Gideon’s chilling whispers dance through the darkness, mocking.“Little goddess, broken bird, weeping daughter, never heard. No more chess for you.”
He hisses with laughter.
She remains quiet, waiting as her poker face hides her pain.
My jaw clenches as I remain close to my keeper, frost called to my fingertips as I prepare to do—I don't even know what. Unlike other wraiths, he's tangible, but my ice won’t hurt him.
“Such delicious fear, sweetest raven Maven,”Gideon sings.
Baelfire is pissed off. Blue flames flicker beneath his skin as he looks around. “Come out, you motherfucking coward.”
More otherworldly laughter bounces between the trees as the experimental wraith toys with us. Shadows shift, swirling and solidifying occasionally around the place we stand at the ready.
Crypt. Go into Limbo. He can’t see you there,Maven says telepathically.
He drops into it immediately.
“Hunting me, hunting you. Back from a grave to mourn at a grave,”the wraith taunts.“If she never loved you, she would have survived. They who love you must die.”
To underline his point, the wraith finally makes his next move. Shadows lurch towards Baelfire, but the shifter dodges aside just in time.My attention is pinned on the swirling, tactileshadows. I barely have time to notice the vague, dark figure rising up behind Silas before Maven’s etherium blade is hurtling toward it.
Her knife whooshes just over Silas's head and plunges into the center of the wraith. Gideon's hiss of pain fills the air as shadows wrap around Silas’s neck and yank out the knife all at once. The blade twists down, aiming at the fae’s chest as he’s being strangled?—
Until Crypt drops out of Limbo and slashes his own sword upward, knocking her knife free of the shadows.
Maven capitalizes on the wraith’s temporary confusion, moving faster than my eyes can register as she catches the spiraling blade and darts forward. Suddenly, I'm watching Maven bury the etherium blade into the fiend.
Gideon shrieks, and his tangible shadows try to swarm around Maven like thousands of wickedly sharp knives—but she shouts something that makes holy magic flare around her. Her spell punctures through every one of his attempts to harm her as she stabs him again, black wraith blood gushing.
Over and over and over, she stabs it.
The shrieks are deafening as what's left of Gideon falls to the forest floor, writhing in a mass of dying shadows. Maven doesn't let up even after the writhing stops, but once the wraith evaporates like all the others, my snowdrop looks exhausted.
Silas is still trying to catch his breath after nearly getting strangled, but Baelfire helps him up as Crypt and I immediately crouch beside Maven.
Fresh tears are on her pretty face as I pull her close, quietly repeating that everything will be okay.
“He's dead,” Baelfire assures her softly, glancing down at the place the wraith just was.
“You avenged her beautifully,” Crypt adds, brushing hair out of her tear-stained face.
“So she did,” a woman's voice murmurs beside us.
I don't even have words for the kind of terror that floods me just with those three words. This is a completely different kind of fear from the blind panic wraiths wield. It's controlled. Absolute. The kind of primordial fright that haunts you when you least expect it.
With my heart pounding in my throat, I peer over Maven's head to see my mother-in-law in the flesh for the first time.
46
MAVEN
The last fewminutes have been such a blur that I've only processed three things.
One, I killed Gideon.
Two, my mother is here.
Three, Lillian is dead.
