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Chapter Twenty-One
The world came back and I knew what I had to do. The thought of the pain I was about to cause made me sick, but she’d been right. Now that I was here and Gladys was pulsing insistently against my palm, I knew Evan had been right. This was the only way. I pulled the sword from Evan’s chest, her eyes going wide. She stepped back and then her body started to fall to the floor.
The world seemed to have gone oddly quiet. All the witches had turned, watching the daughter of the royal house sacrifice her life rather than allow herself to be taken.
“Stupid girl,” Liv hissed.
Evangeline Donovan-Quinn wasn’t stupid. She knew what they were capable of. She’d lived her whole life in utter terror of being caught by them. Used by them. She’d known what these women would do. They would kill her, but not before they’d used her to torture her parents. They had no souls.
“Evan?” Fen was suddenly in his human form, his eyes on the love of his life as she lay bleeding on the floor.
He started running toward her, completely heedless of the fact that he was surrounded by witches.
They did not forget him.
I watched as one of the witches held out her hands and started to send a spell toward Fenrir.
It was odd, but I didn’t feel a sense of panic, not even a fear that my son could be hurt. That emotion seemed a distant thing now. I knew I could save him, but the revelation was an academic thing. It was there in the cool sensation that came off Gladys and fed through my skin and into my veins.
This was the moment when I would normally grow a handy demon arm and throw myself into battle.
That’s not how it would go this day. I wasn’t putting my body into this fight. It was my soul that would win this day, and it meshed with Gladys.
Now I understood what Duffy had meant. Gladys was angry. She didn’t want to be used by the wizard. She wanted to wipe the wizard off the face of the Earth plane, to banish his soul forever for laying a single finger on her.
She’d been roiling in rage for over a decade with nowhere to put it. Now we knew where it belonged.
The human part of me understood that frustration. I’d been this angry, this wrathful, with nowhere to put it. I’d sat up late at night and wondered if it would go away if only I found someone I hated and watched the light die in their eyes, watched them plead and beg and find no mercy from me.
Except I really hadn’t, but in this place Gladys had taken me to it felt like truth. I was protecting Fenrir because I was supposed to. He was part of the team. I wasn’t feeling the maternal love I usually felt when I was near him, and it kind of felt good. I was cold, and that definitely felt good.
Before whatever the witch was sending my son’s way could traverse space and time to inject him with the poison of her magic, I directed Gladys’s blade her way and sent my will through.
A flare of blue light sparked from my sword and slashed through the witch.
Like really slashed through her. In an arc that split her in two. Pure satisfaction ran through me, and I knew I’d found the place for all my rage to go. It could go into her, into all of them.
Fenrir hit the ground as I waved Gladys again. The words she wanted me to say whispered along my skin, firing my blood and granting me the will I needed to make the words real.
“Scutum praesidium.” Then I heard a whooshing sound that let me know I’d gotten what I wanted—a shield around Evan and Fenrir.
My sword’s rage pulsed through me, mixing with my own in a volcanic cocktail, and I couldn’t hear what Fen was saying over the pounding through my head. Blood. I wanted it. Or she wanted it. It didn’t matter in that moment. Fen and Evan didn’t matter in the moment. What mattered was destroying every single one of these witches who wanted to use us to destroy the world. They thought they could use us to unleash Hell and make slaves of everyone we loved? We would show them.
Vaguely I understood that other things were going on around me, but my vision had narrowed to what Gladys wanted me to see—our enemies.
Every witch in the room had turned my way. They exchanged glances as though silently deciding how they would go about destroying the new threat.
A broad-shouldered witch hunched over as though gathering her strength.
I wanted to see what she would send my way. It was kind of like a cat playing with a mouse because I knew she couldn’t hurt me. In that moment I was a magical god who could touch the powers of both Heaven and Hell through the energy Gladys had stored.
It was heady. It was intoxicating. It was fucking dangerous as hell.
The witch came up, throwing a massive ball of flames my way. I could feel the heat and wondered just how much strength she’d given up in her effort to prove she could take me out.
I simply held up a hand, whispering the words Gladys sent through my mouth, and it dissolved.
The witch’s eyes went wide and I moved in on her, touching a single finger to her chest. “Bad girl. Duratus.”
