Page 60 of Raven in Midwinter

“It’s gonna be all right,” he promised me.

I leaned my head on his shoulder, felt the love there, in him, and so let it flow through me, down deep into the earth.

“Corvus is no more,” Giles called out to me as he and Ilara landed about thirty feet away from us. I had no idea he could levitate, but it didn’t surprise me. “And your precious family will now scatter to the wind.”

Lorne would not take his eyes off the wolves. It was understood he would deal with them and I would handle Giles. I hoped I was up to the task.

Lifting my head, I looked more closely at him, and was surprised at how much older he appeared, even from earlier in the morning.

“You need to jump to another realm before you die,” I warned him. “Your companion kept the truth from you, but you’re aging. Fast. By destroying Corvus, you broke the only thing that could sustain you here.”

He laughed. “I always planned to destroy Corvus. I just needed to wait until the guardian was weakest.”

I didn’t take the bait. “Do you not care that Ilara put a spell on the mirrors?” I asked to give myself more time with my land.

“She thought I would actually teach her to be any kind of a hedge-rider,” he said, laughing, mocking Ilara as he walked away from her. “As if it were possible to impart anything to an enchantress from such a primitive realm.”

Ilara gasped. “You lied to me!”

“Of course I lied to you. It was easy. You’re so consumed with rage and revenge that you couldn’t even see that I needed you, your energy, your power, to fuel my flight from your home. That wraith would not stop, and there was only one place I knew that could absorb that much evil and do no damage.”

“You expected Corvus to kill the wraith.”

“Of course,” he said, moving closer. “Your daemon was a lovely surprise.”

“You remember?” I was astonished.

He smirked at me.

“Oh, I see. This is the night in front of the fireplace all over again. You really do play dead well.”

“Whether it be body or mind,” he said and turned to Ilara, holding his hand open, and then made a fist.

Instantly, she was clawing at an invisible hand around her throat.

“Why kill her?” I asked, hoping to buy her some time. “Instead why not return her to her primitive realm?”

“Because she lied to me,” he said, and her eyes started to bleed.

“The wolves are gone,” Lorne said under his breath.

“Please don’t kill her,” I implored him.

“Whyever not?”

I had to think. “You lied to her first, Giles. You promised you would instruct her, but you just said you had already decided not to teach her about any part of being a hedge-rider.”

“She tried to kill me by putting a spell on the mirrors.”

“But you apparently knew that, so why do you care?”

“Because if you can’t trust your companion, who can you trust?” he asked so calmly, even as Ilara’s eyes widened and her face went gray a moment before her head was severed from her shoulders. The spell hand had squeezed through her neck, and when the pressure was released, her head fell, followed by her body. The gush of blood made a pool of red in the stark white snow.

I stared at him.

“I can feel your disapproval,” he said patronizingly. “But what was I to do? She wanted more than I could possibly give her.”

“You should have left her where she was.”