I shivered, a cold ice creeping over me.
Last twisted her hand. A black, thorny rope, dripping with venom, hovered over her hand. It twined into her palm and twisted over her arm until the thorns pierced her chest. It shuddered and writhed, twisting toward Luvic’s fragile golden ribbon.
“If anyone denies this binding,” the Bard said, “speak now, or die a thousand deaths if you later come between a couple rightfully bound.”
There was a small, frantic chirping from Luvic’s pocket. The cricket. Everyone ignored it except Last, whose mouth curled into a happy smile.
The Bard looked over the wedding hall, searching for any protest. Almost all the conjurers had slipped away. There was only Jacob now, near the back. He was fidgeting, tapping his hand against his right thigh. There was Thirteen, the Clark body, seated by himself. And there were two old men, Clark cousins, seated near the front.
Everyone else had gone.
The Bard smiled. “No one denies this binding. You may now bind your troth.”
One of the old men—the ancient, stooped Clark who looked like an old crane searching for a bug—stood and pointed to the Bard.
“You’ll bind them,” he said, his voice rheumy and shaking, “over my dead body.”
Last whipped around, her binding illusion vanishing. “Then you’ll just have to die, won’t you?”
“Smiths!” the Bard snarled.
But it wasn’t.
I grinned. They’d come.
The old man twisted his hand, heaving a giant flaming meteor across the hall.
The wedding arch exploded.
65
The explosion crashed through me in jarring, disconnected fragments. The meteor’s brilliant red flash seared my vision, and my hot-streaking tears blurred the hall, making everything fly at me in unreal, disjointed moments.
Sometimes when adrenaline is shot through your blood, the world slows, and milliseconds draw out like a drop of molten glass spooling out in a long, sticky thread. The next five seconds seemed like minutes.
A wave of furnace-blast heat slammed into me. The wind roared, flinging me backward. I soared past stone shrapnel and exploding marble. I somersaulted in the air, pelted by raindrops of burning stone.
As I catapulted with the wedding-arch stones, the two old men—Celia and Ragnor—twisted their hands in unison. A violent, swirling mass of water combined, braiding together in a long, spinning waterspout. It raced at Last. She wasn’t looking. She’d been knocked to her knees by the explosion.
I was flying past her, but Jagger’s orders yanked at me. I reached out, tugging at Celia and Ragnor’s blood knots and chain splices. Thirteen—the Clark’s body—dove in front of Last. The waterspout ripped through him. He was flayed. Torn apart. The water shredded his body into a hundred narrow strips and threw them like gray confetti ribbons through the air.
Last looked up and watched death approaching in a waterspout. I yanked the final knot free. It collapsed an inch from her bowing form.
I slammed into Primus, and the world sped up again.
We rolled together. My skull punched his chest, and our limbs tangled. He crashed into a marble column, and I crashed into him.
He grabbed me and yanked me upright. His grip was painfully tight. When he looked at me, his black eyes were flaming with an eerie yellow-green light. There was a sadistic, hungry glow in them.
“You saved my sister.”
I gave one sharp nod then spun out of his grasp.
The wedding hall was chaos. The waterspout that had nearly shredded Last wasn’t the only one Celia and Ragnor had created. Another raced to the back of the hall, toward Jacob. A third spun wildly toward the destroyed arch. It didn’t seem to have a target; it was shredding everything in its path.
Jacob laughed and leaped across the hall as if he were running across a trampoline. Each bounding step was higher and farther than the one before. He raced from the water, launching bursts of air to divert it and slow the spin. His cheeks were red; his eyes were bright. I think he was playing with the waterspout.
He was the only one who seemed to be having fun.
