by S. W. Clarke
I removed my hands from his mane as Loki broke away with a growl, leaping toward the nearest creatures.
It was time to test how good I really was at the art of hexing…sans any magic weapon.
I spread my hands out as we galloped, feeling the air over my palms, and called on the Spitfire deep inside me. It was stifled, pressed down, but still there. And as my eyes flicked over my captive friends, its head raised.
That’s right. Be angry. Give me your power.
My chest filled with a soft heat, and I knew this was as good as it would get inside the trefoil knot. I spoke the fae words for the likeness deception.
“Mealladh coltas.”
Beside me, a flash of red hair appeared atop a galloping black horse. I couldn’t even see through her; she appeared as real as me. So that was what I looked like while riding; not half bad.
Together, we rode toward the enemy.
“Well done, my little witch,” Frostwish cackled, sweeping the rod and chain out. “But you’ll have to do better than that.”
With one flick of her free hand, a massive wall of her silver air magic rushed toward me. She was massively empowered by the weapon.
I jerked Noir left, and at the same moment, my likeness jerked right. The two of us crossed paths, and I narrowly avoided Frostwish’s magic. Meanwhile, my likeness passed right through it unharmed.
Somewhere to my right, I heard Loki’s snarling. Good. As long as he was making a cacophony of noise, I knew he was alive.
Another wall of air magic came at me. My likeness and I crossed paths again as I avoided it, and I could see Eva, Aidan, and Liara clearly now. The creatures held them over their shoulders off to the left of Frostwish, standing in wait.
I made straight for them as my likeness headed for Frostwish. The chain swung out, and when I took a peek over my shoulder, spotted it swing through my likeness’s body. I guess that means I aced her class.
Frostwish cursed, spun toward me. But it was too late.
This part I’d have to time just right…
I raised my right hand, flames appearing on three fingertips. I took aim at the creatures—Just like target practice in the common room, Clem—and flicked off three arrows of flame even as I spoke the fae words.
“Pairilis síoraí.”
The flames hit the three creatures in the chest, knocking two of them back. The third went rigid with the paralysis hex and collapsed.
In the process, it dropped Liara.
The fae landed on her stomach. One arm wrenched out from beneath her as she half-lifted her face, and a small bolt of her lightning shot out from her fingertips, incinerating the paralyzed creature. It dissipated into nothing, scattering across the snow.
Liara shot a second bolt at the other two creatures, and it passed through one creature’s body and into the second one. The creatures, already aflame, staggered and melted into the tundra, leaving only Aidan and Eva on the ground.
I rode to a hard stop next to Aidan, leaned down with a hand out. “Get on.”
He gazed up at me, full of exhaustion from his sapped energy.
“Come on, North,” Liara called out, pressing up to her knees. “Put your back into it.”
He managed to reach one hand out, clasping mine. I yanked him up, and he had enough wherewithal to climb onto Noir’s back behind me.
By now Eva was staggering upright, and I turned Noir toward Frostwish and the legion. In the distance, Loki’s flame ducked and weaved as he fought on, still distracting at least six of them.
But the bulk—at least thirty—now rushed us.
“Aidan,” I began.
He was clutching me for dear life. “Everflame. I know.” One hand left my waist, and blue flames appeared in his hand. He shot a blast toward Frostwish, a blue ball racing through the air on course with her pretty head—
And it passed right through her.
“It’s a perfect likeness deception,” I whispered in the moment before a strange weight pressed in on my skull, and then my body was wracked with excruciating, unending pain.
Chapter Forty-Three
Pain. A thousand volts of pain, every nerve lighting up from toes to fingertips. I dropped from Noir’s back, hit the frozen tundra in a heap. Above me, I saw the chain wrap around Aidan’s neck. Blue fire erupted from his hands in a wild spray as he was yanked off Noir’s back.
The horse screamed, leapt. Raced forward and disappeared from my small window of sight. I couldn’t move to watch him go, couldn’t even shift my eyes.
The pain was all-consuming.
Somewhere in me, the part that could form words knew I was under the effects of the agony hex. So this was Frostwish’s power with the weapon in her possession, and I had developed no resistance to the agony hex.
It was gargantuan. Heart-stopping. Rage-inducing.
Not just the pain, but what accompanied the pain.
The helplessness, what she’d done to my friends, the knowledge that everything—all I had worked for—would end ingloriously out here in the middle of Siberia.
And I would die in pain.
I could feel it working its tendrils into the deepest parts of me, seeking its way up the ventricles of my heart until it could clamp down on the electric impulse that kept that most crucial organ beating.
It was a sad irony that the last witch in the world would die to a hex cast by a fae. And I would go out on my back, staring up into a strange sky.
I heard my name—Loki had come to my side, pressing against my body, yowling. Somewhere, Aidan screamed; the agony hex again. I couldn’t hear Liara or Eva, and the fact that I couldn’t hear them was worse.
The chain rattled across the ground, and Frostwish’s face appeared above me, her petite frame wracked with adrenaline. I could see it in the fast movement of her chest, in the red in both cheeks. But she also held delight in those dark eyes.
In my periphery, I sensed the Shade’s creatures looming. Watching.
“It’s the end for you, I’m afraid. I’d hoped you would be sturdier.” The chain clinked, and her hand moved to draw the weapon aloft. “And you never even knew what you were. Well, so few of us ever find out the truth about ourselves.”
I couldn’t even respond. The pain wracked my body until I was as gnarled as an old tree.
I hadn’t expected in my last few moments I would hear a drumbeat. Soft, sure, rhythmic. That I would feel its vibrations under me, rumbling through the ground.
Maybe this was my body’s way of hallucinating something comforting to distract me from what was to come.
Except Frostwish heard it, too.
Her face jerked up, eyes searching the plain. Her lips parted, and the drumbeat grew. It grew and grew until I understood it wasn’t an instrument at all, but a gait.
A horse’s gait.
Soon it thundered, filling my ears, and Frostwish turned fully toward the oncoming animal.
“Well, you’ve come a bit late, haven’t you?” she called out. “The party’s already ended. I had to do all the—”
Her words ended in a yell. But even that was cut off, because she was forced back by the horse—a black streak in the night—galloping right through the spot where she’d been standing.
The hooves came to a hard stop some twenty feet beyond me. And in the same moment, the pain ended. Frostwish’s concentration had been broken.
Aidan stopped screaming, and the world went briefly quiet.
I sucked in air, able to move for myself again. Residual pain shuddered through my body, but I was so grateful to have the use of my hands, I dug my fingers right into the ground and pressed myself up to see something besides the sky.
Frostwish had taken to the sky. Aidan slumped to the ground, fresh out of his own strangulating pain. Eva and Liara were free of their paralysis hexes, and they were staring…
At the horse. A black horse like Noir, but not Noir. This one was bulkier with muscle, taller even than my horse.
A massive man in armor sa
t on its back, now dismounting. The Shade’s creatures had fallen back from him, and when his boots touched the ground, I could swear the layer of frost cracked under him.
Lucian the prince.
“Leave, Clementine,” he said, and I knew that voice. It was exactly the voice I’d been wanting to hear for a year.
He pulled off his helmet, black hair coming free, and even in this pale light I recognized those features. The set of that jaw. Those dark eyes and brow.
The demon prince was, and always had been, Callum Rathmore.
In a moment Rathmore’s sword sang from its sheath, and he stalked toward Frostwish, still hovering above us.
It was then I became truly aware of my own anger.
Ora Frostwish had hurt me. I’d heard kidney stones were bad, giving birth was bad, but Frostwish’s agony hex? I didn’t know if I’d ever stop feeling the phantom pain of that minute.
It was like being dismembered one molecule at a time.
I found my feet, swayed on them, kept upright by my fury.
Rathmore was already standing beneath Frostwish, weapon ready. When they fought, everything happened quickly: she slashed out at him with the chain, and he parried. Metal clanged against metal, flashed in the night. She sent a vortex of air at him, and he dispelled it with his fire.
Frostwish had kicked up a terrible wind, and Rathmore laced it with his fire.
When she swung out again, the chain wrapped around the blade. Instead of tugging it from his hands, he yanked her toward the ground with one massive roar.
She hit the ground in a heap of wings, the chain clinking as it fell around her.
He brought the two-handed blade up, swung it down as though to split her like a fruit down the center.
But with wild speed, Frostwish’s wings were in motion. She pressed off the snow, flew out from under the blow. The Backbiter remained on the ground.
He shifted the swing, clipped her with the flat of his blade in the back. She flew off-course, spinning around, pointing at him. “Betrayer. Your father was right about you.”
That set off the Shade’s creatures. They started into motion toward Rathmore, who set one hand to his sword and ignited the entire length of it with fire. Then he began hacking, the flames flaring in the night as he brought the blade down and down again.
And I?
“Clem—” Eva had flown over to me, her hand going to my arm.
I ignored her. The Spitfire’s wrath was in me.
Loki raced beside me, still on fire. “Clementine.”
I ignored him, too, started toward the Backbiter still in the snow. When my fingers touched the cold rod, it heated at once, my anger and its power fusing. The chain rattled as I lifted it, and I turned toward the battle. Toward Frostwish, whose magic whipped through the air to fend off Rathmore.
The weapon was what I had come for. Before I left with it, I would make Ora Frostwish feel what she’d done to me.
Liara understood. I sensed her fall in beside me, and a moment later, she said, “I’ll keep them off you. Get her.”
I kept on toward Frostwish as a bolt of Liara’s lightning jetted through the night, disintegrating one of the oncoming creatures.
What I didn’t expect was Aidan’s everflame. It blasted by me so large and loud, I felt some of my arm hairs singe off. It found its target in a cluster of the creatures, destroying three of them at once.
Apparently subjecting a mage to the pain hex twice in one night makes him mad. Even when he’s as anti-violence as Aidan North.
Frostwish lifted into the air as I neared, her eyes lighting on me. “Come on then, fire witch.”
Rathmore spun toward me, his blade a whip of flame. “I told you to go!”
He had told Clementine to go.
Not the Spitfire.
Nobody had control over the Spitfire. Not even me.
It was in the moment I fell into a run toward her that I felt it take control for the second time tonight. My chest burst with flame, extending down my arms and legs and right into the weapon in my hand.
Creatures streamed into my path. I flicked the rod, sending the chain aloft and snapping it down. It tore into their bodies like a knife into butter, cleaving them with fire.
They wilted, didn’t get back up.
That pressure pushed on my skull again, and this time I knew it for what it was: Frostwish’s agony hex. The pain was back.
The Spitfire powered on, pain or no. I staggered forward anyway.
A wave of Frostwish’s air magic blasted over me, sending my loose hair back, but I pressed straight through it, bringing the rod around for my next strike. I found wielding it to be as simple as holding a pen.
It felt right in my hand. Especially in the midst of my rage.
I wasn’t just mad at Ora Frostwish. I hated her. The blue-black bob cut, the perfect slender neck, those dark, cruel eyes. After what she had done to me, to Eva, to Aidan, to Liara.
She deserved to die.
I passed through a second wave of her magic; it rushed like a breeze over me, didn’t even douse the flames a little. God, the Spitfire pulsed with power, and I would use it.
My hand came up, bringing the rod overhead even as Frostwish made to fly from my reach. She was fast—she’d always been fast, ever since I’d seen her rush into Eva during the first guardian trial.
But she wasn’t fast enough to evade the chain.
It snaked out, bit her leg in a moment of cruel contact. And I felt the power of the chain, understood what it could do: it hexed what it touched.
Frostwish went as still as a statue, her wings frozen in the paralysis hex. She slipped to the ground, landed with a thump.
I didn’t have another thought. The Spitfire lifted my arm again, the chain flashed in the moonlight, and it dragged a line across Frostwish’s upturned face. She didn’t scream, but I knew if she weren’t paralyzed, she would have expressed that pain until her throat went hoarse.
I’d shown her a little bit of what I’d felt.
Now I would show her the full extent of it.
A pair of armored arms wrapped around me, trapping mine against my body, pinned by shaped metal. “No, Clementine.”
The Spitfire thrashed, raged. Then I was spun around, found myself staring up at Callum Rathmore, the flames off my body creating shadows over his face. Those tragic, dark eyes stared back at me.
“Remember yourself,” he said. “Don’t kill her.”
Remember myself. The words sounded like another language, odd and pathetic and full of the kind of softness I didn’t—couldn’t—feel.
And then he was whispering more words—“I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I die”—and the more he spoke, the harder it was not to remember that these were my language. That even tonight, I had been someone besides the Spitfire.
His fingers squeezed. “I will be myself.”
I will be myself.
I was Clementine Cole, a fire witch, but never a killer.
Chapter Forty-Four
As my flames died away, it was just me left. Me and Callum Rathmore, his arms around me in the snow, the two of us breathing in a post-battle rhythmic cadence. The adrenaline was like a drug.
My hands began to shake, the chain tinkling in the night, as I looked up at him. “I was right about you.” My voice sounded like it had been pressed through a tiny hole and barely emerged out the other side.
The faintest smile touched his lips. “Which part?”
“You’re a demon.”
His eyes tracked between mine, an inexpressible and obvious tenderness there I’d never seen before, and coupled with it the absolute enormity of saying all the things he needed to say. Where did he even start?
I read all that in the moment of silence that fell, and then, before he could speak, Aidan appeared next to me, breathless and glowing with blue fire. “We’re still surrounded, Cole.”
I couldn’t break away. So Rathmore did it for me, his hands falling away. “I can’t k
eep them steady long. Maybe a few minutes’ more before Frostwish rises.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I got the idea.
Around us, the creatures had fallen again into stillness. They watched, stared, some of them as close as ten feet away.
With Frostwish on the ground, Lucian the prince had command.
I turned slowly, found her where I’d left her. She was still under the effects of the paralysis hex, though I hadn’t concentrated on it at all. And a massive red gash ran down her cheek, her blood glinting on its way down toward the earth.
It was the chain.
The chain was maintaining the hex. For how long? I couldn’t say. I would have removed it if I could have, because in this moment I didn’t hate Ora Frostwish. I didn’t want her dead. Not like the Spitfire.
I was Rational Clem.
“Frostwish?” I said to him.
“She’ll live.” He gave her one hard look. “She’ll always carry that scar, but she’ll live. And she’ll slander you. Be prepared for that.”
I’d dealt with worse than slander.
Nearby, Eva and Liara leaned on one another, walked over to us. One had a limp—I couldn’t tell who, though I’d never seen Liara’s face so contorted with pain.
She’d been hurt. Badly.
And yet as she focused on Rathmore, her eyes narrowed with a strange recognition. “You.”
He ignored her, sheathing his sword. “She’ll send more.” She was the Shade—that was obvious. His sword scraped along the ground as he retrieved it. “You have to leave now. Get on your horse and ride.”
My horse. Noir.
As if he’d heard, I spotted him trotting toward me over the plain. He came to my hand, pressing his nose into my free palm, searching for oats.
Still, I didn’t move right away. I just stared at Rathmore, who straightened and turned back to me. His helmet hung from his other hand. “What now?” I said. “You’ve betrayed her.”
“I betrayed her long before tonight.” He slid his helmet over his head. “It’s your life that matters. You still have one more piece to retrieve.”
