A short glance at River told me he wasn’t totally unaffected by the glittery dust shit. His eyelids were heavy and drooping, and he had yet to speak. Not really within character for him. It confirmed my own suspicion that although I’d never healed him, he hadn’t been totally human to begin with.
Bridget had already said she wasn’t interested in harming the guys, though, because she wanted them for herself. I couldn’t help wondering if her caution around them had anything to do with Victor and the horrific scarring on his face. Something had clearly gone wrong between them, and now she was trying to replace him.
I refused to even acknowledge the ick factor of my mom planning on sleeping with the men I loved. That was the icing on the shitcake that was my lineage, really.
No, my first priority needed to be stopping this fucking spell, which meant either stopping the moon from fully rising or stopping the liquid shit from filling out all the runes. No prizes for guessing which option was going to be easier to achieve.
My gaze rapidly scanned the floor, checking the progress. It had gotten far enough that there were too many channels filling now to simply block them up. I needed to somehow get rid of the blackish fluid altogether. A high pressure hose would probably come in handy at a time like this...
Actually, that wasn’t such a terrible idea. I still had plenty of unused spells in my spine tattoo. Surely if I used a couple of water ones, I could wash that crap away. It wouldn’t stop it permanently, but it’d buy me enough time to do some damage to the runes or push the box off alignment with the floor grooves.
Hiding my hand behind my back, I summoned as much water energy as I could, drawing directly from the blood ink and praying it would pack enough force to disrupt the pattern.
Not wasting time with grand gestures, I hurled the water at the floor, right at the line where the dark fluid was trickling across freshly cut stone. My water hit with an explosion of red-tinted spray, and it was then that I realised what was filling the runes all over the floor.
Blood.
Bile rose in my throat, but I tamped it down and refused to let my mind wander onto what might be inside that box. I needed to keep my focus on the water before the spell was used up.
Directing the stream, I used it just like a high pressure water blaster, forcing the blood out of the floor grooves and spreading it over the flat stone in between. When the magic dried up moments later, it looked like I had succeeded.
Until the diluted blood began gravitating back to the grooves with the speed of a receding tide. It was almost like it was being sucked back into its correct position, but what was worse, my water had only served to spread it faster and thin out the consistency so it travelled faster through the designs.
“No,” I groaned, seeing the red blood move faster through the patterns, linking up rune after rune and bringing the spell so much closer to being finished. “No,” I muttered again, even as Bridget broke out into peels of laughter at my expense.
There was only one option left. I needed to destroy some of the runes. Surely if I hacked into a few of them, the spell couldn’t be completed.
Not allowing myself another second’s indecision, I summoned lightning from one of the runes I remembered being near the base of my tattoo. With a forceful throw, I aimed it directly into the centre of what seemed to be a water rune. Water was surely going to be a safer rune to explode than fire, right?
Too late, I realised my mistake. Ordinary lightning and water were a volatile mix, at best. Magical lightning and water was a whole other story.
The impact was so extreme that I was knocked off my feet, smacking my head hard on the floor and rolling over just in time to avoid slapping my hand down onto a rune that looked a lot like fire.
“Fuck,” I groaned, putting a hand to the back of my head and coming away with bloody fingers. Dazed, I looked to where Bridget had been sitting, but her silver box was vacant. Next, I looked for River.
He and his guards had been hit by the impact too, and I saw the second River spied his opportunity to escape. He probably would have made it too, except his motions were delayed thanks to that glitter dust crap and his guards were supernaturals. They moved ten times faster than him, and he’d barely made it two steps across the room to me when a blade protruded out of his chest.
“No!” I screamed, my voice echoing off the walls and bouncing back at me in a cruel mockery of my pain.
River was frozen on the blade of the enormous shifter thing, and I was powerless to help him as the bear-beast tore his weapon from my lover’s body, causing a sickening arch of blood to spray across the floor.
Freed from the long blade, River’s golden eyes held mine without a single drop of fear as he crashed to his knees, then crumpled face forward. Lifeless.
“No!” My cry was echoed, but this time it wasn’t from me, but my mother. “No, you incompetent sack of shit! I told you not to harm them!” she screeched at the two shifter guards, hurling blue-purple balls of flames at them that set them alight instantly.
For several long moments as the two shifters howled and screamed their death song, I crawled over the rune marked floor to reach River’s body. Ignoring the painful deaths of the shifters nearby, I rolled him over and swallowed a scream of pain at just how much blood there was. His own was mixing with the creepy box blood and filling the pattern all that much faster, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
“River,” I sobbed, turning his face to mine and finding him still clinging to life. Barely. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t heal you. None of the runes on my back are for healing.” Why were none of the runes on my back for healing? Because they were all for combat. We’d never guessed I might end up needing to save the life of one of my guardians.
His mouth opened to say something, but no sound came out. Only a bubble of blood that caused him to choke and convulse, while tears streamed hard and fast down my face.
“Alpha, you can’t. I can’t do this without you,” I cried, holding his face between my hands and desperately trying to pretend my knees weren’t wet with his warm life blood. “What do I do? You need to tell me how to save you!”
Bridget’s mocking laughter bounced through the room, and as much as I tried to block her out, I couldn’t.
“You do nothing, Christina,” she sneered at me. “Soon enough you’ll be reunited, though. Don’t you worry about that. Oh look. The pattern is complete.”
As I watched in horror, the last lines of the blood-filled runes linked up, and the whole thing pulsed with power. My lightning strike had done nothing to disrupt the spell. Worse than nothing, it had gotten River killed.
All my fault. Always my fault.
Grinning with glee, Bridget looked up to the sky to check the progress of the moon.
“Only a minute or so left, I would guess,” she informed me with delight. “Any last words, child? After I take your magic, I will need to strike you down. I hope you understand.”
“Fuck you,” I spat at her, my face wet with tears and my voice husky.
“No, sweets, that’s what my new guardians will be doing, just as soon as you’re gone. Trust me, darling girl, I’ll make it so they never even remember meeting you. Now, isn’t that kind of me?” Her grin split her face, and her sharp teeth showed through. “Oh, but I almost forgot. I have one last parting gift for you.”
She circled around behind the bleeding chest and unbolted the lid of it. I wanted nothing more than to run screaming from that room, but I was frozen to the spot, crouched over River’s dying body and unable to look away from whatever my evil, sadistic mother had inside that chest.
“Do thank this one for me,” Bridget implored me. “She was such a big help.”
With one high-heeled foot, she kicked the heavy chest over so that it landed with its lid open, allowing me an unobstructed view of the contents. Not that I needed to see inside. The force of the chest falling caused the person inside to tumble out and roll to a lifeless stop in the middle of the runed floor.
There was no mistaking those delicate limbs or that short, bright purple hair.