Marie’s smile went cold. “Now, why would I do that?”
Lost in the nightmarish vision Marie had trapped him in, he couldn’t see what was right in front of him—Silas. The Grand Wizard swung his staff in a half arc, and a gale sent the snatcher flying into the jutted arm of a tree. Impaled.
Ree suddenly looked up, right into Silas Favreau’s eyes. They were wrong. Reversed, in a way that made her skin crawl. Black where the whites should be, with a silvery pupil at the center, a lone pinprick of light in the darkness. “Hello again, little witch,” he said with an impish smirk.Hello again.Strange words, even for an alchemist. Because they’d never met.
The Grand Wizard reached down, offering a pale hand to her. Ree stared at the many silver and moonstone rings that adorned his fingers, the aurum burning her neck all the while, before she reeled back in disgust. “Get the fuck away from me!” she snapped.
Contrary to popular belief, she was not her mother. She’d rather cut off her own arm than work with an organization as vile as the Brotherhood of the White Hand.
The corners of Silas’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “Suit yourself, little witch.”
A round of aurum bullets shot blindly into the dark toward them. Before Ree could scream, Silas muttered a spell beneath his breath, and a filmy glow encased the three of them.
“Your majesty, if you feel so inclined to conclude this little tiff, that would be especially fucking generous of you,” Silas snapped to Marie. His pupils flared, a strange pale light against the inky darkness.
He was spent. Powerful as he was, the Grand Wizard was facing off against pure aurum, and so far, he had managed to stave off the worst of it. But it was in the air now, scattered from the gunfire, putrid to the nose.
“Of course. I just thought you might have wanted to do the honors,” Marie replied dryly.
The snatcher with the crooked smile started toward them. He fired into Silas’s armor-spell, emerald sparks flying, and little cracks began to appear in the barrier, sizzling where the aurum bullets collided withit.
“Burn in hell, you fucking witch—”
Marie crooked a hand, and the snatcher fell to his knees, his head bent in a motion that it was not designed to do. It was the weight of a thousand souls. What he couldn’t see were the tiny ghostly hands seizing him from every angle, the hands of the damned reaching out from the afterlife, forced to do Marie Laveau’s bidding. They tore at him, tiny lacerations appearing on his cheeks, forehead, and arms. Marie kept turning her hand until finally, in one viciouscrack!,the snatcher’s neck snapped.
Only one remained. Granger, Ree recalled his fallen comrades calling him. He was still on the ground where his backfired bullet had left him, one bloody hand pressed to his thigh. He couldn’t walk, much less run.
“I yield!” he cried. “I fucking yield! Take me in. Take me in to the courts and have me tried. That is the law! That is the proper way!”
Marie looked to Silas. “When will they learn? There’s not a thing proper about magic.”
Silas laughed, his eyes dangerously narrow and full of black fire. “And I suppose those little chains and collars were just a matter of civility, hm? Howproperof you, my good man. How decent.”
Silas used the toe of his boot to kick the aurum chains away. He jabbed the end of his staff into the collars, tossing them aside. Ree heard a hissing noise and smelled the pungent burn of metal; it wasthe natural interaction where the magic of the staff touched the aurum.
“There are codes. There are rules,” Granger insisted.
Marie looked to Silas. Something darkly kindred passed between their gazes.
Granger turned wild eyes on Ree. “You’ve heard the stories about these white-haired demons, haven’t you, little girl?” His eyes bulged with desperation, searching Ree’s for some hint of mercy. “Don’t you know what the Brotherhood does to your kind? Far, far worse than we’ll ever do—”
Silas tilted his staff and whispered, “Mutatio.”
The man’s words died on his tongue. Because he didn’t have a mouth anymore. In the utterance of one word, the Grand Wizard had transfigured his mouth until there wasn’t one at all, only a crooked line sewn together in odd, crisscrossed mounds of flesh. A muffled moaning rang out, the snatcher’s words incoherent. And yet Ree heard them all the same, the warning ringing in her head, the crack of a gunshot.Don’t you know what the Brotherhood does to your kind? Far, far worse than we’ll everdo.
Marie crouched over the snatcher and seized him by a handful of hair, cruelly twisting. He let out a panicked moan.
“If this were any other day and you sought to bring harm to any other witch, I might have taken you to court. I might have behaved properly,” Marie said in a low voice. “But this is not any other day, and you”—she bent low, pressing her mouth to the poor man’s ear. He shivered, and not from the wet cold of the bayou—“did not just attack some common witch.”
Ree caught a flash of something silver in her mother’s arm. A small blade, one she used for cutting herbs at the parlor. Before Ree could really understand what was happening—the sting of aurum still in her eyes and nose—Marie ran her arm in a low arc, the blade slashing across the man’s throat. Blood sprayed out. Marie released the snatcher’s body unceremoniously into the dirt. “You attacked mydaughter.”
And then the collar fell from Ree’s throat as her mother ripped it free with her bare hands. She didn’t flinch when the aurum burnedher fingertips black, nor did she care that she was still covered in the snatcher’s blood. Her dark eyes were fixed on Ree, burning with silent anger.
“Maman—”
“Not a word. Not a fucking word until we get home.” Marie looked around at the blood strewn across the bayou. The men lying in waste and wreckage. Smelled the gunpowder, the stench of their own flesh charred from the poison in the aurum. “The bodies,” Marie said with a sigh, turning to look at Silas. “There will be questions.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t.” Silas’s nefarious grin was answer enough. His white-blond hair took on an ashen hue in the moonlight, his skin so pale and glowing that it could have been chiseled from moonstone. Drops of red snatcher blood stained his silvery goatee.
