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I hated that but knew he had to say it.
“You—you—”She stuttered into silence, overcome by daunting rage. Her image similarly lost cohesion for a moment, her face blurring, as if momentarily depixilated. Not really present then?No. But just as dangerous.
“Youworm,” Titania managed. “You think to outwit me? I made you, Rogue. You are mine, made in my own image and you cannot escape me!” She finished on an ultrasonic shriek that sent agony through Rogue’s sensitive ears and made mine ring.
“We shall see.” He showed none of the pain he felt. A master of the poker face.
“You have chosen your ally poorly.” She turned her attention on me. “So mortal. So sweetly vulnerable. What will you do when I wrest her from you, make her and her precious cargo mine?”
Rogue didn’t reply, because I did.
“You couldn’t do it before.” I shrugged, dismissing her. “You’d simply fail again.”
Her face contorted, the melt showing through. Resolving and then blurring again. Not completely healed.
“Will I? Yes, Rogue,” she said, pointedly ignoring me. “We shall see. In the meantime, I brought you a wedding gift.” She dropped the cloak, revealing her voluptuously naked, featureless flesh. As it hit the ground, the cloak broke apart into tens—or hundreds—of thousands of spidery creatures, seemingly made of pure fire.
Titania laughed and waved her fingers in a little wiggle. “Bye now.” She vanished in stages, her chiming giggle lingering in the air after her image was gone.
In her wake, the scorching heat of her power rolled over the ring of dragons and down, a fireball of raging insanity. Without time for thought, Rogue and I deflected it, but it hit the invisible wall of the dragons’ null field and shattered into myriads more of the fire-spiders. Glowing, multilegged flames, they swarmed over us, burning and biting until we destroyed them.
Those outside the circle of dragons found themselves snuffed as they tried to cross between. But plenty fell inside, anchoring into Goliath’s fur and setting him ablaze. The Rogue part of me doused him with water from the pool, leaving him unscathed but furiously drenched.
Another fist of power hit, knocking us to our knees as the ground destabilized.
“Told you we shouldn’t have done this outside,” I had to say.
“You wanted to work that marriage spell inside and shatter the castle?” Rogue snapped back.
Together we held off that wave until it dissipated.
“Point taken.”
“I knew you’d see the light.”
Hard on his words, a flare went up from the castle, a precise shaft of black and white that tasted of Marquise and Scourge. In the distance, people were screaming. The promised army advanced from the opposite direction, crawling over the snowy hills like a ravening horde of locusts, obliterating the pristine whiteness with menace. From the seething ranks, missiles catapulted at the towers, some striking the glittering stone with shattering force, others dissipating before contact. More hit than didn’t.
Rogue narrowed his eyes, seeing farther than I could. “However, we can’t let her keep us from getting back. She appears to have changed her target.”
“Poof yourself there—they need you.”
He barely glanced at me, a dangerous flintiness in his gaze. “I’m not leaving you.”
“Let’s go then.”
The dragons moved with us, blessedly keeping their defensive perimeter. More spiders swarmed, crystalline, black as oil, with impossible numbers of legs. They poofed into freezing fog or, worse, blood mist, as they struck the null field. We had to be careful to keep to the center, the edges like Novocain on my hyped-up senses, not easy as we lobbed back or busted the missiles that hurtled toward us too. The magical ones were easier to neutralize.
Some, however, were physical. One, a silver torpedo, breached our defenses and slammed into one of the dragons. Null magic didn’t protect it from the impact. The missile shattered the beast’s great wing, tearing the leathery membrane that stretched between tarsal bones like a bat’s. The multihued jeweled scales glittered in the sunlight, ironically lovely as its yellow blood fountained and the beast trumpeted in the pain.
We forged on, however, and the dragon kept up, dragging its broken wing. Feeling the urgency, we all picked up the pace. Goliath, behind us, lagged too long and abruptly returned to his usual size. Fortunately it wasn’t enough of a hit to addle his brain, but he wasn’t happy.
I began to tire, feeling the drain of continuous magic use, especially after that monumental wedding spell. I reached for Mother Earth and Rogue stayed my mental hand.Let me.
As if he’d slipped inside me in the most intimate physical way, his magic flowed in, stroking my senses with a wash of his essence. This was far more than when he’d fed me energy on Felicity’s back.
Far more.
We made it to the drawbridge where the creepy cyborg army was fighting off more spiders that were trying to swarm it, to penetrate the castle. Though they drowned in the moat, the monsters happily surfacing to gobble them down, they kept coming, walking on the backs of dead ones. The gate inside spun, so that any of the spiders that entered the doorway were flung away again, pinballs ricocheting from the center flywheel. More missiles, blasts of pure power—Titania had scaled up in the Faerie arms race—rained down on the castle, sometimes deflected, sometimes not. A tower fell and we winced. Hopefully everyone had been smart enough to hunker down.
