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“That’s what this is about?” I blurted out, my stomach twisting this way and that. “You’ve been attacking Camdaria just to make enough misery for you to eat?”
“You know nothing—”
Bit by bit, the mystique of the creature in front of me was fading, so I just outright interrupted him. “No, I know you. You’ve twisted your power to somehow feed on pain, on death, on chaos. You’ve given up what little humanity you’ve had, and for what? You’re just a lapdog of another ruler.”
“A lapdog? You think me a lapdog!” The Shrouded Shriek’s voice grew into a grating boom, and his form began to expand and cover the entire ceiling. The windows blew out, and I quickly cast another shield in front of them, trying to protect us from the hail of glass. “I killed that cur of a king and his bitch of a wife before you could even speak your first words! You were meant to be their demise, but they sent you away to that damned coven where they managed to hide you for a decade. You were never meant to live beyond a few years!”
What…?
At that, it was as if the entire battle stilled, except for Kai and the king, who were still snarling at each other. All I could do was blink for a moment, wondering if I was being played for a fool as the Shriek’s taunting finally hit home.
“But if you’ve killed the king of Vekas,” Yvonne said, skipping over the entire part where he’d implied that I was the child of the king. “Then, who’s fueling this war? Has… has it…”
“It’s all been me! Yes! All of you are just pawns in my game. Your pathetic, small minded little existences have been fuel for me, and I have indeed been feeding on all of you for generations. I am unstoppable, have always been unstoppable, and no descendant of witches and wolves, or some upstart of an aberrant enchantress, are going to end my plans!”
“Aberrant!” Yvonne snapped. “You really think you can insult me when you’re not even human anymore. Face it, you’re a shell, and you—” Yvonne blinked. “Wait, did you say that you killed the king of Vekas? The Vekan king is Ayla’s father?”
“That must have been what Oliver was so disturbed about” Aodin cried, rolling out from behind an overturned table only to shoot a crossbow bolt back toward where he came from. Oh, the guards were still trying to break down the door. “He used to do some diplomacy work in Vekas when I was young. He spent quite a bit of time with the king and queen. He must have recognized something about you.”
“It’s your wolf form,” Mad Dog said, throwing a guard past me. Where had he even come from? “I thought I recognized it, but I ain’t seen the Vekan king since my family emigrated to Camdaria, so I kept my mouth shut. You’ve got the same fur patterns.”
My mind was reeling, and physically, I felt like staggering back, but I kept my gaze steady on the Shrouded Shriek while my brain tried to catch up.
I was the daughter of the Vekan king and queen? Who were also dead? Meanwhile, the Shriek was masquerading as both sides of the war, perpetuating the pain, bloodshed, and general suffering so he could feast on the negative energy of it all and grow even more powerful.
It all seemed so impossible, but when I strung together all the strange happenstances that’d happened throughout my lifetime, it clicked.
The coven always discouraged me from taking my wolf form. They always said it was because I was a witch within their wards, and that it wasn’t safe, but if I truly had the same markings as the Vekan king, it would make sense they wanted me to hide it.
Then there was the way the Shrouded Shriek was able to track us so easily whenever my curse was running rampant, and whether it was in the middle of the woods or right at the walls of Fort Canid, it seemed like he was able to pop up at the drop of a hat.
Right up until Yvonne managed to put his curse on the ropes. That was the whole reason he wasn’t able to instantly find us in Blath. It took him sending delegates as King Nathaniel to suss out our location enough to attack.
No wonder Kai’s father never sent word back after we took his illegal delegates prisoner. He just didn’t care. Because by then, the Shrouded Shriek was already sending a small army, as well as himself, to destroy us.
My thoughts picked up speed: the way my curse fed on things, the way the Shriek’s magic was able to nullify my own, how the king seemed to zero in on me from the beginning. I felt like so much was laid out before me, but I was never able to see it because I wasn’t looking at the right perspective.
But one shining fact blazed in my head. If the King of Vekas was dead and had been for ages, and his corpse, or an illusion of one, was being manipulated just like King Nathaniel, then all we had to do was defeat the Shriek and Kai’s father, then there would be peace. There were only two things in our way.
“Enough! I’ve spent centuries getting this far. It’ll take more than a group of simple children to upend my plans!”
It looked like Yvonne certainly had more she wanted to say, but the air around us suddenly turned frigid and filled with gray smoke. That was about all the warning we got before a flash shot out from the Shriek .
Giant spears of ice, some of them as long as my torso, rained down on the room. I dropped my shields from the window and flashed them up in front of me and my allies, protecting us from the onslaught.
But Yvonne was also just as vigilant, and I felt her magic blaze through my barrier, making it burst into flames right in front of us, yet none of the heat radiated toward our side of the shield.
I’d never so directly combined magics with someone before, and I was shocked at the ease with which the enchantress did it. Still, considering the day I was having, that wasn’t even in the top five surprising things I’d been sideswiped by, so I didn’t let the shock trip me up.
Instead, I pressed forward, pushing my shield out like a wall. Yvonne followed right along with me, holding a different crystal in each hand. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what she was doing until the flames combined with my shield and turned into an inferno, scorching toward the Shriek.
For a fleeting moment, I was worried about the entire room being consumed in the blaze, but the fire was just as purposeful as the enchantress, targeting only our enemy.
It was chaos all around as we continued our push forward, trying to corral the ancient, malevolent being. Part of me knew it couldn't be so easy, but part of me also valiantly hoped that it could, and that we could pincer him in to squeeze him like an infected pimple.
But as we started to narrow the gap between us to fence him in, the Shriek let out another one of those awful sounds, and the floor below us rippled like a wave, physically throwing us backward.
I’d been concentrating so much on subverting his magical attacks, I hadn't thought about actual, physical interaction—a mistake on my part, and one I couldn't afford to make again.
