“You know what I have to do, Raoul. You shouldn’t be there to see it.”
With a frustrated growl, he bounds up the bleachers ahead of me.
I guess I won’t be chasing his sister alone after all.
After reaching the top of the bleachers, Raoul and I rush through the exit door into the hallway. I look in both directions, but I don’t see the white wolf. My nose isn’t as finely tuned as Raoul’s, and all I can smell is wet fur and mildew.
I glance over at him. His green eyes meet mine, and I know he understands the request I won’t voice.
I need my sweet wolf boyfriend to track his sister down so I can kill her.
31The Phantom
I want to follow Christine and Raoul. They need me to be with them, protecting them. They require my constant oversight and guidance.
Or perhaps it is time to recognize that what I call protection is often obsession. They are both powerful beings with scores of their own to settle. And I have a directive from Christine to ensure that Manannan’s attack on the shifters does not become a slaughter.
Her conscience and Raoul’s must guide me from now on.
It is enough, I tell Manannan in my mind.You’ve killed enough of them.
You summoned me to your side for vengeance, he retorts.Would you abandon the task half done?
Watching the shifters thrash and struggle for their lives is disturbing. The pity unfurling in my heart is a new sensation for me. I think perhaps Christine’s sympathy for them is contagious and has infected me.
I cast aside my mask. “Stop,” I call aloud to Manannan.
He remains near the doors by which he entered, both of his hugehands lifted, his brow bent in concentration as he wields the water he summoned from the nearby river.
I do not have the power to stop him. He will continue killing, beyond reason, beyond need. Once, I would have gloried in all the death, in the influx of souls to my realm.
But I am not the being I once was.
When more waves rush into the building, the panther crouches down at my side, muscles coiled tight. Lloyd-Henry is getting ready to spring away, to change forms…to leave us again.
I won’t allow it.
The limited magic I possess is nearly depleted, and I keep mentally colliding with the barriers the blond vampire erected in my mind. But I scrape together the remaining power I can access, and when the panther leaps away from me, I throw a coil of shadow rope around his body.
He transforms into a raven, and I quickly tighten the magical lasso, managing to keep it cinched around his foot. He shifts into a stag, snapping my grip, but I hurl the shadows around his midsection as he’s bounding toward the rows of seats. I jerk him backward with all my might.
With a cry of rage that sounds both human and monstrous, he whirls to face me, changing into the shape of a huge black dog. I tighten my shadows again, preventing his escape, and he snarls, a demonic threat.
“You protected me,” I say. “Why? Why would you care about my life when you cast me aside as worse than useless?”
A voice emerges from the dog—a voice so hollow and distorted that even I feel a chill at the sound of it. No shifter should be able to speak while in beast form. The fact that Lloyd-Henry can is a grotesque distortion of everything I know to be true.
“I don’t enjoy watching the destruction of something I worked to create,” he says. “Even if it was, in the end, a deformed and impotent failure.” His head turns, watching Manannan’s waves continue to pursue and drown the shifters.
Anger coils around my heart. “Why do you consider me a failure?”
“Because you could not eliminate one small band of vampires at Wicklow. They defeated you. You, agod.”
“I was not yet at my full strength. And there was the girl, the blond vampire.”
“Little Daisy.” The wretched voice croaks from the dog’s throat. “I did not expect her to be there.”
“Her power surprised me. So much has changed since I was forced into sleep beneath the earth,” I say. “Something she told me has remained in my mind ever since that day. She said, ‘In this world, we are the new gods.’ And I believe she may have been right.”
