do it!”
He paused. Very slowly, his head turned toward me.
Phanes plunged his whole fist into Ian just below his sternum and then ripped it out.
The shockwave knocked all of us backward. When my net stopped tumbling, I frantically pushed past Ashael’s body to look where I’d last seen Ian.
He was still there, though now he was on his back instead of standing. Phanes was on his knees, smacking himself in the stomach with his fists while that red light waned and dimmed beneath his clenched fingers.
“It’s not working, it’s not working, it’s not working!” Phanes cried out in frustration.
Ashael let out a tired laugh. “Of course it’s not, fool. You can’t reabsorb that power back into yourself. You should have known that, but you believed me because demons are the world’s best liars, and I told you what you wanted to hear, same as I’ve told every human, vampire, ghoul, or other.”
Phanes staggered toward us. “I’ll kill you. I’ll—”
“You’ll do nothing.”
I leapt into a standing position at Ian’s voice. The tight net knocked me right back down into Ashael, but I didn’t care. Ian was alive, gloriously alive, and rolling over to grab Phanes by the ankle so that the former deity tripped.
“You’ll do nothing because nothing is all you’re capable of now,” Ian went on. “That power showed me how to neuter your abilities. Your wings were the source of all your greatness, and now, you’ve been snipped.”
“What? No!” Phanes said, swinging at Ian.
He caught the punch one-handed. Phanes’s eyes widened, and then he screamed as Ian bent his wrist back until it snapped.
“Can’t stop me, can you, even though I currently am as weak as a new vampire,” Ian said in a tired but conversational tone. “You can’t teleport anymore, either. Or do illusions, or fly, or heal instantly, or live an immortal life span, or—”
“That isn’t possible!” Phanes shouted, sounding as if he might burst into tears.
Ian let him go and laughed.
“It’s more than possible; it’s done. I’m not even going to kill you. Living a regular life span while as weak as a human will punish you far worse than a quick death at my hands.”
“Cruel,” Vlad said with an approving smile at Ian.
A tremendous crash jerked all our attentions to the left, where an enormous, floating pile of burned, snapped trees knocked down the remaining line of larches. Remnants also swarmed it, diving through the pile in a continuous, deadly flow to a chorus of fainter and fainter screams.
Now, Vlad’s smile aimed my way as that huge pile floated closer to me.
“Special delivery from me, Mencheres, and Marie.”
The cuffs in my skin unwound. They pulsed with power as I grabbed them and stretched my hands through the net, waiting.
Morana spilled out of the pile and landed on my net. She was soaking wet and also burned in places, reminding me that effigies of her were still drowned in parts of Russia to this day to herald the coming warmth of spring. Perhaps water and heat was the secret to undoing Morana’s power, just as ripping Phanes’s wings off had been the secret to undoing his.
I didn’t pause to ask. I didn’t even wait for her to open her eyes, breaking my previous claim that I’d never kill an enemy in their sleep. Unconscious or no, and weakened or no, Morana was too dangerous for me to hesitate for a second.
I slapped the cuffs around her wrists and held on to make sure that she didn’t freeze blast them off.
The cuffs glowed a bright, vivid orange that seemed to leak onto her skin before it raced over her entire body. Her eyes opened then, and she screamed as that glow turned into liquid flame that drained her straight down into the hole I hadn’t made because I hadn’t used any of my netherworld-splitting powers.
None of the veils would crack today. They wouldn’t crack because of me ever again. Some powers weren’t worth their cost.
When that hole vanished, Ashael and I abruptly fell to either side. It took me a second to realize why, and then I smiled as I stood up to my full height.
Morana had bragged that the magic used to make these nets had come from her power. Now that she was dead, that power had died with her, freeing me.
I was free in so many ways now. For the first time in my life, my very existence was no longer illegal. Neither was the magic I practiced. What would my life be like,