legislators snuck up behind her and Snow and right as the women shot a lethal dose of fire at his companions, the legislator hit Rune in the back with one of his gigantic hooves.
She dropped, hard and fast, and for a long moment could do nothing but struggle to breathe. She felt nothing.
Her back was broken.
But Snow was there. She grabbed Rune’s hand. “Feel me. You found me in your dreams. Do it now.”
There was no time to think about it—legislators and unfriendly guards sprinted toward her, taking advantage of her injury.
Then the whip men joined the fray.
“Shit,” Rune cried, and felt her spine snap into place. Felt it strengthen, straighten, and heal—Snow’s power flowed into her body and made it whole.
“Good,” Snow said. “Now use what Mother Skyll gave you. I felt it there. Use it.”
“Yes,” Rune screamed, exhilarated. They would not lose to the witch.
She raised her hands as power, Skyll’s power, overflowed.
Snow, with her white hair and dark blue eyes, let go of her hand.
“My sister,” she said. “I’ve waited so—”
And a whip man, riding his foul kelper, cut her in half with his whip.
She stared up at Rune, her eyes still holding a fierce need, a lifetime of loneliness, and a desire to be loved.
As she lay dead upon the ground and Rune stared in shock, crawlers swarmed her body and began to fight for the pieces.
Two carricorns swooped from the sky and lit upon the fallen girl, stripping flesh from her bones in milliseconds.
Rune burned them to tiny, crispy bones, turning half of Snow to ash in the process.
“Fuck,” she screamed, and stood frozen, unable to think past the fact that she’d lost her sister just as she’d accepted the fact that she had one. “No, no. No, God, no.”
The witch’s killers, seeing her vulnerability, struck.
Damascus’s laughter cut through the air, wrapped around Rune’s brain, and tried to make her doubt herself.
Tried to make her doubt that she could ever defeat something like the witch or survive in a world like Skyll.
But the witch didn’t succeed in her attempts to defeat Rune with magic.
Because Mother Skyll was there, and she was mad.
She was furious.
Rune was about to unleash the true monster upon the world. She was the Mother’s instrument.
Once she set that power free, it wasn’t coming back. But that was okay, because she was about to take back from the witch what had been stolen from her.
Her monster.
Herself.
She wasn’t going to kill the witch—not really.
Mother Skyll was.
She just needed to use Rune’s body to do it.
Chapter Fifty-One
What would happen to her once she’d fulfilled her destiny?
The thought poked at her even as she strode—untouched—to meet the witch.
She kept her stare glued to Damascus, who, from her perch on the hill, still didn’t seem to notice that something had changed.
She’d realized Snow, her Shame, was dead.
She was no longer laughing, the pale oval of her face turned toward her fallen daughter. Perhaps she cared a little for the girl.
Perhaps.
A legislator stomped toward Rune and she pointed at him.
Just pointed at him, and he exploded into what looked like giant clods of dirt.
Rune swallowed the sudden earthy tasting lumps in her throat.
That got the attention of two more of the brutes. They broke from the group who were busy tearing the limbs from a half dozen guards, and they roared and ran at her.
The ground churned around them and then swallowed them whole.
Rune swallowed and then spat the nasty, spoiled meat taste from her mouth.
She was the ground. The sky. The trees. The water.
She was Skyll.
It was that moment that Damascus understood.
At the bottom of the hill, Rune stared up at her, then began to climb.
“I’m coming for you,” she muttered.
But a scream halted her single-minded run for the witch, a scream too full of despair to ignore.
She turned to see Cree Stark standing with a blade in each hand, backed up against a black tree, terrified.
“Fuck me,” Rune muttered. “How the hell…”
Four crawlers had battled their way past the mental wall Cree Stark had thrown up, had battered it down and were feeding upon her fear.
And her body.
Rune threw a quick look up at Damascus and then ran for Cree. She grabbed the crawlers and where her hands touched, gaping, bloody holes were created.
The crawlers lay on their backs, shrieking, as blood and organs squeezed through the holes and plopped upon the ground.
“Where’s Owen?” Rune asked. “Where the fuck is Grim?”
“I don’t know,” Cree whispered. “You called. We had to come.”