2 Witch and Famous (14 page)

“Say it, Niall,” I said. “
Say it
. You killed Jessica. You came here to kill Victoria.”

“Victoria?” Niall’s eyes widened slightly. “You know about Victoria?”

“Of course I know about Victoria. She’s Jessica’s lover, and you came here to finish what you started.”

“No, Elle, you don’t understand—”

Niall didn’t finish that sentence, because in that moment I felt something I had felt before, on the way back from Arthur’s Seat. The laser-like focus of someone staring down the sight of a gun. Having been shot at once, it wasn’t a feeling I was ever going to forget.

 “Niall! Look out!”

I threw myself flat on the ground as the first shot skittered off the crenulations. Niall did the same. What sort of idiot shot at people standing in a castle? Particularly one where there were still soldiers garrisoned, more than capable of shooting back, even if the majority of people still thought of it as a tourist attraction?

I huddled in behind the cannon, using the bulk of it as a barrier. Niall did the same.

 “Who is shooting?” Niall asked me, and I realized that I could hear him normally. As opposed, for example, to being in the middle of a screaming crowd of terrified tourists. Apparently, our efforts to avoid being seen extended even to being shot at. It was a surreal situation, sitting there, frightened for my life, while just below a tour guide continued to talk about James VI and I.

“Probably the coven,” I snapped back at him. “It’s happened before.”

“What? When? And you didn’t
tell
me?”

“You do
not
get to play that card. Not now.”

“You didn’t tell me that something like this had happened? Elle! Please…”

“Stay down! They aren’t done yet.” I could still feel that narrow flicker of concentration moving over the battlements around us. The moment one of us moved, we would be a target. “This would be a really good moment to tell me that an enchantress’ powers include an immunity to bullets that I don’t know about.”

Niall didn’t have an answer for that and for the first time, I felt a tendril fear emanating from him.

“No,” he said, “we aren’t invulnerable. We can heal quickly, if we have the energy. We can be faster and stronger than humans. A bullet that does enough damage, though…”

I understood. Even with all the power at our disposal, we could be dead before we had a chance to recover.

“There,” Niall said. “More of them.”

I looked where Niall was looking. A quartet of people was pushing its way through the crowd, against the general flow. I recognized Rebecca at their head. There were two women and a man with her, or rather, two witches and a warlock.

 “Battle witches, probably,” Niall said, with a glance down at them. “A coven hit squad.”

It made sense. The shooter had to be with them. After all, who else could it be? This was Scotland, not the Wild West.

 “Will this never be over with the coven, Elle?” Niall asked.

“I tried to make peace,” I pointed out. “I tried, and then
someone
had to go around attacking people.”

“I have already told you—”

“Forget it, Niall,” I said. Rebecca and the others were blocking the closest exit, straight down the nearest stairs. There were the ones further back, from which we could have disappeared into the corridors and twists of the castle, but standing to reach them would have exposed us to the sniper. We needed another option. A distraction.

I felt the cold iron of the old cannon beneath my hands, and I suddenly knew what I needed to do. Of course, if I did it, Niall had as much of a chance to run as I did. I didn’t care right then. I might not know what
I
was going to do when it came to Niall, but I knew that the coven
certainly
wasn’t getting to kill him.

 “Get ready to run down the far stairs,” I shouted to Niall, simultaneously stopping my distraction for the crowd. “We can sneak down through the castle.”

I pulled in energy from the people around us as fast as I could, trying to shape it, but mostly just forcing the magic down into the cannon until…

The cannon went off, but just saying that wasn’t sufficient to cover the sheer power of it so close. With the magic running through it, what came out wasn’t the simple boom of a blank round. Instead, color and power burst out, exploding above the city streets. The recoil from it was enough to blast Niall and me from our feet.

As we scrambled to get our arms and legs untangled, the tourists yelled as they saw what came out of the mouth of the cannon and shot into the sky above us. The tourists were used to smaller cannon blasts to mark the hours, but this was on another scale. A whole fireworks display compressed into one roaring burst from the beast of a cannon that we had hidden behind. Everyone in the castle stared up at it, and about half of them started to applaud the unexpected entertainment. The other half were just yelling.

My ears were ringing from the boom, but I managed to turn to Niall.

“Run! Now!” I yelled, sprinting for the stairs.

I stopped at them, looking back when it became obvious that he wasn’t following.

Instead, he’d gone the other way and I felt the invisible thread stretching and breaking as he went away from me. I cried out, shocked to see him heading straight toward Rebecca and the other witches. Instead of running from them, he moved forward like the predator he was, obviously ready for battle. It seemed insane. Physically, even Niall shouldn’t have been able to stand up to four trained combat witches at once.

It was only then that I realized that he didn’t plan on this being physical. I felt him twisting the emotions of the crowd as he went. And not in a good way.

“No! Niall,
don’t!
”

My protest came too late. I could feel the ugliness of the crowd’s emotions as Niall altered them, taking the feelings of ordinary, pleasant people and pouring anger into them until it overflowed. So much anger that it was hard to see where he could have gotten it all from. Was that really how he felt?

I didn’t have enough time to focus on that though, because I was too busy watching as Niall transformed the crowd below into something closer to a mob. A mob that he focused, shaping their anger, directing it at his enemies. I could see the crush of angry tourists as they started toward Rebecca and her cronies, their eyes narrowed with malicious intent and their fists ready. Old, young, it didn’t matter. Grandmothers, students, mothers with toddlers, foreign tourists with too many cameras, they all came forward in a rush.

Rebecca knocked one of them back with a push of force, but there was only so much she could do while still being subtle. Hands grabbed for her, pulling at her, shoving her. I saw a big man in work clothes throw a wide, swinging punch at the warlock.

Amazingly, it connected. More than that, it connected hard enough that the warlock went down before he even had a chance to use his magic. What kind of combat-trained warlock couldn’t block a punch? Immediately, someone else threw a kick and he yelped.

Briefly, I thought about leaving Rebecca and her people to their fate at the hands of the crowd. I had warned the coven about what might happen if they came after us. I had warned and warned them, holding back even when they attacked us. Even so, I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I walked away now. I couldn’t leave them. Not if I wanted to go on living in Edinburgh. Not if I wanted to be able to live with myself, either.

So, I rushed down there, reaching for the same emotions Niall had used, trying to untangle what he had tangled up. It was nearly impossible to do anything cleanly, especially with so many people around me, jostling and pushing as I tried to force my way through them. Niall had decades more experience than I did. So I didn’t try to do it cleanly. I just did what I had to do. I got in there like it was a mosh pit at a club and I sucked the emotion out of the air.

I took all the emotion I could take, dragging in the hatred and the anger of the mob, swallowing it down and trying to transmute it as it went. I couldn’t permanently hold the emotions of a crowd. They would snap back to their owners like elastic. I couldn’t feed off them, I couldn’t take away the anger, but I
could
hold all that bile and resentment Niall had thrown in for a few seconds at least, giving people a chance to look around and wonder what they were doing.

People stopped in the middle of assaulting Rebecca’s witches, looking around, bewildered and half-ashamed.

I breathed out, and with it, I breathed out calm, peace, and  love. As much of it as I could manage without emptying myself completely. I took the energy of the anger, changing it, soothing it as I breathed that energy back out.

It wasn’t as skillful or subtle as Niall’s manipulation, but I knew I had the advantage when it came to the sheer power I could handle. I twisted back what he had twisted, not through skill but through simple volume of effort, pouring out calm until it didn’t feel like there was anything left in me. It was like exhaling a breath, then keeping going far beyond my lungs’ capacity.

Even so, it took time to do it. A mob has its own momentum, and by the time I had defused this one, Rebecca’s team didn’t look too good. The warlock on the ground was bruised and bloodied—he was breathing but unconscious. One of the women had what looked like a broken arm. None of them was uninjured. This close, they didn’t look much like members of a crack assassination team anymore, either. They all looked too frightened, too injured. Too ordinary. Between the four of them, they should have been able to deal with the crowd far better, if they had been trained.

Rebecca was the least hurt of all of them. When she saw me looking back at her, she flinched but did not run.

“This is the second time you’ve come after Niall and me,” I said, walking right up to her.

She grimaced and swallowed hard. She started to say something, but I didn’t give her a chance. Instead, I lashed out with a wave of emotion that sent her reeling back against her friends. Any more, and it might have sent her mad. I didn’t care. I wanted her to know that there would be a reckoning.

Then I set off after Niall, hoping that I could catch up with him before he disappeared into the city crowds. Most of all, I hoped that I could catch him before he hurt anyone else.

Niall was truly gone by the time I got back out onto Castle Hill, the traces of him lost in the sea of human emotions all around me. That, or I simply couldn’t bring myself to look for him as hard as I had on the way to the castle. I didn’t want to fight him. I certainly didn’t want to kill him. Yet, with everything he had done, what else was there for me to do?

Maybe I could force him to go away. To go far, far away and never come back. To go somewhere on the other side of the world, where I wouldn’t have to worry about what he was doing. Where I wouldn’t have to think about him.