Page 68 of Wizard of Most Wicked Ways

So was Silas’s.

I saw you ... dead,Hulda had said.

The wardship wall flickered out.

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,the poem in Cora’s letter had read,hath had elsewhere its setting.

That was it, then. If he couldn’t reach him with necrosis, he’d reach him withthat. It made sense, how he would save them. It meant saying goodbye. He wouldn’t come back from this one. Not this time. But for them?

For them he’d happily dance back into the dark.

He pressed both hands into the matted grass. Pushed himself up. He couldn’t fight safe, not anymore. Had to close the distance and keep it closed. Force Silas’s hand. He stumbled forward as Jonelle threw the ruined revolver. As Hulda screamed. As Fallon danced, trying to find an in. As Pankhurst tried to right himself again.

Do not lose focus,Owein demanded.Silas. Silas. Silas.

Maybe Cora’s own spell of luck had drifted across the ocean with that letter, because Silas’s attention was so focused on murdering Pankhurst that Owein got right beside him before the madman noticed.

Owein lunged, grabbing Silas around his neck—a ring of blackening skin bloomed beneath his fingers. Silas punched him with kinesis; Owein lost his grip but dug his hands into the madman’s protected shoulders. Held on hard enough to crack his fingernails. No more distance. No more safe space.

Silas flung kinesis into Owein, who squeezed tighter, holding on so he wouldn’t be thrown. The blast was like a hammer to his gut, as was the third, which cracked his ribs. Silas shifted stiffly, his body overcome with the magic. The fourth blow wasn’t as bad, but bile stirred and burned. Silas beat at him with one hand and one blackened stump, but Owein wore the wizard like a coat. Pushed into him, freed one hand and tried, one more time, to use Oliver’s spell to save himself. He grabbed Silas’s chin; the man bit down on his finger as his lips rotted. Kneed Owein in the groin and freed himself from the putrid touch, but not from Owein’s grip on his shoulder.

Silas roared, the stench of decay on his breath. He tried condensing Owein’s shirt, hindering him. Owein barreled forward and gripped Silas around the waist, squeezing as hard as he could.

“End it!” he screamed. “Kill me!”

Silas did. He grabbed a fistful of Owein’s hair and filled him with necromancy.

It was a familiar sensation, the surging of life-force, the shifting of spirit and flesh, of endlessly sinking. Owein didn’t fight it. He embraced it, releasing the tendrils of Oliver all at once, until suddenly he wasn’t Oliver anymore.

He saw it all without seeing, sensed it without sensing. Oliver crumpling to the ground, Merritt’s uncamouflaged head and hands, Hulda racing from the house, wielding the Mississippi rifle like a club.Pankhurst moaning on the ground and Jonelle shouting at him. Fallon leaping and attacking.

Silas kicked Fallon. Threw Oliver aside. Fallon yelped and shifted back into human, grabbing Oliver’s shoulders, shaking him and screaming.

Silas limped toward Merritt.

No.

Clenching metaphorical fists, Owein ignited all his magic, just as he’d done before, a feverish twelve-year-old boy upon a sickbed, fearing death even as it claimed him. And all those tendrils that had once been Oliver threaded into Whimbrel House once more, sucking him downward from heaven and knitting him into floorboards and painted walls, rugs and beams and cupboards. Fusing him back into a prison that felt like an old friend.

That’s when he first felt the serum Lisbeth had concocted. It was allhismagic, so he hadn’t noticed, not at first. But the way his soul expanded, the way he touched the door to the sunroom at the same time he floated through the books in the library, he knew he was more than he’d been. Like this, he was enough.

He seized them all. The reception hall, the bedrooms, the dining room and kitchen, the library, the lavatory, the sitting room. He infiltrated every grain of wood, every stitch of furniture, every inch of glass. No confusion, no warping, no nausea. Like this, he waslimitless.

And then, with legs and hands he could now only imagine, hepushed.

The enclosed back porch collided with the kitchen, breakfast room, and dining room. The reception hall smashed into the living room and sunroom, condensing and reshaping as he poured out randomized chaos until it fit his desires, merging it effortlessly with alteration, reshaping the first floor into two legs. He stood even as he remolded the sitting room, library, and office into a jointed arm, smashing walls and floors together to form three fingers, because three should be enough.Broken segments from the lavatory and bathroom flung outward in a lasso, surrounding the yard, reaching and prodding and raking like the tongue of a snake until a sliver grazed his target, and Owein knewexactlywhere Silas Hogwood was.

He pulled in the lasso, dragging Silas closer until he could seize him with all three fingers, each the thickness of a tree trunk and the length of a desk. Sensed his screams more than heard them as he picked him up off the ground. Felt the tickles of magic as the madman tried to fight back.

No.

And Whimbrel House crushed him.

Owein felt the presence of another as the body slopped to the ground. The soul of a powerful wizard reaching out with his magic, looking for a place to stay.

Owein fortified himself, rejecting him, slamming every iota of his existence and magnified spells into the ruined walls of his home.

And Silas Hogwood passed away.

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