Silas considers that, stoops to pick up a branch nearby, and tosses it a couple of yards in front of us. The second it touches the snowy ground, it explodes into dust.
“Damn. I’m still not sure,” the blood fae frowns. “If the stick had exploded, I would have had my answer, but it’s clearly unharmed.”
I rub my scarred face. “Fucking gods, we are so screwed.”
Baelfire pats Silas's shoulder. “The stick is gone, Si. Do your thing before the asshole in there stops screaming.”
Sometimes I envy shifters for their heightened senses. I don't get to hear thenecromancer’s suffering from this distance from whatever the wisps are doing to him.
Silas calls blood magic into his hands and makes quick work of the magic snare spells, now and then snapping at the voices inhis head or flinching away from nothing. Once he's finished, we hurry closer to the cabin, and I finally start to hear it.
Hoarse, frantic screaming. Glass shattering. And then, after a few more seconds, abrupt silence.
Without speaking, we move as a cohesive team. Baelfire breaks down the door at the same time Silas throws up a protective spell around us for good measure. The second we step into the ransacked, shredded interior of the cabin, I freeze the gray-skinned necromancer from the neck down.
Dagon is covered in lacerations that ooze dark, inky sludge, like his blood is congealed. He's missing an ear that was slashed off. It looks like a whirlwind of knives just blew through here, and I realize Crypt must have let wisps loose in here.
I don't see the incubus, but there are two mummified corpses laying on the massive kitchen table near this living room. Those poor humans probably owned this remote cabin before the runaway necromancer decided to go into hiding here.
Dagon begins chanting in a strange language, sending darkness flooding into the room. Silas throws out a counter spell that pushes back the dark mist, but the other necromancer is already hissing something else that makes the ice around him crack and shatter completely.
Damn it. I tried to make it nevermelt.
Dagon makes a strange motion with his hands, and mirage-like images of him fill the room, ghostly optical illusions that crowd around us as he limps quickly toward a door.
As soon as one of the optical illusions touches me, my skin starts to bubble and blister, my skin darkening. I shout in pain as it starts to spread—but this sadistic freak of nature made a mistake in thinking I'd let him go, after everything he did to Maven.
I'm not fucking around. The metaphorical gloves are coming off.
Before he can reach the door, I swipe my blistering arm through the air, concentrating to make my rampant abilities as accurate as possible.
A wickedly sharp blade of ice cuts through the air. Dagon screams as he falls to the hardwood floor, his dismembered legs twitching nearby.
A wave of blood-red magic surges from Silas, dispelling the mirage copies of Dagon. It clearly takes a lot out of the fae, because his nose starts to drip blood. Meanwhile, Baelfire stoops to grip our now-legless enemy by the throat, dragging him closer.
Dagon reaches up to claw at Baelfire's arm with blackened fingertips. When some kind of dark magic begins gathering in his hands as he prepares to attack again, I decide to nip that shit in the bud and summon a nevermelt blade.
With two flourishes of my wrist, Dagon’s blackened hands drop to the floor, too. He screams and swears in a language I don't understand. When Baelfire roughly shoves the heavily injured necromancer into a wooden chair nearby, I finally get a good look at him.
Dagon is bony as hell and dressed in gray robes like he stepped out of a time gone by. His skin is ashier than Felix’s, and his hood has fallen back to reveal a bald head covered in dark runes. His eyes are sunken and completely colorless, just pale pools of soulless, gleaming malice.
He looks even worse when an unhinged grin bares his sharpened, yellowed teeth. “In te olfaca palmarius me ume. Im telum,” he hisses in laughter.
Silas scowls. “He said he can smell his masterpiece on us. His scourge.”
“She's not your anything,” I correct, pointing my blade at his throat.
“She returned,” Dagon manages in heavily accented English, his face beading with sweat as his dark, thick, inhuman blood begins to drip onto the hardwood floor below. “I always suspected she was more than merely mortal. My masterpiece was destined for more than my lord’s plan. I made her what she is.”
Baelfire snarls, “Shut your nasty fucking mouth and tell us where her heart is.”
Dagon just laughs again, the sound an airy hiss as he struggles in the wooden seat.
Crypt appears in the room finally. Shit—the wisps clearly got to him, too. His clothes are pockmarked with still-bleeding cuts. There's a particularly bad one on his chest.
Still, he throws down several items as he stares down Dagon. It takes a second of frowning at the items before I figure out what the hell I'm looking at.
There are a couple of braids of silky black hair.Maven'shair. Beside them are old, crusty, bloodstained bandages that Silas reacts to strongly enough for me to decide they must be covered in our keeper’s blood. There's a vial of more blood, two heavily sketched-in leather-bound journals, a broken dagger, and other odds and ends that Crypt rounded up from this abandoned cabin.
