She’s come to our rescue, my heart rejoiced. She might look like a dazzling nightmare, but that should only work to our advantage if we wanted to scare Theodore off. It was almost as though her grief caused her magic to mutate, making her even more powerful than she was before. When Alvie saw her, he almost fainted.
“Rita!” he called, but she didn’t even look his way as she passed him by.
Okay, that was weird.
I climbed down off Ethan’s back and rushed to her, but I couldn’t get past the fire.
“We need your help,” I called in a panic. “Theodore is going to kill Pamphrock.”
My words got absolutely no reaction from her. I reached out, but the purple fire singed my skin. She stopped for a second to look at me, and her stare went right through me.
She turned away and continued to stride past me. A feeling of dread claimed my stomach. Rita walked through the carnage, so striking that some of the slayers even stopped fighting to watch her go by.
She continued until she reached Theodore, and he held his arms out to her.
No way. This couldn’t be happening.
“Daughter,” he beamed. “You’ve finally decided to join us.”
She stopped before him, and he took her into his embrace. Oh, God, please no.
“This can’t be,” I breathed, my gut sinking.
“I have,” Rita answered. She didn’t even sound like my Rita anymore. The harsh reality sank in as I realised that my Rita could be gone forever. Next to me, Alvie wept as he realised the very same thing.
I’d been so distracted by Rita that I completely forgot about Pamphrock.
“La naiba,” Ethan said gutturally. “He’s gone.”
I looked up and saw the governor had lost the battle against Theodore, his body lifeless and limp within the magical hold.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” I all but whispered. The fact that Rita had just joined Theodore made me feel like I was living a nightmare.
Theodore swept his hand down, and Pamphrock’s body fell to the ground with a sickening thud. I glanced at Emilia’s balcony and saw her smiling and closing over the shutters. She’d gotten what she wanted. With Pamphrock dead, nobody was going to try and take Rebecca from her. I didn’t think I’d ever felt more hopeless.
Theodore and his group of acolytes all joined hands, including Rita. Tears streamed down my face. I wanted to rage at him and pull Rita away by the scruff of her neck, whether she liked it or not. But I was no match for either of them, and I certainly wasn’t a match for the two of them together.
“I don’t understand why she’s joined him,” Ethan said, confused.
“He’s her father,” I whispered to him. “She made me promise to keep it a secret, but I guess…” A swell of emotion overcame me. “I guess the secret’s out now.”
A look of surprise passed over his features. Then he glanced over my shoulder and the surprise was replaced with grim determination.
“Climb onto my back,” Ethan said in a low voice.
“Why?” I questioned, too lost in despair to understand his urgency.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he swung me up onto his shoulders without effort. Finn and Ira were beside us moments later, as were Lucas, Delilah, Alvie, and Gabriel. Practically all of the slayers had either been killed or were still fighting it out. The only ones who didn’t succumb to the mist were the handful of dhampirs among their numbers. They came and joined us, too.
Theodore’s chanting was causing something strange to happen. The mist seeped from the dead bodies on the ground and returned to the crow shaped cloud above the sorcerer’s head. That was when I realised it was coming after us, and it no longer seemed repelled by my magic. Now it seemed fearless. It practically crushed everything in its path, vehicles, trees, people. I’d never seen anything like it. The black cloud descending on me and my little group instilled terror into my very bones.
“Hold on to me and don’t let go,” Ethan instructed.
I wrapped my arms tight around his neck and my legs around his waist. A moment later, we were running at vampire speed. I grew dizzy, managing to turn my head just enough to see that we were outrunning the chaos cloud. The blackness was getting farther and farther away.
When we stopped, however, we found ourselves on Campion Row, amid the worst carnage I’d ever seen.
17.
It took a minute or two for Finn and Alvie to catch up with