I take her wrists and lift them into the air.
“Don’t I need a wand?” she asks.
“Youarethe wand. Now focus. Feel your connection to the disease.”
I drop her hands and leave her there to reach into the bodies below. Standing just far enough back to watch. The calm that settles over her face is not innocent. She’s the fighter. She’s the justice. The sword. The ghost she had to become to survive.
I watch as she begins to sow devastation. One by one, the werewolves begin to fall. The black pustules I planted in them earlier begin to erupt into fountains of rot.
Her eyes open slowly as she takes in her handiwork. “Is this me?” she asks. “Or you?”
“That’s all you, love,” I say, and I mean it. “I opened the door. You walked through it.”
I don’t tell her it’s taking an incredible amount of my power to hold the door open. She might be a living relic, but the want in her isendless. It draws from her well of power too fast.
She lifts her hands higher. A werewolf howls in pain. I smile. “That’s my girl.”
“Bastien and I were going to say yes. Before this.”
I lean against the balcony beside her. A half smile on my face. As much as I want that deal to happen, there is something I want even more. It has nothing to do with sex or disease. Maybe I’ve been inside her head for so long. Maybe it was the way she called me disgusting. But right now, the thing I want most of all is for her to be free. Free in the way I never would be.
“Let’s talk about that later,” I reassure her. “I want you sowing rot, not sowing a good time.”
She laughs. And damn her, it makes me laugh, too.
“Why sex and disease? I don’t get how those things go together.”
“Really?” I say. “Disease is the most intimate thing in the world. Next to sex.”
She doesn’t say anything. She just keeps feeling into her power. Spreading more rot. I try to temper her as well as I can, but I have to pull from my own reserves just to keep her going. But I don’t really mind. Not when she’s got this smile on her face.
“I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
She’s becoming the consequence. She wants to make them suffer. And I love seeing it. “You’re damn right you are. I knew there was a good reason why my power went to you.”
She glances my way. “Didn’t you choose me?”
I shake my head. “Once I spilled my seed inside that Kemp witch and gave her line the gift of my power, the magick took on a life of its own.”
“So you didn’t pick me for your revenge?”
Chuckling, I shake my head again. “It believed you were worthy to hold it. All on its own.”
A beat of silence passes between us. Metal clangs and werewolves howl in pain.
“You’re different from what I thought you’d be.”
I bare my teeth in a grin. “Don’t ruin my reputation.”
Her lips twitch.
I rest my hand on her shoulder to stop her. We’d gone through more power than I’d realized. “Enough,” I tell her. “You’ll burn yourself out.”
Reluctantly, she lowers her hands. The air is choked with the stench of rot.
When she glances back at me, I am part of her. I can see myself through her eyes. And I see the witch I used to be. The one who was so demonized by his coven, he started to believe he should become one. Who wanted to bring back the goddesses just to find a little joy in his life.
Who looked across the fire at Bastien and recognized something in him.
