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Josephine’s cuffs landed in a heap of burning goo. Around us, wolves howled in pain, and my coven fought to keep up with the onslaught of monsters. Blood slicked the ground. One of the wolves took a dagger to chest and landed hard. His wide-eyed gaze went vacant. As both armies ripped each other apart with magic and teeth and will, the earth shook.
The pounding under my feet became more violent. It found a steady, three-beat rhythm. Both sides of battle wobbled from its force.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Rich, bitter magic coated my tongue and raised the hairs on the back of my neck—magic that was usually on a much tighter leash.
Magic that Josephine clearly recognized. Her jaw dropped.
I grinned.
Arion weaved his way through the battle so swiftly, he blurred into a flicker of shadows. Witches and vampires were left nothing more than heaps of flesh and bones under his thundering hooves.
Without wasting another second, I launched myself at Josephine. I grabbed the two throwing daggers strapped to my thighs and aimed for her midsection. The first one landed with a satisfying thud, and she barely avoided the second one. She sneered at the quickly spreading bloodstain that coated her dress. Without so much as a wince, she tore the dagger out her body.
“That,” she said and tossed the dagger aside, “was rude.”
I answered by summoning winds that battered her left and right, but she shielded herself with thick walls of earth. I tried to swath her mind in shadows, but she was too clever to make the same mistake twice. Her mind was a brick wall, protected in layers of defensive spells.
Josephine cackled. “Really? That’s how you want to play this, dearest?”
Her own spell hit me like a landslide. My defenses rattled under the force of her magic. She’d held back before—toyed with me to weaken my magical reserves and hide the raw energy she contained.
The force of six witches shattered my defenses, and my mind splintered.
Lost in anguish, I screamed and dropped to my knees. I braced myself for the impact of the hard ground but instead landed on the plush carpet of my cottage’s floors.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Walker
Death surrounded me. Wolves tore into vampires, and witches tore into each other. Almost all the golems had been eliminated, mostly by the man who lay dying at my feet.
My father.
Clyde’s face was clammy and whiter than a sheet. His daggers, slick with blood, lay docile at his sides. Forgotten.
Useless without him.
That’s what I had become.
Witches protected our sad excuse of a family, undoubtedly sent by Freya, though I couldn’t see her past the chaos. Even among the grunts of pain, the gurgling of blood, and the cackling of witches, I heard my father’s rattling breath.
It was so different from his alcohol-induced snores or his occasional breathy bouts of laughter. Just when I finally discovered why he hadn’t truly laughed in years, he was going to leave me.
“I-I can get someone,” Cadence said. She kneeled at my father’s side and wrapped her tiny hand in his, as if she could tether him to us with the sheer force of her will. “One of these witches must know how to heal you.”
“No,” Dad rasped. Blood stained his pale lips. “No, Cady-Cat, I’m afraid it’s too late.”
Tears poured down her cheeks. “But there must be something–”
“The witches do me a great service now,” he said. “They give me a chance to say goodbye to my children. They-they let me fight for you, finally.”
I fell to my knees beside him and tried to ignore the blood that soaked through my pants. I swallowed the tears and thousands of emotions that scattered my thoughts and said the only thing he’d want to hear.
“Mom would be proud of you, Dad. We’re proud.”
A faint smile graced his face, and blood poured out of his mouth. Cadence poured her own heart out for him, and he found the strength to squeeze her hand even tighter. We had only moments left with him, this father I’d met hours ago, but I noticed the gasp echoed by each of the witches surrounding us.
