Gifts. From the Queen of Air and Darkness.
What fresh hell was this?
The floor of the chamber rippled again, and from it rose what at first looked like a large crystal of glacier-blue stone.
And then I realized that it wasn’t stone.
It was ice. The agonizing true ice of the heart of Winter.
And bound upon its surface, and partly within it, was a very, very pregnant Justine.
She looked awful. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten healthily or enough for months and hadn’t cleaned herself properly for weeks. She’d shaved her glorious dark hair to a brief stubble. Her skin was blotchy, oily, her face was far too lean and twisted in agony, and a cage of translucent ice that reminded me of those Hannibal Lecter movie masks bound her face with her head tilted back at a painful angle. She was bent back into a spread-eagled bow, gravid belly outthrust, and encased in ice to her upper arms and to her knees.
And there was nothing I could do. It was all I could do to hold the Hunger in place, prevent it from devouring me, while simultaneously trying to ease its starvation and keep Thomas’s heart beating. If I turned my attention from that, even for a moment, it might all fly apart.
“Hear me, Raith!” Mab’s voice rang out. She drew from her belt a bronze knife.
A knife I remembered, from a Red Court ball long, long ago.
Medea’s bodkin.
“I have your haunted love!” Mab caroled. “I have your unborn son! And if you do not arise, I swear by stars and stones that I will end both lives in a single stroke!”
Chapter
Forty-Nine
The hardest part of holding together ritual magic is maintaining a balance. Most of magic as practiced by wizards comes from our humanity—our emotions, specifically. But it has to be shaped and controlled with rigid intellect, with raw focus, concentration, directed intent, and will. The state of balance between those two portions of the mind could feel like a lot of things and could be described in a lot of different ways.
But Mab had just seriously harshed my wizard mellow.
I felt the ritual magic begin to intensify, like a spinning wheel beginning to wobble, becoming more forceful and more unpredictable. Wild sparks exploded out from the anchor crystals around the circle in a myriad of colors, blindingly bright.
Lara let out a cry, shielding her eyes with one hand. “Harry?”
“Mab!” I shouted, my words emerging from my lips tortured and groaning, as though I was straining under a heavy weight. “What the hell are you doing?”
I saw her smile, far too wide, her eyes flickering through the color spectrum in mad glee. “Why, being kind, my Knight. As you requested.”
And she turned toward Justine, raising the knife over her head.
“Empty night,” Lara breathed.
And blurred toward Mab at approximately the speed of an arrow from a bow.
Mab was her match.
She seized one of Lara’s arms with her free hand without so much as looking, as if the Queen of Air and Darkness had seen this movie before and already knew exactly where Lara would be. She spun and flung Lara across about a quarter of the summoning chamber, to send her tumbling along the outside of the rounded walls. Lara spun over and over, front and back slamming against green crystal, and landed thirty feet later, stunned.
Then slowly Mab turned, and step by step, inch by inch, approached the bound Justine with that mad, too-wide smile.
I struggled to keep the ritual together, focusing my thoughts on whatshouldbe happening instead of what actually was. “Alfred!” I screamed.
And Demonreach, the genius loci of the island, rose from the crystal, ten feet of massive, cloaked, humanoid fury. Eyes of green-gold lightning blazed deep within the hood. The ground shook. Cracks appeared in the crystalline walls. The cloak flared back, away from Mab as though a gale of invisible, intangible wind emanated from the Winter Queen. The body beneath, which I had never before seen, was composed of stone and winding oak roots, of earthen muscle and sinews of green leaf and long grass.
“QUEEN OF WINTER,” boomed Demonreach’s voice from within the depths of the hood, “THOU SHALT CEASE THY ACTION.”
The spirit slammed a gnarled-root fist to the ground, cracks spreading through the crystal, and beneath Mab’s feet there was a sharp report, like a rifle, and more roots exploded up, winding around the ankles and calves of the Winter Queen, halting her in her tracks.
