‘Youdid this,’ shouted Lio, tugging the knife back. Opal slapped Lio across the face, her talons drawing blood. Lio began to cast a portal, but Opal seized him with her magic, the force pinning him against the concrete floor.
‘Opal,’ begged Cate, her voice shaking as she approached. She grabbed at Opal’s shoulders. ‘Darling, please. This violence is not you.’
‘Be quiet, Mother.’
‘What can we do?’ hissed Moira.
‘Sweetheart,’ said Cate, ‘how can we help?’
‘You can go away and die.’
Casimir sent a slice of violent magic at Opal but Cate dove before it, blocking the spell.
‘Don’t you dare!’ shouted Cate at Casimir. She seized Moira’s hand, and together they sent a shock of lightning at Casimir so powerful he could not evade it. Casimir, who had made to leap behind the enormous tank, was shot down mid-air. He let out an anguished scream.
Catherine Weyer smirked at him.
‘You should have told us that Opal had no contract,’ said the leader of the witches of Acanthi. She darted forward. She cried an enchantment in the language of the spirits, drawing from the man’sblood which still stained her hands, and cast the spell. The magic hit Casimir full in the chest.
Casimir screamed. He buckled and curled in on himself. Wings sprouted where his arms should have been. His nose turned black, morphing into a long, sharp beak. His belly bloomed. His tattoos turned to feathers. He cawed and flapped, and suddenly there he was, a crow the size of a man.
The huge crow swooped at them, and he pierced Moira’s throat with his beak.
Cate shrieked and lunged for her fallen sister. Lio looked away just as Moira’s throat was ripped out by the monstrous corvid.
Opal watched on for a moment, stunned. Then she looked down at Lio and calmly took the bread knife. Still, her magic pinned him down.
‘Compassion?’ she hissed. Her monstrous form stood over him, scales covering all but the very centre of her chest and her delicate face. ‘You should have killed me, Lio, you weak, little boy.’
She raised the bread knife.
Lio tried to fight her magic, but the repulsion rune was gone from his hands and his chalk was unreachable and his pneumonia-rattled body was so tired. He pictured the rune fortransportation. He reached; he strained his arms and tried to cast, but Opal was sat on his chest, and he could hardly draw breath. In the background, Cate was screaming at the crow, Casimir. He had blood on his beak; Moira lay dead on the cement beside them. Lio coughed, wetly, choking as he did. No magic came to him.
He tried again.
He strained.
Opal watched this, knife poised above his chest, ready to end it.
He closed his eyes.
Robert Liutprand Lashkari took a final, strained breath and prepared for the dagger to drive into his heart. In that flash ofseconds, he realised that he was quite afraid to die. He considered himself a gentleman and he had believed, always, that he would meet death with bravery. Now, he choked on the grief of its arrival.Already?His heart cried out as it leaped at his chest like a child at the window of a building, burning.I’m not ready.He should have sent letters to his mother and father. He should have visited that dumpling restaurant on Wren Court. Was there an afterlife? Would Rupert be there?
Lio braced for it.
He said goodbye.
The knife came down.
And as it did, a blast of magic struck. Opal toppled off him. The knife clattered to the floor. Lio opened his eyes.
Cate was across the room, one arm outstretched. Her face was drained of blood.
Her daughter had almost murdered him.
Exactly as Cate had almost murdered her daughter.
And Lio, in one swift glance at Cate, understood that for all Cate’s love of her daughter, she could not bear to let Opal perform the same crime that she almost had.
