Echo’s pulse raced as Astra strode toward Odette and the others. “What … what are you doing?”
Echo’s skin tingled and the dagger appeared in Astra’s hand.
“No!” Echo tried to move, but the stake in her back shifted and she screamed in agony as it neared her heart.
Astra rounded a crying Margaret whose terror-struck eyes met Echo’s as the fae gripped her by the neck with supernatural strength and began murmuring in Irish Gaelic.
The air charged, a humming noise growing louder and louder in their ears.
“Astra!” Echo crawled across the ground toward her birth mother.
“Echo, please!” Odette begged. Not for her to save them but for her to stop moving.
She couldn’t.
She couldn’t just let her …
Furious, she twisted her arm behind her back to grab the stake. It burned, her flesh hissing and bubbling, and she released it with a cry. Her palm was blistered and red, the top layer of skin melted off.
Some kind of spell.
“Astra!”
Kiyo’s grunting brought her gaze across the circle. He was crawling toward Astra too, face contorted with pain as he tried to move with the silver blade in his back.
The fae’s eyes bled gold as her murmurings turned frantic, and then before Echo could grab at the stake again, Astra slashed her dagger across Margaret’s throat.
“No!” Echo’s scream would have shattered the sky if it weren’t for the golden dome that appeared over them and then spread until it covered the entirety of Arthur’s Seat and the park below. It sizzled and disappeared.
A barrier spell.
Astra released Margaret and she collapsed on her back, the blood flowing too fast from her neck. Her eyes stared unseeingly up at the heavens.
Echo felt an invisible fissure split her chest.
Odette was sobbing. Nancy tried to soothe her. Kiyo roared in fury.
Echo … Echo experienced something ancient and vengeful building up inside her, pushing through the crack in her heart to unleash itself. She dragged her gaze from Margaret to Astra, and Astra’s smile slipped at whatever she saw in Echo.
“Now, now.” She shrugged off her unease. “No need for the mercury eyes. It won’t do any good.”
The voice that came out of Echo sounded foreign even to her ears. “I’m going to rip you limb from limb.”
“You can try.”
Challenge accepted.
With a Valkyrie-like scream of outrage, Echo reached behind her, ignored her burning flesh, and yanked the stake out of her back. She stood. The pain from her injuries numbed as wrath-fueled adrenaline consumed her. She was a blur, her incisors out, and when she reached Astra, she went for the throat. Her fangs pierced her flesh, popping through the skin with ease, andEcho clamped her supernaturally strong jaw down and then tore her open.
It was enough to disorient her. To slam her body to the ground. Astra gurgled, blood spurting out of her neck and mouth.
In hindsight, Echo would have done anything for her usual control and calm.
Perhaps then she could have finished off the fae.
Instead, a bestial instinct to cause as much damage as possible took over. She pummeled Astra’s face over and over until eventually, her fist smashed into the ground.
The fae hadtraveled.
