“What if there’s another way?” I ask.
“Trust me,” she says haughtily. “There isn’t. If there were, I would have done it. I might look whole and fully restored to you—but that is just on the outside. Using another soul in your body, in the body that soul was not made for, is like…” she trails off, shakes her head. “It’s indescribable. The discomfort. There is a tightness all over me, and the bond between myself and the other vampire is fragile. It will not break, not unless I consciously decide to sever it, but it always feels like it’s on the brink of snapping. And then she will be restored to her former form, and I to mine.”
“You trust me completely, don’t you?” I say in wonder. “You have told me the absolute truth, not holding anything back.” I pause. “Why?”
“When you offered the deal to me I saw who you were,” she says. “I knew nothing of you before. But in that one short interaction, I realized you were the Queen Morgan could never be. The Queen all The Haven vampires deserve. And, despite it all, I still consider myself part of The Haven. I could not have been so determined to build my army and come above ground, to claim my rightful spot amongst all of you, if I did not.”
“But your creatures attacked us,” I say. “On your command.”
“I gave them the order to bring me the Queen. They were not told to kill others. The screams are only a temporary affliction. Your coven would have recovered in time.”
“Strangely enough, I believe you,” I mutter. “I thought you were all enemies.”
She laughs. “The Tentoria do not have enough intellect to consider others enemies. They do as they are told. It’s all or nothing with them.”
“They obey you completely.”
“Of course,” she says. “Each one of them knows, on a deep, instinctual level, that they are indebted to me. Their lives rely on me. I could have them all killed with a snap of the fingers.”
“Could you?” I narrow my eyes. “How?”
“Easy,” she says. “Watch this.”
She calls forward a group of about a hundred screechers. They come before us. The others huddle back.
“Ready?” she asks. She closes her eyes, whispering an incantation, then opens them to glare at the screecher on the very left.
The moment her eyes fall on it, it collapses to the ground, lifeless, an empty husk.
The rest in line topple over, one by one, like dominoes. In a few seconds, there are a hundred new corpses on the ground, unmoving.
“Magic?” I ask. Since I’m still blocked, I cannot tell.
“Not really,” she answers. “The words you heard me speak were simply a way to ascertain the link between myself and the one who was downed first. There are infinite threads linking me to each individual Tentoria. The incantation showed me which thread I had to snip.”
I start to feel a little bit more of the Currents. Very, very weak, but they are not hidden from me any longer.
“The potion is wearing off,” I tell her. “Soon, I’ll be able to channel.”
She frowns. “That is too early.”
“You haven’t tested it on a witch as strong as me.”
Rebecca cracks a small smile. “No. I guess that’s true.”
“What I was saying earlier,” I tell her as the other screechers move in to take away the bodies of the deceased, “If we—”
I cut off with a choke as the living screechers start to rip the corpses apart and eat them.
“What are they doing?” I ask, aghast.
“Feeding,” she tells me with an indifferent shrug. “What does it look like?”
“They feed on their own kind?” I stammer.
“Well, yes. They don’t need food, not directly, they are sustained by part of the same essence that sustains us. But they know that the tiny piece of soul that is spread out through all of them cannot go to waste.”
“By eating their kind they absorb it?” I ask, not able to look away from the grotesque feeding.
Rebecca laughs. “Of course not. When one of them goes down the tiny fraction of a soul in them gets absorbed equally by all the rest. But they don’t know that. They’re not very smart.”
“They’re like zombies,” I whisper, and shudder. The feast is almost done, the last remains of the corpses being slurped up.
“A bit more useful,” Rebecca notes. “What were you saying before?”
A part of me still can’t believe how cordial she is now, after the way we first interacted.
I guess diplomacy sometimes does work.
“I was saying,” I pick up, “that if Morgan was able to sever your soul and cast it in that painting, maybe there is a way to get it back.”
“I gave up on that hope long ago,” she tells me.
“Why?”
“My cousin would not have left these things to chance. When the soul was locked in a painting, it was bound there for all eternity.”
“But she failed,” I say. “She failed, with you. That makes me think it might be possible. If we can get you your true soul back…”
“You’re sweet, girl, but this is not realistic. I’d rather not talk about it. Don’t want to raise false hopes.”
I thin my lips. I do not like being dismissed so easily.
Suddenly, all in one go, awareness of the mass of Currents crashes into me. I gasp, like a drowning woman who’s just been pulled out of water.
Power surges through me and eviscerates the last remains of that nasty potion. My whole potential for magic is unlocked again, and I soar as the Elemental Forces lock into me.
Without thinking, I pull on as much power as I can, filling myself to the brink with magic. The Forces swell and strengthen inside me, growing, growing, ever-more, until I hold more than I ever have before.
I add to that by pulling on the Air, Fire, Water, and Earth forces from the other dimension. They interweave with the ones already inside me, feeding off of them, building, growing, coming together to grant me unimaginable might.
For a flash of a second, I see the entire fabric of all the world, those tiny, infinitesimal, and all-encompassing webs that hold everything together. Rebecca, as a fellow witch, must sense my power, because her eyes go wide, and she takes an unconscious step back.
The web disappears, but in its wake, I can sense each one of the screechers. Every single one. I know their agony, I know their pain, I know their tortured existence. I am one with them all, intercepting the connection Rebecca has with them.
“What are you—what are you doing?” she gasps.
I see no need to respond. My will is absolute. Those creatures threatened The Haven. They hurt my vampires. As long as they exist, not under my control, they are an unpredictable force that can change alliances at any time.
So, I do what any Queen would do. I use the combined force of the Elements to rip away the soul connection to the screechers from Rebecca and infuse it into me.
“No!” Rebecca gasps.
I’m sick with power. Conscious thought does not exist. I operate entirely by instinct, knowing full well what is right and wrong and what must be done.
I open a portal to the Demon Realm in the sky and call upon bolts of fire and lightning to strike the screechers down.
Rebecca screams. I throw up a cage of air around her, using the Demon Realm magic that she cannot undo, to box her in. Chaos rains from the sky, each bolt precise and accurate as it destroys each screecher where it stands.
The whole landscape devolves into mayhem. Through my link with them I command the screechers to stand still. But the stronger ones, the ones with a sense of self-preservation still within them, wrestle out of the command and try to run.