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Tonia homed in. “Keep talking, bitch. Now, Hannah!”
The bowstring sang, and the arrow winged through the air. The keen head struck true, pierced the left eye. And the shaft dug deep.
The toothed tail slashed madly, and the sinuous body bucked, bucked. It shook its powerful head, fighting to dislodge the arrow. As it fell, the dragon’s dying roar shuddered through the air, swept over the burning grasses in the field, flattening them. On an answering cry, Fallon cleaved its head.
“Burn it!” she shouted at Duncan, but he’d already fired the flame.
Lana whooshed out wind to send the burning head of the dragon, the smoldering body of the man, into the pit.
“He was mine!” Petra barely got her wings out before she hit the ground. She landed badly on ground sparking with embers, screamed at the pain. “He was mine! We’ll kill you. Kill you all.”
“You’re done.” Duncan sheathed his sword, led with power only, pushed out with light when Petra flung out dark.
“Let him do this,” Fallon murmured. “He needs it. Open,” she said when Duncan drove Petra and what was in her back toward the stones. “Lock the dark.” And she, too, sheathed her sword.
Petra’s next flame dissolved when it hit the barrier.
“The circle holds. The light holds.”
Face contorted, Petra charged at Duncan, beat fists bloody on the barrier. “You will not send me back!” The voice that roared out of her, no longer her own, thundered.
Petra, trapped by what she’d taken in, flung herself against the circle, raced around it in a blur until the blood of the woman soaked the ground.
“Enough,” Fallon ordered. “It’s enough.”
“Get me up,” Tonia insisted as Duncan moved into the circle. “I’m not missing this.”
“You shouldn’t— Never mind.” Hannah got an arm around her. “Lean on me.”
“I always have.”
Her hair in tangled mats, Petra huddled on the ground, battered, bleeding. With eyes that had gone a sweet and innocent blue, she lifted her face to Duncan.
“It made me do terrible things. Look how it hurt me. Help me, Duncan. Rescue me.”
“Not this time.” He pushed, but more gently than he’d thought himself capable of, driving her back.
“Come with me.” Smiling through bloody teeth, Petra reached out, and the dark heart clawed with her.
Fallon stepped in. “Go to hell.”
Petra’s hands, her feet left grooves in the ground as she fought against the push. Her scrabbling fingers caught the edge of the pit. With one last smile she looked at Fallon, spoke with the voice of the beast.
“We’ll come back for you.”
As they fell— a scream from what had once been a woman, a roar from what she’d embraced—Duncan drew his sword, sent flames to destroy both. “No, you won’t.”
“Hold the line,” Fallon said to him, and walked over to Laoch, took what they needed out of the saddlebag. “Are you up for this?” she asked Tonia.
“You’re damn right. A little help? Legs are still wonky. Seems I broke both of them.”
“I’ve got you. We only left the circle open for the three of us,” she explained to her mother and Hannah. “We couldn’t take chances. We have to close it, seal it, purify it.”
“We’ll wait.” Lana slipped an arm around Hannah’s waist.
They waited and watched while the children of the Tuatha de Danann closed the ground inside the stone. With merged blood, they sealed the shield, purified it with light.
With the sword she’d taken from the fire, Fallon etched the fivefold symbol into the shield.
As she did, light exploded in the sky. It burst like noon, bathed the world, fell warm and soothing over her face.
“Here, the grass will grow again and wildflowers bloom,” she said as the light quieted, and night flowed back.
“The deer will come to graze, men may come to see. But the sign will remain, and the shield forged in blood and light will forever hold back the dark.”
“This land is clean,” Duncan said.
Tonia leaned against him. “This shield is true.”
“Open.” Fallon stepped out of the circle. “This place is open to all who walk or fly or crawl in the light. And forever barred, in and out, from any who seek the dark.”
“As night follows day,” they said together, hands again joined, “as day follows night, this world is guarded by the light.”
She turned to her mother. “It’s done. It’s finished.”
“I know.” Tears glimmering, Lana cupped Fallon’s face. “I know it.”
“I never saw you here. Mom, I never saw Hannah. We couldn’t have done it without you, both of you.”
“And what came out of New Hope with you,” Duncan added.
“Thought I heard singing.” Tonia swayed. “You hear singing?”
“Something like that. How about you and Hannah take Tonia back?”
“Yeah.” She sent Duncan a weak smile. “I can go with that now. Because . . . uh-oh.”
Duncan caught his twin when she passed out.
“She just fainted,” Hannah assured him as she checked Tonia’s pulse. “We’ll get her to the clinic. We’ll take care of her. Here.” With Hannah on one side, Lana on the other, they supported Tonia.
“It’s going to take another flash,” Lana warned her.
Supporting her sister, Hannah braced herself. “I can handle it.”
“I know you can.” She looked into Fallon’s eyes, laid a hand on her heart, and flashed.
Safe. They’d be safe now. Fallon ran her hands over her filthy face. “It was in the altar. I could feel it in the stone. It wanted me to lie on the slab so it could suck the life and light from me. So I destroyed the altar, but I didn’t kill it. Only weakened it. I—”
“It’s done now. It’s done.”
It didn’t seem quite real, not quite solid now that the tidal wave of power ebbed.
“I don’t know how to feel. Relieved? All my life’s been aimed at this moment, so what d
o I feel now that it’s finished?”
She looked at him. Real. Solid. And everything steadied again. “You’re a mess. Bruised, bleeding, burned. I guess I am, too.”
“We’ll fix each other up.” He took her hand. Light still shimmered between them, and he focused on that as he spoke. “I wanted her dead, and wanted to do it. For Denzel, for Mick, too. For so much and so many. But when it came down to it, she was just crazy. Pathetic. Evil, but pathetic. Ending her . . .”
It wasn’t satisfaction, it wasn’t pleasure.
“Relief’s good,” he decided. “Relief works.”
“I’ll take it, and now we need to— Laoch! Oh Jesus, Laoch. I need to—” She ran to him, ran a hand over the flank the dragon had burned.
Instead of a wound, even a healing scar, he bore, like the shield, the fivefold symbol.
“Sometimes the gods are kind,” she murmured. She breathed out a sigh as Taibhse dropped down to perch on the golden saddle, and Faol Ban sat beside the alicorn to wait.
“We need to make sure I destroyed all of it in the woods, that there’s nothing left that can—”
“Fallon.” With a tenderness that surprised them both, Duncan pressed a kiss to her forehead, turned her around. “Look.”
The woods lived again. They stood thick, the pines green, the oaks ripe with color under the light of the swimming moon. A moon, she realized, and stars that shined through a sky as clear as glass.
Through the trees, and over the fields no longer scorched and burning, lights danced.
“The faeries came. They’re bringing it back. All of it back.”
“We’ll come back, too, bring Mom so she can see the house again. Open it up to the light again.”
“Someone will farm the land again.”
“Someone.”
She smiled at him. “Relief’s okay. Happy’s better. I think I just got to happy. And finished? That’s best of all. Let’s go home, Duncan.”
“Let’s go home.” He yanked her in, and they flashed to New Hope on a kiss.
EPILOGUE
On New Year’s Eve, in a year that ended and would begin in light, snow lay in white blankets over the sleeping gardens, draped over the branches of trees like lacy handkerchiefs. The wind blew cold and clear over families of snowpeople.
