Lightning cracks down.
It doesn’t hit the ground. It stops above her and curls in on itself, folding into a ball of pure white fire, and then another, and another, until a dozen of them hang spinning around her in a slow ring. The hair lifts off my arms. My lion paces hard inside me. My ears pin flat and my tail snaps behind me. I don’t understand one single thing I’m looking at, and every animal instinct I have is telling me to get down in the grass.
Aaron studies her like he can see exactly where all that power is coming from.
“You’re already powerful on your own,” he says, quiet. “But this.” He takes in the spinning fire, the white eyes, the storm she pulled out of a clear sky. “Somehow you reach past yourself. You call on the ancestors.” His head tilts. “And someone else. Mother Fate, perhaps.”
Tiana throws the spheres at him.
All of them, at once, a dozen spheres of white fire tearing across the ring straight for my mate. My lion takes over. I lunge for the space between Aaron and the storm, my arms coming up, his name already ripping out of my throat?—
A wall of blue-gold light snaps up in front of me. I slam into it palms-first, and it holds.
Aaron doesn’t so much as flinch. He’s got one hand out toward me, holding the shield that just caught me, the other lifted toward the fire screaming down on him.
“Keep your ass back,” he snarls.
Then he turns his head and looks at me, all that fire bearing down on him, and there’s a heat in his eyes that has nothing to do with the storm.
“You know what, Mara, you are really pissing me off here. I have told you. Time and time?—“
The spheres come for him.
They don’t land. Inches from his palm they jerk to a stop, all twelve of them, snapping into a straight line in the air like they’d hit a wall I couldn’t see. Blue-gold light unspools off his fingertips and wraps around each one, and then they’re his. They drift up off his hand and begin to turn, slow, a ring of Tiana’s own white fire orbiting my mate while he stands there not even bothering to watch them.
My mouth’s hanging open.What in the actual fuck!
Tiana’s white eyes flare. She slashes both hands down and the fire in her own ring stretches and links and hardens, the spheres drawing out into long whips of white lightning, chains of it lashing the air. She sends them snapping across the ring at him.
Aaron throws her own spheres back at her.
They slam into her chains midair, and the two storms collide in a scream of light, and then his magic does something to hers. It climbs up the chains, turning her own lightning against her, and the whips snap back toward the woman who made them. They coil at her wrists, her arms, winding up toward her throat. Tiana’s white eyes go wide. The cold certainty drops clean off her face. For the first time, I smell real fear coming off a Blackwood, and it pours off Tiana in waves.
“Alright.” Angie’s voice cracks across the ring. “Damn it, Aaron, we get your point. Do not hurt your sister.”
Aaron lifts his free hand, almost lazy, and snaps his fingers.
It all stops.
The chains, the spheres, the storm, gone in the space of that one snap. The clouds peel back off the sky and the warm evening floods into the hole where the storm used to be, and Tiana stands alone in the middle of the ring with her chest heaving and her brown eyes back in her head and not a thing left around her wrists.
The whole cul-de-sac has gone dead quiet.
“Holy shit,” Kade breathes beside me. Her blue eyes are huge.
Aaron rolls his shoulders. “Got that one from Uncle Amir.”
Nobody answers him. The fear-scent hangs over House of Zorah so thick I could chew it, every wolf and witch in the ring staring at this man like they’ve never laid eyes on him before.
I don’t know him right now either. And Mother Fate help me, that does something to me I’m not ready to look at.
Aaron holds out his palm, and light gathers over it, and a picture builds itself in the air for all of us to see.
It’s Eric. Somewhere I don’t recognize, gray and shaking, being half-dragged through a hole punched in the world by the one man I’ve only seen once. Henry. The portal’s edges go dark and oily, and Eric stumbles toward them barely on his feet. But Henry doesn’t follow him through. He stops in the mouth of his own portal and turns his head, slow, scanning the dark like he can feel eyes on the back of his neck.
His gaze lands somewhere I can’t see, and Aaron answers it.
“Yeah, asshole. I’m watching.” His voice is ice. “As long as Eric is anywhere near you, I’ll always know exactly where you are.”
