell you about all the shifters she dragged into that basement, kicking and screaming, to die for power? How many lives she took? You look at me as a monster when you are the child of one, Juniper.”
“Yes, she told me,” I answer, glancing around and trying to make a plan.
“It’s not exactly hard to make her a villain when she already was one.
The enchantress.” He sighs. “How easy it is to enslave people when they fear someone you made look worse.” He keeps getting closer.
“Did you know she was the first one to suggest using people to feed it so we could live longer, so we could have more power?”
“She told me what she did, but I don’t think stealing someone’s baby, brainwashing them, using them, and rewriting their memories over and over again to win really makes you any better.
You’ve got this whole world fooled that it’s real, and it’s not.
You just wanted to be rulers in charge of this world, and now there’s only one of you left.
When you die, they will be free.” I lift my chin. “Finally.”
“You’re an insolent child. Every time we reworked your memories, we would hope you’d be better.
You never were.” He sneers. “Choosing those beasts and love over your own kind. You could have joined us and been a force in this world I own!” he shouts.
“I debated over and over why we couldn’t just kill you.
Every single one of us knew, and everyone we spoke to, every witch that had any sort of prophesying power, all said the same: that your death would be our ruin, but your life would be too.
There was only a small chance you would ever be on our side, so of course again and again, you chose them. The vermin.”
His power snakes across the floor like red shadows. He walks towards me; I try to take a step back only to realize that my body’s frozen. I try to speak, to do a spell, but I can’t. I panic, reaching for my mates and begging anyone to get to me. Now.
“You have no idea the power we have,” he continues.
“How much it gave us to feed it in the end. Lyra, she’s not been here for many years.
And you, you’re not linked to it. You can die here, and your mother will die too.
This world will be mine, and I will rewrite it with those cards once more. No one will remember you.”
“No world could forget my daughter. She is the best of us all.”
A blast of green magic slams into the side of him. I look over, watching as Lyra steps out of a portal, followed by her bonded. She nods once at me, her eyes soft. “The spell is done, and it will begin at sunrise in an hour. Go save them, Juniper.”
I hear Black screaming my name across the battlefield as he runs to me, but I can’t look away, a sinking feeling entering my chest. Lyra has used all of her magic to kill two of the Umbral Authority and make spells to destroy this world. She can’t fight him.
A red sphere slams up around Lyra and Bael and her bonded.
The second it does, the spell on me ends, and I gasp, falling forward onto my knees.
Black falls next to me, picking me up and checking me over.
“We have to go.” My eyes trace back to the sphere of magic and the fight happening inside.
Lyra is going to lose. “Wini’s not far from here.
I can sense her. We need to get to her and open the portal.
The Mindless are weakened right now. It’s working. ”
“She isn’t going to win,” I whisper, crawling closer to the sphere.
With Black’s arms around my chest, I watch my mother fight, and I know I can’t help.
I watch them both fight. Magic swirls around them in great, dangerous attacks, hitting them all over and over.
Pure power. I watch the second she makes the choice, the second I know she won’t be walking out of this place with me.
Her frantic eyes search for me, and when she finds me, she smiles.
Her final spell is a simple magic, one I’ve faced myself.
Death magic. The gray swirls dance out of her hands, like a song being sung at sea to lure pirates into the deep depths of the water.
The death magic explodes around her until there is only gray magic and four people locked in the middle.
The magic gets to Bael first, and he screams as it slams into his body and rips him apart into dust. Lyra, my mother, turns and walks to her bonded. The three of them hold each other in a circle, as the death magic swirls around them in a dance until there is nothing but the magic.
It disappears, the sphere with it, until there is nothing but dust blowing across the field. “NO!” I scream, my magic cracking the earth around me in a pattern, and I scream until my voice is raw, feeling my tears spill into Black’s cloak as he holds me to him.
Black whispers into my ear. “I’m so sorry, Juniper. She loved you.” He pulls my face up to look at him as I sob. “I’m sorry, but we have to finish this, or so many more will die. We all need you.”
I can only nod, staring back at the place I lost the last of my family.
She is gone; they are gone. Black picks me up and runs in the opposite direction, taking down anyone who tries to stop us.
A dragon swoops down and lands with a crash nearby, and Vale shifts back only to grab the neck of a witch about to attack him and snap it. Vale runs to us. “What happened?”
“Lyra is dead.” I try to say it calmly, but it doesn’t work.
Vale takes me off Black. “I’m sorry, Hex. I’m really fucking sorry, but we need you to do a spell now. It can’t all be for nothing. Look around you. There are a lot of families that need saving right now.”
I can’t look. I can’t think of anything other than the fact that I only just found her, and them, and they’re gone.
I touch the ring on my finger, remembering that they sacrificed their lives and it needs to be for a reason.
I feel Wini’s hands on me as Vale puts me down, as Black shifts and goes to the sky and Vale fights with Luke and Aster to keep anyone away from us.
“You still have family, Juni. Stand for us. Fight for us.”
She is right, I know she is, but I struggle to make myself stand up. The grief is drowning me into a puddle, and I don’t know how to escape it. “JUNI!” She shouts at me and I snap my eyes up. “Stand up and do the spell!”
“Wini,” I whisper. She is right, I need to end this and grieve after. I still have my mates, my best friend, and a world to save. “Have you got the potion?”
She nods with relief in her eyes. “All done and in the biggest cauldron I could find. You ready for this?”
“No.” I brush my tears away. “But we have to do what’s right, or her death was for nothing. We can make it be remembered.”
I take the spell out of my pocket, and Wini runs us over to the cauldron while we are defended. “Stand behind me,” I tell her.
Using my grief, using every bit of pain, I push myself into the spell, feeling the magic flow through me, to the tarot cards, to Minnie wrapped around the back of my neck, to the watch on my wrist with a chain, all of it.
The power explodes through me in almost a rainbow, and it smothers the smoky sky until there is nothing but light.
I imagine Gwen and the Nexus academy but let the magic take over.
It easily flows through me, and I sigh, enjoying every moment of it.
A portal blasts out of the cauldron, spreading in a line, making a huge half-circle.
“So you took my offer,” Gwenieve shouts from the other side. “I got your note the other day to be prepared!”
With tears still falling down my face, I shout back, “Kill any of those creatures that come through. They can’t be saved and they bite. Get everyone else through. You don’t have long before this world dies!”
She says something to the blond man at her side, who runs off fast. I turn to Vale. “Let’s go to Bloodstone Academy and end this.”