“Bones, no!”
Mencheres appeared out of nowhere, and not a moment too soon. There was a wrenching sound, a blur, and then Bones was thrown backward missing an arm. The scream I made drowned out Spade’s shout as he arrived just in time to witness it.
Ian stared with stupefied amazement at the hand still clutched to his throat, the limb beginning to wither. I went to Bones, but he sidestepped me and strode right to Mencheres.
“Did you have a reason for preventing me from silencing that insult, Grandsire?”
Now my whole body tensed. If Bones and Mencheres went at it, all hell would break loose.
“You were going to tear Ian’s head off,” Mencheres answered. “You would have regretted it afterward, for many reasons, and I think we have already given Patra enough cause to celebrate without further reducing our numbers.”
Ian appeared mildly dazed by recent events. He shook his head as if to clear it, then stared at me and Bones with a look of vague disbelief.
“By Christ, Crispin, I don’t know what got into me,” he breathed. “I had no cause to rail at you like that. Forgive me, both of you.”
Bones started to run a hand through his hair, stopped when he saw his limb was only half grown back, and snorted incredulously.
“Two hundred and forty-seven years I’ve had that arm. Didn’t think to lose it while trying to rip your head off. Bugger, I have to pull myself together.”
“Now more than ever we all have to pull ourselves together,” Mencheres agreed.
“Yes,” Bones said, eyeing him in a way that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Especially you, Grandsire, because this must end.”
Vlad entered the room. He looked around, saw the staring contest between Bones and Mencheres, and took a seat.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mencheres said with bleakness. “And I tell you, I cannot do it.”
Bones was next to him in a flash. “The reality is that either you or she will be dead very soon. Whatever Patra meant to you, whatever secret dreams you’ve harbored of fate intervening at the last moment to make things right—you of all people know better. You told me never to doubt your visions, yet here you’ve lingered with the hope that you could be wrong. But you’re not, so you must end this, because that is the responsibility you have to the people under your line and now also under mine.”
I was confused. Mencheres didn’t have Patra stuffed in a back room, to my knowledge, so how could he have the power to end this, as Bones was implying? Vlad leaned forward, picking up on my thought. “Don’t you see, Cat? When Patra had you trapped in a lethal nightmare, who knew how to break it? Last night when the zombies attacked, who knew the only way to destroy them was to destroy their homing beacon? Mencheres. So if he knows these spells well enough to know what counters them…then he also has the knowledge to cast one himself.”
One look at Mencheres’s ashen face confirmed it, and then I was right in front of him as well.
“You have to. She’s not going to stop! Do you want to see everyone around you dead? Because that’s what will happen if you don’t do something.”
“And could you?” Mencheres flung at me. “If this were Bones we were talking about, could you mete out death to him? Could you sentence him so easily to the grave?”
He stopped, showing more naked feeling than I’d ever seen from him, and it hit me. He’s still in love with her, even after everything she’s done. Poor bastard.
I chose my words with care. “I don’t pretend to know how hard this is on you, Mencheres, and if this were Bones, it would rip me apart inside, too. But”—I paused to look straight at the man I loved—“if you ever went so far off the deep end that you’d try—and succeed—in killing those I loved, and you made it very clear through countless examples that you wouldn’t stop until I and everyone I cared about were dead, then yes. I’d kill you.”
Bones stared back at me and a small smile touched his mouth. “That’s my girl.”
Then he fixed his gaze back on Mencheres. “I can’t offer you any comfort in this but one, single thing: a quick death for Patra. She doesn’t deserve it, and I’d promised to treat whoever plotted against my wife to a much more prolonged, gruesome experience, but for your sake I’ll amend that. If you do what you must now.”
Green blazed from Mencheres’s eyes, and so much power crackled off him that I flinched. “Are you threatening me?”
Bones didn’t even twitch. “I’m the co-ruler of your line and I’m stating my intentions toward an enemy who has butchered our people. You need to remember whose side you’re on. Can’t you see Patra has been betting her life on the notion that you’re incapable of that?”