I forgot his father entirely until the elder mage spoke.
“Idiotic little fool,” he said savagely. “It’s not like I didn’t warn him a thousand times, since before he was ten years old.”
I turned to find Malefic Bones staring over his shoulder at his own son, disgust and fury etched into his features. He gripped an Anubis-topped cane in one hand, his knuckles white. I couldn’t help noticing the gold Anubis was bloody.
“Now I’ll have to play nursemaid until he’s of use.” The disgust grew audible in his voice. “All because he couldn’t control himself around a half-breed bitch’s cunt––”
I screamed.
I screamed again, louder, and couldn’t stop.
The tall, black-haired mage turned on me, silver eyes flashing, as if he’d briefly forgotten I was there. His lip curled. His angular features stood out in the sunlight that lit his face from one side. I saw the coldness in his expression, the calculation, the shrewdness in his eyes. I felt the hair’s breadth of silence before he decided to turn his magic on me.
I saw him start to raise his hand.
The magic I’d been gearing up as he searched the room ignited for real.
My monocersus primal was nowhere to be seen.
The sun over my head flared out in a bright burst, the tendrils of magic reaching outwards. In a bare instant, I felt the black crystal there also, flashing brighter as it merged with my sun. Together, they ripped through the black tendrils of the elder Bones’s magical shields like they were tissue paper.
The hand of mine not holding the crystal was already performing its own mudra as I muttered a curse Bones had taught me only a week before.
“Mech sveta rassekayet…”I hissed, twisting my wrist.
My curse found Malefic Bones with absolutely nothing in its way. The arm Caelum’s father had raised got hit right at the bicep, exactly at the point where I’d aimed it.
The spell severed the whole thing slantwise, through skin, muscle, tendon and bone like a sword through a silk scarf. The cut was so quick, so neat, the blood took another second to spurt after the arm hit the stone floor with a sickening thump.
It seemed to take a second longer for Malefic Bones to realize what I’d done.
He let out a disbelieving scream.
He stumbled backwards and sideways, out of the mouth of the closet door, just in time, as I threw another curse at him. I missed him with that one, another severing curse I’d aimed at his neck. The bolt whistled past and impacted the far wall, blowing a chunk out of the stone, letting through another beam of sunlight.
My rage flared hotter as I emerged from the the opening, looking for him.
I could already feel he’d rebuilt part of his shield.
I didn’t stop to think about why or how I could know that, or why I could see everything so clearly right then, as if the entire tower had been mapped out from some higher part of me, hovering far over the rest of my body.
I didn’t question how I knew his shields wouldn’t save him.
I saw the bolt coming when he aimed a heart-stopping spell at me, and I easily maneuvered out of the way, even as I threw up a much stronger shield of my own. I just missed him with a skull-cracking curse, then with a body-paralyzing spell, before he darted into the lavatory and slammed shut the door.
He’d done something to staunch the loss of blood from his arm.
He was fast, I would give him that.
It wouldn’t do him any good.
I could feel him weakening. While his current condition probably wouldn’t kill him, he was in serious danger of passing out. I suspected he’d gone inside the lavatory to buy himself time while he found some way to stop the blood-loss entirely, or even to regenerate or clone some portion of the blood he’d already lost.
Again, it wouldn’t save him.
It was strange how entirely calculating my thoughts felt.
I’d fallen into a blank, no-mind space, one that operated in pure tactics, with absolute indifference to assessing my own motives. I didn’t really know who I was in that space, or whether what I was doing was right or wrong or even particularly smart, but I knew with one hundred percent certainty what I intended to do.
