Biting Cold (9 page)

I glanced behind us. Where was Paige? All things considered, this was really her fight. She should have been out there by now, fighting back with the magic that we didn’t have.

Another unit of gnomes stepped forward, springing a net of vines hidden in the dirt beneath Mallory’s feet. She was pulled up and into its grasp, but she quickly recovered and blasted the net into a thousand tiny wicks. The net collapsed and dropped her to the ground again with a thump.

She looked pissed.

I had been surprised by Mallory’s appearance, but that emotion paled in comparison to the shock I felt at what she did next. Without any warning to the gnomes, and without any apparent hint of remorse, she threw out an orb of magic that whipped the gnomes back like rag dolls. They hit the ground, obviously unconscious, if not worse.

And she didn’t stop with one. She threw orb after orb until she’d cleared a twenty-foot circle around her.

It was time to go for broke. I looked at Ethan, who nodded. With swords in our hands, we stepped out of the trees and prepared to do battle.

“Mallory Carmichael!” I called out. “Stop this right now!”

She rolled her eyes with the arrogance of a self-absorbed, sadistic teenager. “Walk away, Merit, or bring me the
Maleficium
and we can all leave together like one big happy family. I know you don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

She was right, but it wasn’t as if giving her the book would actually save lives. She’d already thrown aside a dozen gnomes like they were nothing more than scattered leaves.

On the other hand, if she wanted me to bring the
Maleficium
to her, maybe she wasn’t entirely sure where it was. We could work with that. I stalled, giving the gnomes time to regroup a bit.

“We’ve talked about this before,” I said. “Releasing evil isn’t going to fix you. You’ve put supernaturals and humans in danger, wreaked havoc across Chicago, and you’re AWOL from the Order. Give this up so we can all go back to our lives.”

“You know I can’t do that,” she said, and that’s when I could see it—the regret in her eyes. She knew what she was doing was wrong, but she was doing it anyway. Doing it despite the damage she’d caused and would keep causing.

“This book won’t help anything,” I pleaded with her. “It will only make things worse.”

“Really? It helped you. You got Ethan back.”

She was simultaneously right and wrong. “I’m glad he’s back, but you didn’t do that for me, and you didn’t do it for him. You used him to get what you want—and you used me to get his ashes out of the House. If he thought destroying the city was the cost of bringing him back, even he wouldn’t have paid that price.”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“I shouldn’t be dramatic? I’m not the one who landed in Nebraska to steal something that doesn’t belong to her.”

“Do you have any idea what I’m going through? What I’m feeling right now? It hurts, Merit! Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. The only thing that will make it better is balancing the magic in the world.”

I could see the pain etched into her face. And as she faced her pain, Ethan screamed out and fell to his knees, clutching his head.

They were connected. Tied together, somehow, as a result of her magic, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My heart skipped a beat, watching him there in pain and knowing I was helpless to intervene. But I could be brave and face her down, and so I stepped forward.

“This ends now, Mallory.” I stepped forward, katana at the ready. “You’ll get the
Maleficium
over my dead body.”

She looked back at Ethan, and I thought for a second I’d finally gotten through to her, that she was actually considering the consequences and implications of her actions.

But I was doubly wrong. She hadn’t been looking at Ethan…she’d been looking at Keith, the gnome of the horrendous plaid pants.

She rolled together another ball of magic, then pitched it at him. He screamed out as the shock of magic hit, but then froze for a moment.

As we all watched in horror, we realized Mallory hadn’t meant to kill or even stun him.

She meant to
change
him.

Keith began to stretch and expand. His shoulders widened, and his arms grew into tree limbs. His torso tripled, and his legs lengthened until his head rose over us to horrific proportions, from
a smiling two-foot-tall gnome to a twenty-foot-tall lumbering beast. He looked down at me and grinned menacingly through domino-sized teeth, and it wasn’t a pleasant smile.

Mal hadn’t just made him larger; she’d made him meaner.

“Oh, that is just wrong,” I muttered.

I swallowed down fear, took a defensive stance, and held up my sword, preparing for battle.

Keith stumbled toward me, hands extended as if he meant to swipe me up off the ground. The gnomes might have been spritely in their original size, but stretched and expanded like Silly Putty, he lumbered about. Of course, he was throwing a lot more weight around.

I felt miserable about striking back at him; it wasn’t his fault Mallory had turned him into a monster. So I tried other tactics. It didn’t take much effort to run around and avoid him. Although I’m sure the sight was comical—sword-bearing vampire being chased around a cornfield by a twenty-foot-tall garden gnome—I hoped I might be able to wear him out before he could do any real damage.

Todd was a little more optimistic.

“Keith, stop this!” Todd ran in front of him, arms waving. “Snap out of it, man. This girl is on your side. You don’t want to hurt her.”

I instantly forgave Todd for the kick on the shin. But if there was any bit of Keith that remembered Todd or anything else of life before Mallory, I couldn’t see it. His eyes—oversized and shaded by his giant white cap—were empty. Not just dazed, but completely void of emotion or recollection or any intellect at all.

Poor Keith.

And goddamn Mallory.

Even if we brought her back from the brink, I’m not sure I could ever forget, or forgive, what she was willing to do to get what
she wanted. But that problem assumed we would survive to bring her back, so first things first…

Keith swiped at Todd, knocking him off his feet. I held my breath, but he sat up a moment later and signaled the gnomes. They launched another attack, this time on one of their own.

While I helped Todd stand again, the gnomes peppered Keith with rocks and their few remaining arrows, but Keith was big enough to ignore the few pricks that made it through. He howled out when an arrow caught him in the shin, yanking it out and tossing it to the ground, and then stomping around to try to catch the gnome who’d gotten the lucky shot.

The battlefield silenced for a moment, and Todd’s eyes went cold. He looked up at me.

“He is gone,” Todd said. “Perhaps if we knocked him out, magic could be worked?”

I didn’t waste time arguing. I ran toward the middle of the field, where Keith was throwing clumps of dirt—and probably some chunks that weren’t actually dirt—at the gnomes around him.

“Keith!” I called out, facing him with sword extended.

He looked back, then stomped toward me.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, and when he swung down a meaty hand to knock me off my feet, I slashed out with the katana.

I caught the back of his hand. Blood splashed the ground, and Keith yelped in pain, a horrible sound that probably woke the few remaining farmers who hadn’t already been awakened by the giant garden gnome tromping around their neighbor’s land.

I paused for a moment at the sight of blood, afraid I’d be overtaken by the need to drink. But there was nothing remotely palatable about the smell of it. It smelled of dirt—not dirty, but damp and mineral. Not an altogether bad scent, but nothing I wanted to drink.

Not that Keith would have given me the opportunity to do so. Monstrous teeth bared, he wrenched in the other direction. I hit the ground to avoid the swing of his palm, but I wasn’t far enough to avoid the swing of his fingers. They hit me like tree logs, tossing me ten feet across the field. I landed facedown with a bounce that echoed through my body and radiated pain through my limbs.

There was no time to rest. The earth shook as Keith moved closer. I winced at the stabbing pain in my ribs—another rib broken, I guessed—and slowly got to my feet.

A bundle of gnomes came again to my defense, but they were soon out of weapons. Keith tossed them away like irritating gnats, then turned his gaze on me again.

He bounded toward me. Ignoring the pain in my side, I two-handed my katana and drove it into his foot. He howled with pain. When he bent over to clutch at his injury, I pulled my sword away and ran through his legs.

Before he could get his bearings, and before I had time to think better of it, I jumped onto his back and scrambled upward. My weight distracted him from the pain, and he stretched and twisted back and forth, trying to throw me off.

It was like the world’s strangest amusement ride…but all good things must come to an end.

My broken rib hardening my heart against the violence, I climbed to his shoulders, adjusted my sword, and thrust the butt-end of the sword handle into the pressure point behind his ear.
Hard
.

Keith froze, then began to fall toward the earth. I jumped away to safety, rolling across the ground while he hit the earth like a fallen tree.

The night was silent for a moment.

I brushed hair from my face and stood up again, looking around
until I found Mallory. She stood nearby, her expression suddenly horrified, her gaze on the giant gnome on the ground. He was out cold.

I wiped the mud from my katana on my pants and walked toward her, stopping ten feet away.

“Any more minions you want to create, or are you ready to face me on your own?”

When she didn’t answer, I moved closer.

“It’s me and you,” I said, only inches away. “Are you ready for that? Are you willing to kill me to get what you want?” I rotated the sword in my hand, hoping I might intimidate her at least enough to let her guard down.

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“That’s funny, because I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid of who you’ve become and who you’re going to be if you finish this the way you want to. I’m afraid you’ll never come back from it.”

“I’m not afraid,” she repeated, but there was clearly fear in her eyes. As much as she wanted the
Maleficium
—as much as she believed she needed it—she was scared.

Good. Maybe the Order had managed to talk a little sense into her in those few hours before her escape.

Thinking I was making progress, I kept pushing. “Look at what you’ve done. You’ve hurt people, Mallory, for a spell you think is going to make your life better. But if that was true, wouldn’t the sorcerers have done it by now?”

“They don’t understand.”

“Then make them understand. But with words, not by turning our lives upside down.”

No response.

“Please,” I quietly said. “Just come home with me. You can see Catcher and talk to the Order. We can try to get you back on track.
I know it will be hard, but you can do it. I know you. I know who you are and what’s in your heart.”

Silence. And for a moment, I thought I had her. I thought I might have convinced her to give up her misguided quest for peace of mind and go back with me to Chicago.

But it wasn’t to be. She suddenly looked up, like a deer scenting a predator in the woods, then looked at me.

“This isn’t over,” she said, then disappeared in blue light of her own making.

T
he world was quiet again.

“Where did she go?” Todd asked. His hat was dirty and rumpled, and his clothes were torn and filthy. He’d had a hard night.

“I’m not entirely sure.” I glanced around, momentarily panicked that I wasn’t sure where Ethan had gone. He was rising from the ground at the edge of the trees, a couple of gnomes assisting him. But he still winced at the apparent pain, and his steps were labored as he joined us.

“Are you all right?”

“Headache,” he said. “And still dizzy.”

“Is she still nearby?”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

“So you’re definitely connected to her?”

He opened his eyes again. “Emotionally, I think. I feel her anger, her stress. Her addiction.” He looked at me with apology in his eyes. “Her frustrations.”

I think he meant to apologize for grabbing me, but we could have that conversation later. “If she’s still here, where is she?”

“She didn’t make it through the trees,” Todd said. “So she couldn’t have gotten into the silo.”

“And Paige?” Ethan wondered. “Where is she?”

“And how did she miss the fight?” I quietly wondered.

But that question answered itself as soon as I’d asked it. I closed my eyes…and smelled the faint aromas of lemon and sugar.

“What is it, Sentinel?”

“Tate is here.” My heart began to pound in anticipation.

“How do you know?”

“He has a scent—lemon and sugar.” I felt stupid suggesting it—what supernatural creature smelled like sugar cookies?—but there was no denying the scent, or whom it signaled.