“Better than the pope. Turns out an entire convent of nuns praying over a thing for a hundred years does give it a certain amount of power.”
“Oh, is that all it took.” Amelia would be happy to know why her spells never worked against Ashtoreth. She just wasn’t holy enough, obviously.
“Kitty. You need to go. We’ll talk later.”
“Yes. Yes—I have so much to tell you.” I backed away, my mind already running ahead.
“Go!” he said, and I ran. I hoped we would have a chance to talk later.
I ran on, following the scent I’d picked up before Ashtoreth attacked.
The land sloped up until I found myself at the top of a rise, looking down to where the forest curved around a stretch of open shore and a gravelly beach. Roman was there.
The vampire knelt, surrounded by lit candles, scratching symbols into the beach with a dagger. Dozens and dozens of symbols. Grant and Amelia were right—this was a complicated spell. He’d been at this for hours.
So. Now what did I do?
Attack, of course.
Wolf was right. Nothing else for it but charge down the rise and across the beach. Maybe all I needed to do was scratch out some of those symbols. Stop the spell, not the man. That was all I had to do, and whatever happened after that didn’t matter. I started down at a run.
Roman saw me. He looked up, and even from fifty yards away I could see his frown. I wasn’t supposed to be here, he was probably thinking. Ashtoreth was supposed to stop me, to guard him.
He had a dilemma now, I realized: he’d most likely been depending on Ashtoreth to zap him out of here as soon as he launched his spell, so he could avoid the blast and still be around to enjoy his new vampire-friendly world. His escape path was gone. Would he still pull the trigger, launch the volcano, destroy the world as we knew it?
He would. He did.
He stood, and in his hands he held a lamp of some kind, an ancient clay oil lamp, a primitive version of Aladdin’s lamp. A thick buttery flame burned from the spout, and the words that Roman chanted over it echoed. This was it—the Manus Herculei. It was the lamp. I was still too far away to stop him, even if all I did was run full tilt and crash into him.
I almost shouted at him to stop, but I didn’t even have time to cry out.
Roman lowered the lamp to the water, then below the surface. The light should have gone out. Instead, the flame spread, a sheet of fire pouring across the surface of the lake as if it were oil instead of water. When there was enough, the fuse would light, the caldera would ignite. This was it, all of it, down to one moment.
I yanked the Maltese cross over my head, stretched back, and threw as hard as I could. The piece of bronze flew, turning, flashing the orange of reflected firelight.
It splashed maybe thirty yards out. It’d been a pretty good throw, with my werewolf strength behind it. But the cross sank and disappeared into the dark water with barely a ripple. I could have howled to the sky, I was so angry, so full of disbelief that I had come so far and failed.
The wall of fire stopped. The flames s
topped, wavered, the sheet of fire doubling back on itself, burning waves turning from some invisible wall that had risen up to contain them. Then, the fire roared. Exploded. And I thought this was it, the ground under my feet was about to open up, a million tons of magma bursting around me, and my werewolf healing wouldn’t save me this time.
That didn’t happen. The flames compressed, flowing into another wall of fire that tightened even further, becoming a battering ram that roared straight back the way it had come. Toward Roman, still kneeling by the shore.
Fire bathed his face in an orange glow. He didn’t have time to register any kind of expression before the explosion, focused like a missile, hit him.
The shockwave knocked me over. It felt like another earthquake, and I wondered if the ground under me would ever feel solid again. Face in the dirt, I wrapped my arms around my head, braced against whatever came next.
When the world fell silent, I lay still for a long time, hardly believing that it might possibly be over. That the world was still here. We hadn’t all burned up in a primordial explosion. The air smelled of ash and smoke, burned vegetation. I was covered in a layer of dust, earth that had been shaken loose and had settled back down. I was sore, but not hurt. Battered, but not broken. The cuts and scrapes on my arms and face would heal soon enough.
In a sudden panic, sure that he was right behind me with a weapon in hand, I jumped and looked to where Roman was, where he had been, to see what he was doing now.
The beach where he’d been standing looked as if a bomb had detonated on it. Trees smashed flat, fanned away from the point where the vampire had been standing. The ground was black with soot, scorched like the inside of a furnace, to a distance of maybe thirty yards. The magical signs had all been erased.
Fascinated, I moved forward. I wanted to understand what had happened. I had to see what was left. I stepped on crackling, baked dirt. Puffs of ash rose up from my steps. I coughed at the smell of smoke.
A body lay at the epicenter of the explosion. And the body moved, twitched. Propped itself on an arm as it tried to roll over, then collapsed as the arm lost strength. It was Roman. He wasn’t dead. Or rather, he was still alive. But he was a mess, charred over his whole body, bits of skin falling away, scalp peeled back to reveal skull. His eyes still gleamed, and grimacing lips revealed pale fangs.
I heard footsteps and dropped to a crouch, balanced on the balls of my feet and a hand, ready to flee, to spring away in whatever direction I had to. For now, though, I waited to see what happened.