will pressing against me, though my mother’s power let me match it for a while at least.
Then Sofia got to her feet, and there was light.
24
Me & my Mother
Despite being bathed in the one thing that could rob him of a sizeable chunk of his powers and facing down an alpha werewolf and—okay, me, but I’m not nobody in this situation—Sebastian Douglas continued to look infuriatingly smug.
“Tell me,”—he gave me another one of his creepy insulting smiles—“how certain are you that I’m too weak to snap the child’s neck like a twig?”
I wasn’t totally certain, and judging from the way she’d put herself bodily between Sofia and the Prince of Wands, Tara wasn’t either.
“You’re talking a lot for somebody who’s so sure of his ability to slaughter us all.”
“I’m used to taking my time. Immortality does that to one.”
I was really, really unsure what the balance of power was here. It was me, Tara, and Sofia versus Sebastian, his borrowed magic, and two messed-up werewolves. It was the wolves in particular that were making me nervous—the ones by the house were staying clear of the sunlight, but that didn’t entirely make sense to me. Vampires obviously had solar issues, and I could see the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter finding the full weight of a summer’s day a bit of a pisser, but werewolves were very much all-weather monsters.
Then again, these weren’t exactly werewolves anymore. On a hunch I looked more closely at the glass shards piercing their eyes. I might have been imagining it, but I thought they were melting. Not quickly enough to help, but definitely melting. Unfortunately, time was against us.
“Yeah,” I said, “I see that. But I’m afraid in this case I’m going to have to hurry you.” And yes, I’d have been able to act faster if I hadn’t taken the time to banter with him first, but I was sick of letting that fucker have the last word. I reached for whatever power I could gather and went straight for Sebastian Douglas, hoping that my mother would leave me enough control to keep my focus on him instead of just killing whatever seemed tastiest.
The wolves sprang, but not at me. They’d be going for Sofia and there wasn’t a lot I could do to stop them. Either Tara had her covered, or she didn’t. My vision narrowed and I tasted the blood of the cold and the dark on my tongue. I’d been worried that my mother would be distracted, but I needn’t have been—in her strange symbolic worldview Douglas was her only enemy. The embodiment of a rival power, a chance for victory and dominance.
Blue fire rushed towards me, but I threw myself into the snow and came up on hands and knees. Somewhere far away I was dimly aware of a pain in my arm, but it didn’t matter right then. What mattered was the hunt. What mattered was the kill. I had an iron spike in my hand and, unusually, my mother seemed to see the value of it.
The light went out, and the storm closed in. The part of me that still cared about anything but spitting Sebastian Douglas and eating his heart was wondering whether Sofia was okay, but that part of me was shrinking fast. I turned and through the blizzard I saw Tara standing over Sofia’s huddled body while the two wolves circled. Then I felt the invisible grip of the Prince of Wands taking hold.
“Noble.” He stepped out of the darkness from somewhere I was sure he hadn’t been before. “But doomed.” With a gentle flexing of his fingers, he directed whatever fucked up vampire-wizard-arsehole telekinesis he was so fond of using to start pulling me in all directions at once. I felt a straining and a tearing in my limbs and my neck.
I tasted blood. He was strong but I knew with a sudden and startling certainty that in a place like this he was not quite so strong as the primal might of the Old Powers.
Closing my eyes a moment, I let my mother take over.
I have not forgotten, usurper.
A dead magic holds me, but I am life and fury and it is nothing. I move and the corpse-thing knows a moment of panic. This is his fear, beyond all things, the chaos that I am, the uncontrollable untameable wild. He has made himself replete with the blood of my rival, but I have tasted that blood and know its savour.