pictures with your blood, Deirdre.”
“Blah, blah, blah.” Her hand fell on Geoff’s iron blade. It hadn’t vanished. The iron must have rendered it immune to the illusory magic. “Skip the villain monologue and get to the killing.”
He faltered at her confidence. “I have the Ethereal Blade,” he said, as if uncertain that she’d seen it. He lifted it between them.
“Yeah, I know,” Deirdre said. She tugged the iron sword to her side and stood, wavering on unsteady legs, hair stiff with frost. “I’m not worried.”
“You saw what it can do. You saw the valkyrie with it.”
“You’re not a valkyrie.”
“But Rhiannon entrusted me with it,” Kristian said. “That says something.”
“Sure. It says that Rhiannon doesn’t have a valkyrie and you’re expendable. Otherwise why wouldn’t she wield it herself?”
Self-doubt flickered through his eyes, quickly replaced by blind bravado. “She’s a gods-damned queen. She has better things to do.”
“Yeah, like not being suicidal,” Deirdre said. “Does this mean you’ve already killed Ofelia Hawke with that?”
“Yes,” Kristian said.
She barked a laugh. “You are so full of crap. You’re lying. I can tell you’re lying.”
“You don’t have acute werewolf senses,” he said with a sneer.
“No, but my bullcrap meter is attuned to douchebags like you,” Deirdre said. “You haven’t managed to kill her yet. She’s still alive somewhere. Right? Then I want to finish this so I can find her.” She spread her arms wide, leaving the iron blade dangling from her forefinger and thumb, inviting him to attack. They were in a silver forest after all—and Kristian was a shifter, not truly sidhe. “I won’t shoot or stab you, Mr. Artist’s Hands. You’re going to die without wasting a single bullet.”
“Nuh-uh,” Kristian said. He’d run out of villain taunts. He had no better retorts to fling at her.
She laughed again.
His insecurity turned to rage.
When he lunged for her, his movements reminded her so much of the way that Jacek had attacked her back at the asylum. They were both snakes, after all. And Deirdre thought that Jacek had been bad enough.
But Kristian wasn’t kidding when he said he had an artist’s hands.
He sliced through the air with confidence, moving the point of the blade so quickly that Deirdre could see nothing but a blur.
She threw herself under the swing. It whipped over her head.
For a dizzying moment of horror, Deirdre imagined that she wouldn’t duck quite low enough. The Ethereal Blade would skim her scalp. Her brain would explode into flowers and she would die in a conflagration of perfumed vines, slowly and painfully among the ice.
It didn’t strike. She rolled again, getting behind Kristian, and he tracked her quickly.
He brought the Ethereal Blade down. Deirdre lifted Geoff’s weapon to meet it.
The blessed sword cut cleanly through iron.
“Oh man,” she said.
She tossed the hilt into Kristian’s face. He knocked it away, too.
Deirdre had no choice but to dodge repeatedly on instinct, trusting her senses to keep her out of the way of his blade. He was so fast. He came from unexpected angles, swiping the cutting edge so near Deirdre that she felt the wind of its passing.
She leaped behind a tree. The Ethereal Blade cut right through its silver trunk.
It toppled, branches falling toward Deirdre.
She jumped out of the way, and the frosted tips of the tree crashed into the ground, cracking the sheet of ice. Sapphire water gushed from the holes. It looked like unseelie blood.
Kristian cackled as he cut through another tree just as effortlessly.
Deirdre didn’t dodge fast enough that time. She shrank into a ball and protected her head.
Its branches fell around her like a cage of silver. A fragile twig scraped down her shoulder, unprotected now that she had given her jacket to Geoff. Pain erupted down her arm.
“Damn!” she cried.
Deirdre kicked both her feet out, snapping branches with her boot heels, and then scrambling out from under the tree in time for Kristian to chop it into pieces behind her.
She couldn’t fight him while he had the Ethereal Blade. It was too deadly. Deirdre needed time to draw her gun. Needed to put distance between them.
But even if she was fast under ordinary circumstances, there was nothing ordinary about Original Sin’s frosty silver forest. She was sluggish. Kristian was immune to the cold, probably protected by the same unseelie magic that cloaked everything in illusion, and he was fast for a serpent.
Deirdre felt like she was running away from him through a dream, moving only inches no matter how much energy she put into it.
She drew her Sig