Page 135 of Time's Fool

“Of what?” I said back, trusting his ears to hear me, despite the wind tearing the words out of my mouth. “That a demon is here to steal their magic and redirect it, thus turning ancient, ravenous gods loose on Earth? We’d be better going to the Corps—”

“You are a woman, and potentially a witch in their eyes, and I am vampire. What help do you think we would find—”

“I don’t know, but the covens are vulnerable tonight and they know it. They’re throwing everything they have into that!” I pointed at the churning vortex overhead. “They’ll kill us before we get two words out!”

“But we must do something. If Mircea but slips—”

And then he did, while we were still uselessly debating it.

I didn’t see what happened. All I knew was that, one second, Mircea was darting around the landscape, sliding under and jumping over blows that would have turned him to ash had they landed. And the next he was on the ground, with the creature looming over him, a triumphant smile on its excuse for a face.

Louis-Cesare threw his new sword, and again his aim was true, despite the wind and rain and distance between us. It took the bastard straight through the head, but all it did this time was to melt the blade as it passed through his body, leaving a clump of molten metal to hurtle out the other side. And the demon’s face to coalesce again on the back of his head, laughing at us.

“Don’t worry; I haven’t forgotten you. You’ll be next.”

It turned back to Mircea, who still hadn’t moved, even with the moment of distraction that Louis-Cesare had bought him. Nor was he looking at the demon. In the instant between the creature melting its face back through its head, the last moment my father would likely ever have, he was doing only one thing.

Staring at me.

Something broke inside me in that instant, and I found myself pelting toward the two of them, stupidly, suicidally, but I couldn’t stay still. I couldn’t just watch this. And while I heard Louis-Cesare coming after me, he couldn’t catch me.

There must have been some of the demon’s power still thrumming in my veins, fueling my race toward disaster. And then more than some, for halfway through my useless, headlong rush, something filled me like a beaker overflowing with water. Water that I grabbed from the air like a sheet waving in the wind, and catapulted in front of me with all the force I had, straight at the demon.

It hit like a watery fist, sending him sliding across the ground, like the portal that had spilled all of those townsfolk off their feet during the fight on the bridge. Only there was no portal here, no river full of water to be captured, no anything but me and my clenched hand. Which, when I moved it, dragged more rain out of the sky, following the motion like the crashing of the sea.

“This is impossible!” the demon said spluttering and clawing at the ground to stay in place as the wave crashed around it. “You gave that to the witch!”

I didn’t understand what it meant until I looked down, and saw a blue ring glowing brightly around my finger, instead of Mircea’s golden ring.

“No, I gave Morgan my signet,” Mircea said, “I thought she might want the Ring of Water back, and took the precaution of having one of my family’s mages enchant it for me the previous night, to swap its appearance for that of my crest.”

“But it doesn’t matter!” the creature snarled. “The dhampir can’t wield it! She isn’t a witch!”

“No, she isn’t. But she currently has a great deal of magical energy—your energy, in fact. Which appears to be sufficient.”

“But—but you are bound from harming me! Both you and the monster who stole my power!”

“So I am,” Mircea said, eyes still looking at me. “And so is Dorina.”

And, finally, I understood. Dorina had been the one to rip into the creature’s power in London, and force it to flee. She had been the one opposing it in Wallachia, holding it in place and allowing it to be captured. And she was the one who had just sent all that she had left, everything that she had stolen, straight to me.

Because I wasn’t bound by a goddamned thing.

“Then what is this?” the demon raged, as I stepped forward. “How are you doing this?”

“I’m not Dorina,” I said, and sent the massive wave I had been building above us straight at his already cooling body.

The demon had been black and red before, the previous waves having cooled the outer crust considerably. But when it emerged this time, it was solid black with gray splotches, like the ashes in a fireplace when it has burnt down. So, I blasted it again and again, sweeping the air so clear above us that it almost appeared to have stopped raining.

The creature screamed and howled and thrashed and fell, but it wasn’t done yet, because it turned—not on me, or Louis-Cesare who was there beside me. But on the man it had just been trying to kill.

“Don’t be a fool. I can take you back there, I can take you to her.”

Mircea had gotten to his feet, and now he approached the creature. “You would offer me a deal?”

“Yes, yes!” the creature, back in its piteous state, mewled pathetically. But I didn’t think it was an act this time. Because the arm it was reaching out with suddenly crumbled and fell off, washing away in the river I was keeping the creature in, like broken bits of carbon.

“And what would that be, exactly?” Mircea asked, crouching before the thing again, just as he had back in the cellar. Where he and Dorina had planned this, silently, while the rest of us looked on unawares.

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