Page 232 of Blood Feast

He made it over the top of the wall and leapt down into Cassia’s garden to find Miranda standing guard. Shock crossed her face. She hurled her fork at him, and it shot toward his heart like a spear.

He blocked the gardening tool midair with his staff and sent it spinning away into the grasp of the roses. As he advanced on Miranda, she drew her relic blade. She was getting desperate.

Lio swung again. She disappeared, and his staff passed through empty air. She popped back into sight at close range, stabbing upward.

Before her dagger could slide under his breastbone, he fell backward, pulling his staff back with him. He drove the end of Final Word toward her gut, forcing her to retreat. Lio sprang to his feet again.

He battled his way forward, the shape of her mind bending around him with every blow from his staff. The walls crumbled and rebuilt, and each time, thorned vines grew thicker over the stone. Where his feet disrupted the soil, plants grew, then withered, then grew again, roses fighting with poisonous weeds. Miranda fought him tooth and nail with a deadly aim and agile dodges. But he was gaining ground.

He rammed Final Word into her breastplate, right upon the Eye of Hypnos written in his Grace’s blood. The blow hurled Miranda backward through the broken wall into Cassia’s sickroom.

The Overseer landed on her back on the table where she had tortured his Grace. The black roses grew eagerly over her wrists and ankles, tying her down. She fisted her hand around the hilt of her dagger and screamed a curse at Lio.

He came to stand over her. “Did you think Cassia’s magic would choose your side, now that I’m here to rescue her power?”

“That’s what you’re really after?” Miranda laughed. “You’re even more of a fool that I thought. Hesperines can’t cast essential displacement anymore than you can be subjected to it. You’ll never reclaim what I took from her.”

“I just scaled your defenses with the help of her magic. Her power has turned traitor to you.”

“That magic isn’t hers anymore. It’smine.”

He circled the table. “Then why haven’t we seen you use it in battle? You throw fire, lightning, warding, even thelemancy at us. But no Lustra magic.”

“I have more than enough mind magic to defeat you.”

“Cassia’s power barely obeys you, doesn’t it? You’re holding it back as you wait to push it through her foci, hoping it doesn’t escape you before you can use it to destroy the last node.”

“Her roses are falling to my war magic while we play this game. When I seize her third focus, it will be the end of the world as you know it.”

“Kallikrates himself said it took him centuries to learn how to displace Lustra magic. He admitted he holds onto Cassia’s by a thread. If he so much as touches her mind, her power will return to her.” Lio leaned closer, his fangs sliding down. “I am the only one who will ever touch her mind again.”

He watched as realization dawned in Miranda’s eyes, and she understood what he was about to try. After the miles and the bloodshed and the regret it had taken to get to this moment, he savored it.

“This is the flaw in your plan,” he said. “Me.”

“It won’t work,” Miranda spat. “Whatever mental link you think you can forge between Cassia and me, it’s not enough. You understand nothing of essential displacement.”

He was educated enough in the arcane to know she was right. But he had more than thelemancy to draw upon. What Kallikrates and his Overseers would never understand was Grace Union.

“Watch me,” Lio said.

Miranda’s gaze hardened into another’s, and she said in the Collector’s voice, “If you try to take her power from me, you will pay my price.”

Lio gathered the full force of his mind magic. “I won’t have to try.”

The Lustra fed Cassiaand her roses more magic ripe with the temple’s spells. As the channeling raged through her, Lio’s grip around her waist anchored her to earth. She laid her arm over his and wound their fingers together.

Her strongest wall of thorns still stood before the dome, but beyond it, another line of her defenses succumbed to Miranda’s fire spells. The odor of burning roses took her back to the shrine where she and Lio had fallen in love, which was now scorched earth. The night Hagia Boreia had been razed, the air must have been so thick with that stench that no one could breathe.

“You will not destroy another Sanctuary as long as I stand!” Cassia screamed at the unseen enemy. She sent out another blast of her power, regrowing the thorns that had just fallen. Above her, Mak and Lyros cheered.

But the necromancer’s aura loomed, far too close to the final bastion and more powerful than she had been at the gates.

“Can you feel that?” Cassia shouted to Mak and Lyros.

“Kallikrates’s presence,” Mak confirmed.

Lio, Cassia warned.Kallikrates is here.

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