“This book won’t help anything,” I pleaded with her. “It will only make things worse.”
“Really? It helped you. You got Ethan back.”
She was simultaneously right and wrong. “I’m glad he’s back, but you didn’t do that for me, and you didn’t do it for him. You used him to get what you want—and you used me to get his ashes out of the House. If he thought destroying the city was the cost of bringing him back, even he wouldn’t have paid that price.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“I shouldn’t be dramatic? I’m not the one who landed in Nebraska to steal something that doesn’t belong to her.”
“Do you have any idea what I’m going through? What I’m feeling right now? It hurts, Merit! Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. The only thing that will make it better is balancing the magic in the world.”
I could see the pain etched into her face. And as she faced her pain, Ethan screamed out and fell to his knees, clutching his head.
They were connected. Tied together, somehow, as a result of her magic, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My heart skipped a beat, watching him there in pain and knowing I was helpless to intervene. But I could be brave and face her down, and so I stepped forward.
“This ends now, Mallory.” I stepped forward, katana at the ready. “You’ll get the Maleficium over my dead body.”
She looked back at Ethan, and I thought for a second I’d finally gotten through to her, that she was actually considering the consequences and implications of her actions.
But I was doubly wrong. She hadn’t been looking at Ethan…she’d been looking at Keith, the gnome of the horrendous plaid pants.
She rolled together another ball of magic, then pitched it at him. He screamed out as the shock of magic hit, but then froze for a moment.
As we all watched in horror, we realized Mallory hadn’t meant to kill or even stun him.
She meant to change him.
Keith began to stretch and expand. His shoulders widened, and his arms grew into tree limbs. His torso tripled, and his legs lengthened until his head rose over us to horrific proportions, from a smiling two-foot-tall gnome to a twenty-foot-tall lumbering beast. He looked down at me and grinned menacingly through domino-sized teeth, and it wasn’t a pleasant smile.
Mal hadn’t just made him larger; she’d made him meaner.
“Oh, that is just wrong,” I muttered.
I swallowed down fear, took a defensive stance, and held up my sword, preparing for battle.
Keith stumbled toward me, hands extended as if he meant to swipe me up off the ground. The gnomes might have been spritely in their original size, but stretched and expanded like Silly Putty, he lumbered about. Of course, he was throwing a lot more weight around.
I felt miserable about striking back at him; it wasn’t his fault Mallory had turned him into a monster. So I tried other tactics. It didn’t take much effort to run around and avoid him. Although I’m sure the sight was comical—sword-bearing vampire being chased around a cornfield by a twenty-foot-tall garden gnome—I hoped I might be able to wear him out before he could do any real damage.
Todd was a little more optimistic.
“Keith, stop this!” Todd ran in front of him, arms waving. “Snap out of it, man. This girl is on your side. You don’t want to hurt her.”
I instantly forgave Todd for the kick on the shin. But if there was any bit of Keith that remembered Todd or anything else of life before Mallory, I couldn’t see it. His eyes—oversized and shaded by his giant white cap—were empty. Not just dazed, but completely void of emotion or recollection or any intellect at all.
Poor Keith.
And goddamn Mallory.
Even if we brought her back from the brink, I’m not sure I could ever forget, or forgive, what she was willing to do to get what she wanted. But that problem assumed we would survive to bring her back, so first things first…
Keith swiped at Todd, knocking him off his feet. I held my breath, but he sat up a moment later and signaled the gnomes. They launched another attack, this time on one of their own.
While I helped Todd stand again, the gnomes peppered Keith with rocks and their few remaining arrows, but Keith was big enough to ignore the few pricks that made it through. He howled out when an arrow caught him in the shin, yanking it out