came between me and the witch, shielding me as I fell to the ground, heaving and feeling on the verge of vomiting.
What did she do? Melt my insides? Poison me? Make me go bald? Who knew what she just hit me with? I waited for the effects to show up, but other than feeling like I’d been punched in the gut, nothing happened.
Standing on shaky feet, I let the full weight of my fury settle into my bones.
Maybe I was just playing at the whole Queen thing, still learning and doing things by trial and error, but I was still going to wipe the floor with this bitch.
“Drop the ice,” I growled to Liam, pulling both of my throwing daggers from my thigh holsters.
She cackled from the other side of the ice, and Liam did as I asked. The ice went from a solid six-inch wall to powdered snow in moments, and that’s when I struck.
With one hand, I threw a dagger at the wall about two feet from her face, purposefully missing. Her eyes followed it for a fraction of a second, and that’s when I threw the other dagger, along with a sunlight bomb. The knife slid into her neck a fraction of a second before the sunlight burst over her skin, lighting her on fire. The stairs splintered into chunks of wood as the explosion rocked the house.
Heat blasted outward, and Liam and I had to stumble back a few feet so that we wouldn’t be burned.
“Holy shit, Lily,” Liam breathed. “You got the Queen’s power.”
Yeah… I did.
With a horrifying wet gurgle, the witch screamed, clawing at her skin as she burned alive, and I knew it was time to leave. Without a word, Liam and I kicked off the ground, flying up into the air. Ducking our heads under the overhang, we flew up the stairwell and back into the house.
“Let’s just go. I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” I told Liam. I could come back for the crystals later after I dropped Liam off with Kira and we regrouped.
He landed in the living room of the house, shaking his head. “It’s now or never. All the crystals have turned dark, and he’s burying them. If he didn’t get me to submit to the spell, he’ll steal one of my brothers. We need to end this now.”
Shit.
“Maybe now that the witch is dead—”
“He’ll find another. Lily, I can’t sleep at night until I know we’ve stopped the Winter King.” His voice held such malice, but it wasn’t the tone that gave me chills. It was the way he referred to his own father as the Winter King. I knew then that what Cam said was true, and if I killed him, he’d be okay with it. As fucked up as that sounded. This man wasn’t his father, not anymore.
“Okay, let’s bring all the crystals home,” I told him.
I followed Liam out the back door, looking above me and wondering where the Winter King was, expecting him to jump out of nowhere and try to take us out… but he didn’t. It was eerie and gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Liam limped, and I got a better look at one of his wings. It was bleeding and bent at an odd angle, how he’d flown up that staircase was beyond me.
“Liam, slow down. Let me heal you.”
He shook his head, pressing on as he pushed into the woods. “There are three clusters of three crystals each. You need to save your strength to fight us a way out of here.”
I spun around, noticing that no one was following us. “No one is here, I’ll have enough energy to do both. Just hang on a minute.”
I ran to keep up with him as he dropped to the ground in front of a large oak tree and started digging. Using his hands, he dug into the dirt like a crazed maniac. I knew he probably had some PTSD from what they did to him and wasn’t handling it well, but I didn’t know how to support him at this moment. So I just let him be… Instead, I lay my healing hands on his bent wing as he clawed at the ground like a wild animal, making clumps of dirt and grass fly everywhere.
“Gotcha,” he breathed, and I froze.
Pulling my hands from his wing, which now looked better, I peered at the hole he’d dug. Three dirty crystals lay in a triangle formation