But I kept my expression as calm as Sorcha’s, not wanting Fallon to see a hint of my worry.
“My friends can handle themselves against your witch,” I said.
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. I don’t care. She’s already had her use.”
“And what use is that?” I slammed her stupid Faraday cage with another bolt of lightning, and she chuckled, amused.
“All of this.” She looked around at the zombies crowding the ledges, her red eyes wide in wonder. “The plague. Lavinia created it—at least, the spell for it. My mother will be annoyed if she dies, but oh well. Casualties happen in war. Like your sweet friend Cassia.”
I sucked in a sharp breath at my friend’s name.
Then I pointed the wand at Fallon and shot multiple bolts of lightning at her cage. They surrounded it, hissing and buzzing around her red electricity.
I can put my fae and witch magic behind it and push harder, I thought. I can break through.
But I pulled back and let my magic fizzle out. Because as satisfying as it would be to destroy her cage, I still didn’t have a holy weapon.
I needed to keep stalling.
She pulled her hair over her shoulder, brushed her fingers through it, and smiled. “How did it feel watching Cassia die?” she asked.
I raised my hand and aimed a bolt of lightning at her face. The cage stopped it, of course, but the release was satisfying.
“You saw me afterward,” I said. “You should know.”
“Actually, I didn’t see you afterward. Lavinia banished the orbs from our castle. She said they were distracting me from mastering my magic.” She toyed with electricity in her hands, thunder rumbled overhead, and the sky flashed red.
I raised my wand, shot electricity out in all directions from the top crystal, and created a massive blue electrical cage around the crater.
Red bolts of lightning struck the top, but they didn’t break through.
“A cage around a cage.” Fallon looked up at it approvingly. “Smart.”
I lowered the wand, and the blue cage around us held.
She snarled at me, and her eyes flashed red. Hurricanes of rage swirled within them.
She was going to snap.
Keep her talking.
“The Nephilim army has been hunting demons since before I was born,” I said. “None of them have ever had lightning magic. So how do you?”
“That was the beauty of Lavinia’s spell. Because the plague eats away at fae magic. Then, when it reaches the heart, it transfers the remnants of that magic to me.” The sky boomed and lit up with red streaks again. “The plague killed hundreds of thousands of fae.” Her long hair blew around her, and her skin glowed red with electricity. “All of their magic is stored inside me.”
The weight of that settled on my shoulders, and fear coated my tongue.
But I swallowed it down. Because I was the Queen of Wands.
I could fight her.
I had to be able to fight her.
The entire realm—and maybe more—depended on it.
I glanced up and around the crater’s edge, trying to see through my blue cage to the zombies surrounding it.
Come on, guys, I thought, searching for my friends. Where are you?
There were no signs of them.
I needed to keep stalling.
“I guess that kind of makes sense.” I toyed with my electricity, mimicking her. “But lightning magic isn’t fae magic. It’s Jupiter’s magic. So how do you have it?”
Did Jupiter gift Fallon with his magic, too?
“Your magic is impressive, and I wanted it for myself,” she said simply. “And remember, I’ve absorbed magic from hundreds of thousands of fae. Their magic exists in tiny orbs inside of me. Rub enough of those orbs together, and BOOM. Electric charge.” The sky cracked with thunder and flashed red again, as if accentuating her point.
“So you saw my magic and copied it.”
“Not copied.” She frowned. “I was inspired by it.”
“Same thing.”
She snarled, the cage around her vanished. She raised both hands and shot a thick beam of red electricity toward me.
I clutched the wand with both hands and shot out a beam of my own. Just like earlier, my blue magic crashed into her red magic. Together, it formed one long beam—her side red, and my side blue. White sparks ignited and flared out in the center where they touched.
We both held on, braced ourselves, and pushed harder.
I screamed and threw as much power as possible into my magic. Silver and violet helixes swirled within the blue beam of electricity.
But it wasn’t enough. My hands shook around the wand. It was taking all of my strength to hold out against her.
If I could force past her magic and reach her, maybe I could trap her in a Faraday cage of my own. Then I’d have to either hope my friends got here in time with a holy weapon, or leave her to seek them out, hoping she’d still be there when I returned.
I didn’t like either option. But they were both better than her winning and finishing me off.
While I’d been thinking, her magic had climbed forward, making its way closer to me.
We circled around each other, both keeping hold on our magic.
Sweat beaded on my brow and dripped down the side of my face, narrowly missing my eye.
The cage surrounding us, I realized. It’s taking too much magic to hold onto it and defend myself against her.
I let it fizzle out, and a surge of magic rushed through me. I pushed it toward her, and she stumbled back.
But her hold on her magic didn’t weaken.
She steadied herself, screamed, and sent a surge straight back at me.
I pushed harder, but her magic inched closer. One foot, two feet, three feet. She was gaining on me too quickly. And with each bit of progress, the weight of her magic grew heavier and harder to hold back.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
Distract her, I thought. Get her lost in her thoughts, like how I just got lost in mine.
“What do you want?” I screamed to be heard over our crashing magic and the blowing wind.
“The wand.” Her eyes glowed brighter red. “Kill you, and the wand’s mine.”
She forced her magic further forward. Most of the beam between us was red now. One more foot, and she’d reach me.
Part of me wanted to let go and roll to the side, like she had earlier. Then I could lock myself in a Faraday cage of my own to buy myself some time while I figured out what to do.
But her magic was much closer to me now than mine had been to her then. If I let go, I wouldn’t have enough time to move before her electricity reached me.
I needed to stand strong.
So I bent my knees, every muscle in my body shaking as I tried to stop her progress.
Sweat coated my body. My palms were slick with it, the wand slippery in my grasp. I held my breath and tried as hard as possible to hold on.
But her magic inched closer. Only a sliver of blue protected the top crystal of the wand from her magic, and then, nothing.
Red exploded around the crystal, and the force of it threw me backward in a burst of light. My back smacked against the ground. Dots floated in my vision, and I gasped for air, but it sliced my lungs like knives. The wand lay beside me, its crystals dead of light.
But they weren’t broken.
Just like I wasn’t broken. And I wasn’t going to lie there and give up. I had too much to fight for. My parents, my friends, Julian, and my home. I was going to get back to Avalon, and I was going to make sure the demons couldn’t do to Earth what they’d done to the Otherworld.
I was the Queen of Wands. Fallon might have knocked the wind out of me, but the wand gave me strength. With it, I could still fight.
I sucked in my first good breath since being slammed to the ground and reached for the wand.
But I was too late.
Because Fallon got it first.
20
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sp; SELENA
“YES,” she said, and she tilted her head back, raising the wand to the sky.
Red electricity danced along her skin. But it didn’t travel up the wand.
Instead, the wand’s invisible magic traveled down to me. Tendrils of it brushed against my skin, like it was begging me for help.
Of course it was. Because the Holy Wand was mine.
The Holy Wand.
If the wand’s holy, then maybe…
The wand and I were connected. We’d been connected since I’d hovered my hands over it in the Sanctuary and held it for the first time. So I pulled the tendrils of the wand’s magic into me.
The crystals pulsed with blue light, in sync with the beats of my heart.
Fallon smiled. She must have thought the glowing crystals were her doing.
Now, I thought, and blue electricity ignited around the entire wand in a bright burst of light.
Fallon screamed as the electricity spread over her body, covering her completely. It cracked and buzzed around her, and she seized, like Felix had when I’d fried him.
But she kept her hand wrapped around the bottom of the wand. It was like her palms were covered in superglue. And the longer she held on, the longer the electricity continued to fry her.
I pushed myself up and backed away, putting a few feet between us.
Her strangled screams echoed through the crater, so loud that they drowned out the thunder overhead. Her veins popped out so much that they looked like they were about to burst. Her eyes widened, bloodshot and about to pop out of their sockets. The ends of her hair fried and burned upward, like ropes on fire. The sickening smell of cooked flesh filled my nose.
I reached out my hand and focused on the wand.
Come to me.
It yanked itself out of her grasp, flew toward me, and smacked into my palm.
The electricity around Fallon fizzled out. She collapsed to the ground in a burnt heap, and rolled over to look up at the red sky.
She blinked a few times and moaned like the zombies surrounding us.
Not dead.
At least, not yet.
Please work, I thought, and then I raised the wand with both hands, pointed the top crystal down at her chest, and plunged it into her heart.
The crystals glowed blue—as did her eyes. She opened her mouth to scream, and blue light flooded out of it. Her skin cracked open, and blue light flooded out of the growing crevices, too.
The wand was burning her up from the inside. The light clawed through more and more of her skin, ripping it to shreds and consuming her in a Fallon-shaped blue orb.
The light exploded in a burst. Then the wand slid past her body like there was nothing there, and it wedged into the ground.
The thunder overhead silenced. The eerie red light faded away to nothing, and the sun shined down, basking me in its warmth.
The light around Fallon dimmed and disappeared.
All that remained was a big pile of ash. The tip of the wand was buried in the spot where Fallon’s heart would be. About half a foot away—on top of the ash that had been her head—was a pile of pointy yellow teeth.
I pulled the wand out of the ashes and stared down at Fallon’s remains.
It worked.
The Holy Wand was a holy weapon. It could kill demons.
I reached down, picked up one of the teeth, and pocketed it. Most members of Avalon’s army had a “tooth bank” where they kept a tooth from each demon they killed.
Hopefully Fallon’s would be the first in my own very large collection.
I stood there, staring at the pile of ash, smiling at the fact that I’d truly killed her.
Thump, thump, thump.
The sound echoed around me, like falling rocks.
I whipped my head up to see what was making the noise, and froze.
Zombies were tumbling over the edge of the crater like lemmings. They rolled down, hit the ground, and pushed themselves up to stand. Their eyes were on me, and they groaned, opening and closing their jaws as they shuffled toward me. More kept falling over the edge—a never-ending stream of them.
I spun around to find a way out.
But they surrounded me from all directions.
So I raised my wand, and clouds rolled in overhead, blocking the warm sun. Then I called bolts down from the sky and struck the zombies down. They collapsed to the ground—stunned, but not dead.
Time to get out of there.
I ran forward, rammed the top of the wand into the ground, and pushed off of it, flying up and through the air like a pole-vaulter. I landed at the rim of the crater, on the back of a fallen zombie, and bent my knees to absorb the impact. Then I held my arm out and called to the wand. It unwedged itself from the ground in the center of the crater, soared through the air, and landed in my palm.
The crystals glowed brightly, and adrenaline rushed through my veins.
I hopped off the back of the zombie and looked around to figure out a way back to the hill where Julian and the others were fighting.
The adrenaline evaporated away in an instant.
Because apart from the ruins on the brown, barren land, zombies stretched out for as far as I could see. Tons more than I’d been fighting with the others back on the hill. There must have been thousands of them.
They started getting up, and I called down lightning again, frying the ones closest to me.
I needed to clear a path and get out of there.
My heart pounded, and I spun around to figure out where to go. The ruins meant this place was in the Western Wildlands. The crater had been in the “eye” of the hurricane—because of the lack of wind and rain—so the others had to be nearby. And we’d just entered the eye from the east when the zombies had attacked.
I needed to go east.
But nearly identical hills rolled in every direction. The trees were dead, so I couldn’t use their moss to figure out which way was north. Using the stars to navigate was out, since it was the middle of the day. And even though Fallon’s storm had stopped, I needed to maintain the cloud cover overhead so I could keep zapping the zombies. So using the position of the sun wasn’t an option, either.
I rammed the wand into the heart of the zombie in front of me and turned it into ash. Then I ashed another, and another, until I stood in the center of a circle of it.
A few of the zombies nearby started to get up. So I called down another round of lightning and knocked them back down. Then I ashed a few more of them for good measure.
Breathing hard, I stopped and looked around at the piles of ash surrounding me. Because as good as it felt, taking my anger out on the living dead wasn’t helping anything. Plus, there might be a way to cure them. That was why we were planning on keeping Lavinia alive—in case she knew a cure. So I needed to stop killing them. At least, I needed to kill as few of them as possible.
There has to be a way to quickly find the others. There’s always a way. I just have to figure out what it is.
I looked down into the center of the crater, at the pile of ash that had been Fallon. I should have gotten her to tell me where we were before killing her. But thanks to the strange way she’d brought us here, I was clueless.
How exactly had she brought us here?
Wind gusted around me, thunder cracked overhead, and a thick bolt of lightning struck the ground in front of me.
The storm.
That had to be it.
Fallon had somehow turned us into electricity and transported us through the Red Storm. I’d never heard of such a thing, but then again, I was still discovering the limits of my new magic.
I straightened, tightened my grip around the wand, and took a deep breath.
Time to create a storm of my own.
I brought another round of lightning down on the zombies to make sure none of them started to get up while I was attempting lightning travel. Then I raised the wand and pictured the valley where Julian, Torrence, Sage, Thomas, Reed, and I had fought the zombies afte
r entering the eye of Fallon’s hurricane.
Thunder rumbled loudly overhead, and the wind blew stronger. The gusts picked up the zombies and blew them away, clearing the area where I was standing.
The clouds overhead darkened. Blue lightning flashed between them, casting its light down upon me. A Blue Storm. The storm was a part of me. I could feel the area where the storm clouds spread, like I was running my fingers over a raised map.
I could go anywhere in its reach.
But the further the storm spread, the more magic I expended. And I wasn’t trying to create a storm across the entire Otherworld. It needed to be just large enough to get me to the others.
I closed my eyes, hoping I could see down from the clouds. No such luck. Feeling the topography of the land would have to be enough.
The storm touched the start of the Western Mountain Range, and I pulled at it to stop it from expanding.
While locating Fallon, I’d studied the map enough times to know the layout of the Western Wildlands. So I reached my magic down from the clouds and touched as much of the land as I could. My storm covered nearly the entirety of the Wildlands, and finally, a map of the land beneath the storm formed in my mind.
Where do I need to land?
I had an idea of where we’d camped out in the mountains, and an idea of the path we’d taken through the eye wall to reach the valley where we’d fought the zombies. Pinpointing the exact valley was impossible, but to teleport, witches didn’t need to pinpoint locations exactly. They just needed to be able to picture it clearly in their mind—what it looked like, and where it was on a map.
I wasn’t sure how similar lightning travel was to teleporting, but at least it was something to work with.
Take me to them, I thought, and I pushed my lightning magic up into the clouds. Now.
A blue bolt struck down from the sky and surrounded me.
My cells ripped apart in an explosion of pain, and I became lightning, zooming through the clouds like electricity through a wire.
21
SELENA
EVEN THOUGH I was prepared for the pain, it didn’t make the feeling of my cells being ripped apart and stitched back together again any better. And while I knew light-speed travel was basically instantaneous, the pain made it feel like an eternity.
The Faerie Plague (Dark World: The Faerie Games Book 5) Page 10
