I snorted. “No, you weren’t. You’re in agony.” Her face was pinched, her eyes narrow with pain. She’d fooled me about many things, but I knew what someone looked like when their head hurt so badly they could barely see.
“It doesn’t matter. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.” She held her hand out to me, palm up. She shook her arm, and a tiny creature with far too many legs skittered out from her sleeve and clung to her finger. “I’m not convinced you do anymore.”
I wasn’t confident I had the strength left to grow my hair a single inch. But surely someone remained with the power to oppose her. Where were my sisters and their spouses? I had to have stopped Angelique’s creatures in enough time to save them. I must have. And she couldn’t have killed every last one of the hunters. Could she?
Sam lay at my feet in mute contradiction to my hopes.
If the swelling causes the brain to herniate, then death is the most likely outcome, usually within minutes.
It was possible that as we spoke, his brain was squeezing itself out through the opening in his occipital bone, where the spinal cord enters the skull.
The tiny monster in Angelique’s hand looked at me with dark, liquid eyes as she brought it closer.
In the swirling dust behind her, a shadow moved.
“I’m rather proud of this one,” she said. “Scorpion mated with a blue-ringed octopus.”
I carefully didn’t look at the figure making its way toward us. I kept my eyes on the little abomination.
“What does it do?” I asked.
“First the sting causes paralysis, then it dissolves your internal organs. Very tricky to get it right. It took hundreds of tries.”
“I think I could outrun you.” I wasn’t sure of that. My feet felt as heavy as blocks of lead.
Angelique shrugged. “Go ahead.”
I didn’t move. Whether or not I was capable of running, I had no way to carry Sam with me. There was still a chance he would live.
“Or you can stay and let it bite you, if you’d rather,” she said. “It’s a pity, really. You taught me so much. I honestly thought that you and I had something—”
She gasped. Her expression became one of perplexity, as if she had been presented with a riddle she couldn’t quite solve. She glanced down at the steel blade protruding from her chest. When she opened her mouth to say something, blood came out, first in a dribble and then in a flood. Angelique dropped to her knees, slid off the sword, and fell over sideways.
“Stop trying to kill my boyfriend,” the hunter behind her said.
Jack dropped her sword, and it clattered to the ground. Her tunic was so drenched with her own blood it looked red ratherthan green. After a bleary, unfocused look in my direction, she collapsed on top of Angelique.
Angelique remained motionless, not so much as an eyelash fluttering.
Stabbing had been her weakness after all.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Happily Ever After
First things first. The scorpion octopus had fallen from Angelique’s hand. I eyed it warily.
The creature flopped in my general direction. It moved awkwardly, flinging its tentacles ahead and then rolling over them in a kind of drunken zigzag. A light breeze sprang up, stirring the dust. The little monster lost its balance and tripped over its own limbs.
I frowned. Was this really the deadly killer she’d described? She hadn’t used it in any of her assassination attempts. Could it have been a bluff? A failed experiment or one not yet ready for use? Perhaps she’d wanted nothing so much as for me to panic and run.
I didn’t care to find out. I stomped on it. It squished beneath the thick leather of my boot with a satisfying crunch. No sting penetrated the sole; I was not stricken with paralysis, nor did my internal organs dissolve.
The breeze had picked up, gradually dispersing the haze. Iwondered if Kit had survived or if it was simply the weather. Finding out would have to wait—I had patients in front of me. I took a breath to steady my nerves and tried to give the situation a calm assessment, as my mother and father had taughtme.
Angelique was dead. Jack’s sword had pierced straight through her heart. She hadn’t even been slain by magic, no curse that might be reversed. There was nothing I could do for her.
While my impulse was to attend to Sam, there was hardly anything to be done for him. Either his brain was swelling inside his skull, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, he might wake and be fine in a couple of minutes. If it was, he would die.
