The Danger of Destiny

by Leigh Evans

  It tipped over and crashed to the flagstones.

  I was free.

  Arms hugging my ribs, I rolled to sit up.

  Lexi was so pale. The only thing bright was his blood. He said five words. “Get out of here, Hell.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Helzekiel stepped over the door rubble, pausing only to pick up a particularly sharp and stabby piece of wood. You didn’t need to be a Mensa member to figure out what he was going to do with his splinter of oak.

  He walked straight past me, his gaze fixed on my brother.

  You’re not staking my brother.

  I rose silently, half-bent at my waist. I had no magic, and my sense of direction seemed tilted toward the left, the result of one or the other of my recent beatings. But damn, I could move my arms again, and I had a hard head and 120-odd pounds of force working in my favor. Plus, let’s not forget, enough hatred to fuel a nuclear reactor. Put bluntly, if hate was all I had I could transform my body into a mage-seeking torpedo.

  I went for the tackle.

  He heard the soft pad of my moccasin-shod feet. As I flung myself at Helzekiel’s back, he pivoted quickly on his heel, his arms opening to receive me.

  We toppled.

  I landed on top of him in a terrible mimicry of intimacy, my breasts flattening on the chest of the man who’d broken my brother. My eyes lifted and locked with his.

  Helzekiel’s irises were a half shade lighter than his black pupils.

  I watched those dark circles widen.

  “Your eyes,” he breathed.

  I head-butted him. Forehead to nose. Cartilage cracked, and blood smeared, and then we were rolling. Briefly he was on top. My wolf snarled, and then I was on top. Over and over, we rolled, dried heather crackling beneath our struggling bodies.

  I had nails and teeth. I went for everything I could reach.

  His neck. His cheeks. The skin above his wrist.

  I was the honey badger of revenge.

  He slapped me. My head whipped to one side. Another blow and he was on top, his knees pressing on my shattered ribs. I screamed, drumming my heels. Merry was a hot coal scuttling up to my chest. Above his head, I saw movement on the rafter. A swarm of tiny lights. Faint pinpricks, getting brighter, purer, sharper.

  Greener.

  “Come,” I urged to my talent, parting my lips.

  Helzekiel’s eyes grew darker, speculation swimming with sex hormones stirred by his questionable conquest. He lowered his head, putting his mouth on the place that Trowbridge had marked. As I struggled, Helzekiel’s tongue wet my skin with a long, insulting lick—a sickening prelude to what he planned next.

  But there, at the base of my throat, his tongue met something unexpected. Hot. Metallic. Moving. He stilled. Slowly his head lifted. He stared at the taunt, flexing golden links, his brows pleating.

  “Recognize the gold chain, do you?” I purred.

  Merry sprung.

  * * *

  Orange-red was her belly; needle sharp were the ends of her articulated vines. She latched on, pinching his cheek with her pincers.

  More blood dribbled, sweet as freesias.

  I went for his eyes again. With a grunt he captured my clawing hands, snaring them together with one of his. Once he held them in an iron-tight grip, he slapped the heel of his other palm on my jaw, keeping my head firm to the flagstones, and pushed away from me. The links of Merry’s chain were piano wire against my neck. I felt the burn and then the cut, and then the air was twice perfumed with freesias.

  I’m going to lose my head.

  And it was going to be cut off, far less neatly than Marie Antoinette’s.

  So be it. I wanted to tell to Merry to not stop, no matter what. To keep torturing the bastard who’d imprisoned her inside a hunk of amber, even if I lost my head. To never let go of his jaw, to never cease her efforts to gnaw her way to his carotid artery.

  Kill him if I cannot.

  A nice sentiment, but I was inarticulate with pain, close to passing out.

  Already I saw moving spots above me.

  Bright glittering bits of green.

  Goddess. Magic-mine.

  I opened my mouth to the small cloud hovering over me. My Fae talent thinned to a stream and came back home.

  * * *

  Reduce, reuse, recycle. Never had a PSA seemed so applicable. I did not allow my magic to sink to my gut. She was a tool of war, like my brain was a tool and my wolf’s strength was a tool. Separately we were broken; melded together we amounted to half-broken.

  But it would do.

  I’d make it do.

  Merge. All of us together. Sister-wolf, frightened Hedi, magic-mine.

  Take from this; take from that.

  Merge.

  Through my bloodstream my talent surged, and she brushed against my will and took from it direction, and she slid against my wolf’s feral heat and took from it muscle.

  A fine specimen of wrath, she erupted from my fingertips.

  New. Improved. And oh-so-very deadly.

  My gaze went to his, then beyond him. I bared my teeth—a feral wolf, a bloodlusting Fae.

  Target found.

  Go. Grab. Use.

  My pearly whites were the last things Helzekiel saw before my magic brought the marble mortar down on his head.

  * * *

  My twin had used that instrument daily to grind herbs and the eye of newt. That was his part of his job description, along with hunting wolves and being the Black Mage’s Shadow. It was a familiar tool for Lexi. But now it was my mine.

  Five pounds of stone make for a good cudgel.

  Blood sprayed.

  As it does.

  The mortar lifted and fell. On each lift, it felt and looked a bit different. Wetter, heavier, uglier. Bash. Grunt. Bash. Grunt. I repeated the cycle until we could do it no more, and then we released our cudgel and heard it crack in two as it hit the floor.

  Helzekiel’s body lay partially over mine, an unforgivable weight on my ribs. Get him off me. Whimpering, I pushed his broken head off my shoulder and wriggled out from under him.

  I rolled away from his corpse to face the window. Blood and death used to sicken me. And now the only thing that sickens me is my own pain. Magic-mine moved, tugging my hand to slide toward what interested her. My gaze numbly followed her progress to Lexi.

  She nosed his boots.

  All the wailing should have stopped, I thought, but it hadn’t.

  Lexi’s head was bent, in contemplation of the wound and the stick, and the long smear of blood that coated his shirt and the top portion of his pants.

  What is that noise?

  I fought to place it. I could hear Lexi’s shallow breaths, and my own fast breathing, and the sound of Merry curling a few of her vines into a crazed and complicated awful nest around her red-orange belly. But over that, something louder.

  I turned my head to locate it. It came from outside.

  “Son of Lukynae!” I heard them chant. “Son of Lukynae!”

  Trowbridge.

  * * *

  “Lexi!” I shouted, rolling to my hands and knees. “Break Ralph’s spell!”

  My twin blinked very slowly, as if wakening from a dream. As I crawled to him, his head turned slowly to me. He looked dazed.

  “Say the word!”

  His brows pulled together.

  I grabbed his shirt. “You told me at the creek that you could see some of the stuff the Old Mage sees, know some of the stuff he knows. Especially when he’s concentrating hard. You must know it. We need the word!”

  My brother’s face shimmered, glazed, and then a haze went over it. My brother’s firm, sharp jaw sagged. The skin below his eyes grew fleshy as the Old Mage struggled to take over his body again.

  “Go away!” I screamed. “Go away, Mage!”

  I shook my twin as hard as I could. “Lexi!” I pleaded. “You’re strong—dammit, you’re a Stronghold. We hold. We don’t give up. You hold for me. You push him back.
Find me the word. Break the spell.”

  Keening cries from outside.

  Tears clogged my voice. “Everything we’ve gone through. Everything you’ve suffered and I’ve suffered. The way Dad died, and the way the Fae executed Mom. She bled out on our kitchen linoleum, Lexi. She died in front of me. And I couldn’t stop it. I was trapped inside the cupboard. All of life has led to this. Fight back.”

  He whispered, “I always fight back.”

  “Then keep doing it.”

  “Jaden is at the bottom of the tower. It will come down when the curse is broken.”

  Two twins stared at each other.

  One taproot, one destiny.

  I nodded. “Then let it.”

  “Warn them,” he said simply.

  I dragged myself over to the window and pulled myself up, holding on to the lintel. Shakily, I yanked Merry over my head. I placed her on the windowsill. I tried not to look at what was being done to Trowbridge, to look beyond that. But he felt me. He had to have, because he raised his anguished gaze to mine.

  “Wolves!” I yelled. “Beware!”

  “Aisce!” screamed Lexi.

  * * *

  One word. One short, single consonant blew apart Merenwyn.

  I’ll never know what it actually looked like.

  Before Lexi had uttered the word, I’d already thrown my arm over my face to block the oncoming explosion of light and swung away from the window. I was facing the interior of the room when the twin curses blew apart.

  There were two shock waves. Whomp. Whomp. One lifted me clean off my feet; one slammed into my back.

  As I hurtled through the air, I knew nothing.

  Not my name. Not my destiny.

  Not anything.

  * * *

  I was alive. I knew that because I hurt really badly.

  Ambient noise was gone, replaced by a strangely muffled quiet. Dust motes hadn’t finished their dance. They hazed the air around me, blurring details.

  Had the tower come down?

  The domed ceiling had a portion blown out of it, and a long vertical tear drew a jagged line down the tower’s wall. I could see light through the doorway where there should be no light.

  Somebody was going to need to call Mike Holmes.

  My hair was in my mouth. I lifted an arm to do something about that, then noticed that bits of my magic coated me, a green shimmer on my pale skin. Healing me, I decided. Soothing the small cuts on my arm, the many nicks on the back of my hand.

  All one again. My wolf’s heat warmed my core.

  “Lexi?” I whispered, turning my head to the side. A shred of bookbinding peeped from under a drift of heather. It fluttered as I breathed, so I pursed my lips and blew a whistle of air. It rolled away, a fragment of spent evil, coming to rest at the heel of Lexi’s boot.

  He was facedown.

  “Lexi?” My heart skipped a beat, taking in his immobility, and then kick-started again when he groaned. I rolled to my hands and knees. The glow of the setting sun illuminated the open arch of the window. Its casement hung from one hinge, twisted and paneless.

  Trowbridge.

  I crawled across the rubble to the window, grabbed the stone ledge, and used it to haul myself to a semi-upright position.

  Below me, the birth of a legend.

  Bodies everywhere. Moving bodies, dead bodies, people soon to be dead bodies. Ralph’s blast had mown down those closest to it. As the base of my tower, the corpses of the Royal Court lay strewn in an outward fan. Their colorful clothes were tattered; their legs and arms were posed in ugly attitudes of death.

  But beyond, in the Spectacle grounds proper …

  The area contained by the palisade’s tall walls wasn’t a theater of death. It was the scene of an ongoing massacre. For Ralph’s blast had not just killed and blinded; it had mown the Fae down. And now a race of people denied respect, the right to peace, and the basic right to life had broken free from their pens.

  The Raha’ells were on a rampage.

  I searched among them and found Trowbridge, easily identified by the ring of warriors who surrounded him. The guard he was choking was in his final death throes, and as I watched Trowbridge finished him off by snapping his neck.

  “Son of Lukynae!” the wolves roared.

  Frenzied and fueled by the complete belief that every brutality they wished to do was deemed both just and right and had been predicted by a prophecy made long ago, the Raha’ells fell upon the rest of the Fae.

  We can be animals, we wolves, even when we wear mortal skin.

  “Hell,” I heard Lexi rasp.

  I spun around. My twin had pushed himself onto his knees. A braced arm kept him from falling flat again. His head was bowed, and his long golden hair hung over his face.

  “Do it,” he said hoarsely. “Go to Threall and finish it.”

  Bloodlust in my veins.

  Yes, we are predators, we wolves.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  A fierce desire to protect and a darker wish to spill some blood while doing so can turn a mystwalker’s soul-soaring flight into mach-five super-drive. All of my usual let’s-go-to-Threall teleportation routines—think up, think fly, think there—were telescoped into one fluid rip of the incorporeal from the physical.

  Without the usual agony, I was there, up in Threall.

  That fast.

  I came to consciousness before my corporeal shape had fully formed. Kind of ugly, watching my soul-light being encased by the layers of things I understood my body needed: bones, and arteries, tendons and muscles.

  Instead, I focused on the stumps studding the small clearing. Perhaps that’s how the old wizard had untangled the magic required to conceive his spell of glamour. He’d spent centuries watching new mystwalkers materialize in the clearing. Lots of time for him to study the process and to deconstruct it for his own use. By the time the pool of test-subjects had thinned, he’d figured out how to create an illusion of a body.

  Then, he sat back and waited for a sucker.

  I’m going to hurt him bad.

  “Come alive,” I heard Mad-one say, her tone urgent. “You must make haste.”

  I gave myself a self-check. I was almost good to go: I had legs that I used to stand. I spun in a careful circle, searching through the mysts for Mad-one. “Where are you?”

  “Where I have been this age,” she replied sharply. “Guarding your citadel. If you have the belly for battle, make haste to me, for I grow weary.”

  “I’m almost ready. Give me a second to grow another arm.”

  “Are you strong, Hedi of Creemore?” she said in a softer tone. “For you will need be.”

  “I was born strong,” I said without any irony.

  “Then prove it so,” she told me.

  I didn’t have a good comeback for that one, so I kicked off and took to the air, the Tony Stark of Threall. Streaking across the tops of the trees, piercing through blue mysts, moving so fast that the cyreaths cradled in the boughs of the old trees below shuddered in my wake.

  No loving heart had I. My thoughts were simple.

  The old bastard hates pain, does he? Well, I’m going to whack his soul-ball like it’s a piñata holding on to the Earth’s last cache of Cherry Blossoms.

  And then I’m going to tear his soul to shreds.

  * * *

  We are one tree, Lexi and I.

  Two black walnut seeds that had spliced together, producing one taproot and a trunk. But as the citadel of our souls grew toward the sun, the stem of the tree split in half and the heart of one tree turned into two very distinct trees.

  My half of the black walnut is stunted in terms of upward growth, though I’m not ashamed of its lack of inches because it’s obviously healthier than its twin. Solid limbs, thick curving branches, heavy foliage. Also, my soul-ball is enviably firm; the hues that spun from it are green-gold, with intermittent flickers of brilliant blue.

  As a soul-light, I’m stunning.

  However, it wa
s obvious that I was never meant to be a mage. For my side of our shared tree had never sought to stretch impatiently for the sky and the colors of my cyreath hadn’t been mixed from a royal palette of reds and purples and blues.

  On the other hand, my twin’s citadel was a sample of what happened when three fairy godmothers named Fate, Karma, and Destiny warred over a man’s future. He stretched for what he couldn’t reach, and his health suffered. His walnut tree was raddled. Stripped of bark in places, and with broken branches.

  It was very, very quiet in the little hollow where our tree grew.

  Not even the wind sighed.

  * * *

  “Hello, my name is Hedi of Cremoore,” I murmured. “You tried to kill my brother. Prepare to die.”

  I floated, eye level to the soul-balls that hung from Lexi’s side of the tree. Mad-one had been right on the money: I’d arrived in Threall not a minute too soon. The old man’s sagging cyreath was collapsed over my twin’s, turning two distinct shapes into one deformed blob. The interior of the mage’s soul-ball emitted a steady throb of a red-tinged purple light.

  Ugly.

  I couldn’t see much of Lexi’s soul-ball, except for what meager amount was visible beneath the old man’s smothering weight: a half inch of firmer material and a thin wedge of jewel-toned light.

  Talking of Mad-one, where was she?

  I pulled back, my gaze roving the small clearing, in search of her. A visual sweep of the shadows cast by the trees and the tall grass didn’t produce her. I narrowed my search to the ground directly below my hanging feet. There I saw a flash of blue and followed the hem of her gown to the shape of her, kneeling at the base of our tree. Her eyes were closed; her hands were flattened, the palms on our joined lower trunk.

  She looked up, her face screwed in pain.

  “Hurry,” she gasped. “Complete your task.”

  I nodded, returning my attention to the pressing problem of parting the two soul-balls. Forget going for the piñata stick. I couldn’t beat the old man without harming my brother’s soul. I was going to have to get my hands dirty to remove him.

  My flesh crept at the thought.

  Touching meant intimacy.