Victor and I kept fighting. Well, really, he fought. I just parried his blows, clutching one hand to my side to try to slow the blood loss. With every blow, I grew weaker and weaker, and he pressed his advantage, concentrating his strikes on my sword hand. I knew what he was trying to do—knock my weapon away so he could stab me through the heart and take my magic for himself.
But I wasn’t about to let that happen so I tightened my grip on my sword, channeling the magic still pulsing in my black blade into my hands, arms, and legs so that I could keep on fighting. But I was still losing, and it was only a matter of time before Victor snuck through my defenses again and gutted me. He lashed out with a particularly hard blow and I staggered back, almost flipping over the side of the bridge.
“If you give up now, I will make your death relatively painless,” Victor said, slowly approaching me. “One blow to your heart and it will all be over.”
I let out a harsh, bitter laugh, realizing it for the trick it was. “You’re such a liar.”
He shrugged. “Certainly. I’m going to enjoy cutting you to ribbons, just as I did your mother.”
Once again, white stars flashed in front of my eyes, but they weren’t caused by any lightning or other magic. No, these stars were part of my soulsight, letting me look back into the past and see my mom’s body, bloody, beaten, and broken on the floor of our small apartment.
White-hot rage roared through me, more rage than I had ever felt before. This time, the cold burn in my veins had nothing to do with magic, but everything to do with my desire to stop Victor, to finally hurt him the same way he had hurt my mom.
Even as I raised my sword again, Victor used his speed magic to step up and pin me against the side of the bridge. He pressed the tip of his sword against my throat. I froze, my own sword raised in midair.
“Drop your weapon,” he hissed, pressing his sword a little deeper into my neck, breaking the skin there and making blood trickle down my throat. “Now.”
I slowly laid the sword down on the bridge ledge. I waited, wondering if Victor would tell me to take off my leather belt with its three throwing stars as well, but he just sneered at me, cold triumph gleaming in his eyes. So slowly, very, very slowly, I dropped my hand down to my side, inching my fingers toward my belt. Victor hadn’t won yet, and I could fight dirty too. All I needed was one moment of opportunity and I could finish what my mom had started all those years ago.
“I’ll admit that you put up a good fight,” Victor said, staring at me. “I didn’t expect you to have transference magic and be able to siphon off my magic into your black blade. That will be my bonus for killing you, and taking it from you will just be fun.”
I didn’t respond, although I kept crawling my fingers toward my belt.
“You might have stolen some of my magic, but I’ll use your black blade to put it right back inside my own body again,” he said, his voice ringing with triumph. “Where it belongs.”
I still didn’t say anything as my fingers reached one of the throwing stars on my belt and curled around the metal.
“Goodbye, Lila Sterling,” Victor sneered. “And good riddance to the Sterling Family once and for all—”
Even as he crowed about how he was going to kill me, I shoved his sword away from my throat. The blade cut deep into my palm, but I ignored the stinging pain, yanked the throwing star off my belt, and swiped it across his face. The star sliced his cheek, making him scream, stagger back, and lower his weapon.
Using the last of the magic in my veins, I grabbed my sword off the ledge, stepped up, and stabbed him straight through the heart with the black blade.
Victor screamed as my mother’s sword plunged deep into his chest. He staggered back, but I went with him, keeping a tight grip on the black blade. I was going to end this—now.
And that’s when his magic started pouring into me.
It was small at first, a single spark of white lightning erupting from his chest, zinging along the length of the sword, and traveling up to my blood-covered hand. The second that spark came into contact with my blood, a whole cascade of sparks erupted, until it seemed as though Victor and I were standing in the middle of a giant fireworks display.
He gasped in surprise and so did I, but we were connected by the sword in his chest and all I could do was stand there and gape, as though I were outside my own body and watching all this happen to me from someplace far, far away.
When Grant Sanderson had tried to take my magic, he’d been determined to cut me to pieces to get my power just because he wanted me to suffer. But you could also take a person’s magic by stabbing him once straight through the heart with a black blade. That’s what I’d done to Victor, not because I wanted to take his magic, but simply to end the fight. But apparently, he had so much magic, so much raw power, it was literally bursting to get out of him.