Chapter Fifty-six
The fury leeched out of Amunet’s pretty features, leaving them relaxed but thoroughly confused. “Cain?” she repeated, not understanding. “What do you mean it was about my son?”
Helena’s gaze narrowed on the woman. “You honestly didn’t know?”
Amunet still looked confused, but a flash of defensiveness moved across her eyes now too. She didn’t say anything. So Helena spelled it out for her. “Amunet, your son was miserable,” she told her softly and with a shake of her head. “He was Death, and he took that curse with him everywhere he went. And in the end… he was so tired of it, he just wanted to die.”
*****
He’d known they would be here. For fifty years, he’d known it would all go down once and for all in a big field in the middle of the Illinois woods about an hour outside of Chicago.
That’s where he’d been when she’d sent him away, after all.
It was a lifetime ago. Generations.
Cain leaned casually against the handlebars of his motorcycle and studied the magical shield that prevented him from riding in any closer. It sank several feet below the ground and rode up over the area in a dome.
Humans wouldn’t notice the shield. They would simply get close and have the feeling that they didn’t want to go any further. They would be strangely compelled to turn around and go the other way. But Cain saw it. This was family magic, in a way.
At least, it had been, once upon a time.
He was a different man now. The being who’d once been able to call the caster of this spell family was long gone. He’d experienced five decades of life as someone capable of facing choices and their consequences. It was forever compared to the eternity he’d spent as Fate’s puppet. And that experience fleshed him out and changed him.
He would never forget his prior existence. As a once-Nomad, the memories were indelible, even while the history of them had been forever changed. Time was funny that way, and so was magic.
But while the memories were retained, the man who’d made them wasn’t. Cain had rewritten him – and now he sat back in the saddle of his bike and contemplated the dome that was meant to prevent access to what was inside.
He switched off the bike, kicked down the stand, and turned the wheel in as he gracefully dismounted. Then he strode slowly right up to the glimmering, powerful boundary, and walked right on through.
*****
It was Diana who reached out to Evangeline the Dragon Queen, nearly finishing the loop of the private conversation that shared their clandestine design from one woman to the other. The idea had glimmered to life with the pulling of a very special trigger, and Minerva Trystaine had grasped the idea firmly and altered it just so before sending it on to the second Queen.
Each woman to receive the “message” after that then branded it with her own cast of power before transferring it to the next. At last Evangeline was left to process it.
She was chosen as the second-to-final recipient because as the daughter of a Nomad, she was strong. She was powerful enough to hold the now vast store of magic that had been built up on the spell stream by the time it came around to her.
There was a lot of magic.
Eva didn’t envy Helena Dawn her upcoming task. The new Time Queen was being thrown to the sharks on her inauguration day. She would not only have to receive the “message,” that was really a spell they had each contributed to, but direct it at last to its rightful place in order for this to work.
Evelynne D’Angelo had woven into the spell the indomitable magic of the night. Siobhan Ashdown had crafted along its fabric the ominous magic of the dead. Chloe Septeran had given it the sparkling magic of stardust. Diana Piper had granted it the coveted magic of healing.
Minerva and Selene Trystaine lent it the similar but separate magics of Seelie and Unseelie wishes. Violet Kellen shaded the spell stream with the magic of shadows. Dahlia Kellen painted it red with the magic of demons. Samantha O’Neill presented it with the adaptive magic of shifters. Adelaide Lane seduced it with the magic of the Nightmares.
Finally, Poppy Nix coated it with the hard and cold magic of Winter, giving it a crystalline and deadly sheen. And now it was Eva’s turn.
As a Nomad, she could never kill one of her own kind. So she turned to her father’s magic instead when she looked inward to grace the spell stream. There, she found the niche that was waiting for her and locked into it the draconic magic of raw, primal power.
She heard a dragon’s roar as she did, and in the outside world, she swung her long black sword with vicious and determined strength, slicing through her enemy once and for all.
Her shimmering ebon dragon armor reflected the rays of the full moon overhead like black diamonds. She felt constantly on the verge of shifting into her true form, and she had to fight like the devil not to do it. If she transformed here, she would break right through her mother’s shield, and Katrielle was having too hard a time keeping that dome up as it was.
Amunet was flooding that shield with opposing magic. She had been from the moment it had gone up. Eva could feel her mother fighting against her sister and the wayward attacks of the monsters and fighting all around. Eva could hear the feverishly whispered words of her mother’s continuous spell, even as the Dragon Queen continued to battle her own monsters.
But she finished her part of the vital message she carried and prepared to send it on. The spell was a last bastion, a one-in-one-hundred chance, but if they did everything right – it was possible. Even probable.
It was all up to Helena now.
Eva replied to the Winter Queen with a kind of “affirmative” that wasn’t a word but more like a magical mental nod to indicate that she’d safely received the spell and would pass it on. In response, she could sense her sovereign sisters preparing for the final moment. It was like a unanimous drawing of breath.
This was it.
Eva finished slicing through the next monster that attempted to climb on top of her, dropped and rolled to avoid the spray of acidic blood that came from it, and pushed once more to her feet to search the field for Helena Dawn, the Time Queen.