Hibla bared her teeth. She was some sort of shapeshifter. She claimed to be a jackal but nothing that came out of her mouth could be believed. Enhanced strength, supernatural speed, and judging by the way she held her sword, a great deal of training.
On my list of people to kill, Hugh occupied spot number two and Hibla took up spot number three. My father wasn’t willing to throw away Hugh, but Hibla was expendable. He wanted a demonstration of what I could do with the sword, and he must’ve known I couldn’t resist this bait. Very well. I would oblige.
Hibla raised her katana.
I charged. She struck from above, and I caught her blade with Sarrat. She pushed, trying to bring my sword down. Shapeshifter strength. How fun. The pressure of Hibla’s katana ground on Sarrat. I dropped my guard, she jerked her sword up to cleave my neck, and I sliced across her chest. My blade came away bloody. The blood soaked into the pale bone-metal. Thin tendrils of smoke rose from Sarrat, which was fed by my rage. My sword was furious and hungry.
Hibla stumbled back, her eyes wide. Hurts, doesn’t it?
She lunged at me, her blade fast like a striking snake. I blocked, letting her sword slide off the flat of mine. She pushed me back across the walkway, each blow hard. I would tire out before she did, but she had no idea how much anger I was carrying inside.
Strike, strike, strike. She lunged at my leading foot with hers. I shifted my balance, knocked her blade aside and smashed the heel of my left palm into her nose. Cartilage crunched. Blood gushed over her lips.
She punched me. No time to dodge. I turned into it, ducking, and took the hit on the shoulder. My left arm went numb. I kicked out at her knee. It crunched. I spun and kicked her in the head. The kick took her off her feet. She rolled back, shook her head, jumped up, and I slid Sarrat between her six and seventh ribs. My saber’s tip scratched Hibla’s heart. Not yet. No, not yet. I pulled the blade back.
She kicked at my stomach. I saw it coming and tensed, and her foot smashed against the shield of muscle. The blow knocked me backward. It felt like someone had slapped my gut with a burning hot iron. I grunted and straightened, and Hibla raised her sword. She was good and fast. But I was better.
“I’ll kill you and bring your head to Hugh,” Hibla ground out.
Not in your wildest dreams. “You’re good, but not my level of good. If you trained all your life, you still wouldn’t be good enough, because I really want to kill you. You murdered Aunt B. She was my friend.”
Hibla attacked. I blocked and sliced across her chest from left to right. She whipped about, thrusting, and I sliced her arm, severing the muscle and tendon. Hibla screamed.
“You didn’t have the decency to face her or to give her a quick death.”
I reversed the blade and stabbed her in the stomach. Hibla gurgled blood.
“She died in agony. I cared for her.”
Her leather armor was in my way, so I cut a piece of it off and tossed it aside.
“This won’t be quick. This will be painful for you. But if you ask me now, I’ll end this fast.”
“I’ll rip your heart out and eat it while you die.” She stabbed at me. Her sword grazed my side.
“Cute.” I drove her back across the walkway, slicing bloody chunks of leather off her. “I want you to understand me.”
I thrust. She moved to block but missed, and I slid the blade of my saber against her inner thigh, cutting through her femoral vein.
Her sword grazed my side and I drove Sarrat’s pommel into her face, gouging her left eye. The eyeball burst and the white of Hibla’s eye slipped onto her cheek. She stumbled and I pulled her dagger out of its sheath on her belt. Oh look, I have two blades now. The better to hurt you with.
“This isn’t vengeance.”
She shuddered and dropped her sword. Flesh spiraled up her bone. She was trying to shift. I lunged forward and sliced across her midsection, one, two, three. Her flesh smoked. Hibla’s top half careened.
“This is punishment.”
They said you couldn’t bleed a shapeshifter to death. They didn’t say anything about cutting her apart.
She lunged at me, a huge hulking monstrosity with her claws out. I ducked between them and slid Slayer through the bottom of her chin up into her deformed muzzle. Talons raked me, but I didn’t care. I plunged Hibla’s dagger into her lower abdomen, jerked it out, and broke free. She roared, baring her teeth. I swung my saber and sank into a smooth easy rhythm. The world narrowed to my blade and my target in front of it. A cut. Hibla’s hand slid off. Another cut. Another piece of flesh. She backed away, and I followed her, relentless, precise, paying her back for Aunt B, who would never see her grandchildren; for Andrea and Raphael, who had to watch her die; for Andrea’s unborn baby, who would never know his or her grandmother; for my f**ked-up nightmares . . .
A cut. A cut. A cut.
Do you want to see how cruel I can be? I will show you.
Hibla fell before me, a stump of a creature. She was done.
A man lunged onto the walkway, tall and thin, the magic flowing to him. I had felt that same magic before, just before three silver chains shot out of him and pinned Aunt B to the ground. I dragged Hibla’s dagger against my bleeding side and hurled it at the mage. It bit into his throat. I sparked the magic in my blood and the blade erupted into a dozen sharp spikes, puncturing the mage’s throat from within. His eyes rolled back into his skull. He crashed down.
I looked back at the bleeding piece of meat that used to be Hibla. She couldn’t hurt any more than she hurt already. I swung my sword and watched her head topple off her shoulders. I should’ve just left her there to suffer, but I had things to do.
I could feel Curran watching me from the doorway. I wasn’t alone. He was there with me, like a rock I could lean on. I leaned on that stare and looked up.
The dais was almost in front of me. I wiped Sarrat on my jeans and took a step forward. A wall of red pulsed in front of me. A blood ward. My father had sealed the dais with his blood. If I broke it, no person in this room would have any doubt I was his daughter.
My father’s gaze fixed on me.
It was too late to turn back. I had a sword and he was feet away. My entire life had been spent working up to this moment. I could do this. I was the daughter of Nimrod, the Great Hunter, the Builder of Towers, Hero of His People and Scourge of His Enemies. My father’s kingdom and those like it had brought about the cataclysm that purged magic from the world.
I thrust my bloody hand into the ward. It shuddered like a living thing caught in convulsions and solidified into a translucent wall of red. The people behind me screamed. The wall cracked and shattered into chunks. The pieces of the ward rained down, melting into thin air.
It didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all.
Magic spread from my father. It rose behind him like wings, like a hurricane pulled apart into shreds that could condense into a devastating storm at any second. The barrier of the blood ward had been containing it, but now the ward was broken and I felt every iota of Nimrod’s power. I forgot to breathe.
My grandmother was not completely dead, but she wasn’t alive, not in the true sense of the word. My father was alive. Semiramis’s magic had terrified me to the bone, but against this storm, her power was a mere shadow, a candle caught in the blinding glow of an industrial floodlight. It was the kind of power that could pick up chunks of skyscrapers and fuse them into Mishmar.
If that power turned against me, it would destroy me. He would simply will me out of existence and I would disappear.
So this was what Hugh meant when he said I couldn’t win.
I had no chance. No chance at all. If I lunged at him now and tried to bury Sarrat in his heart, I would simply stop being, as if I had never existed. I felt it with complete certainty, the same certainty I’d feel if I stood on the roof of a high building and looked at the hard pavement below. To jump was to die.
Christopher and Robert would die a second or two after me, Curran would never leave this place, and Atlanta would fall.
“Do it!” Voron screamed at me in my mind. “Do it! Kill him!”
I felt no fear, just an utter calm. Things became really simple. If I tried to kill my real father, everyone else, especially the man I loved, would pay the price. I could feel Curran’s gaze on me. There were people waiting for me to protect them from Roland in Atlanta. I couldn’t throw my life away. It wasn’t completely my own anymore.
I stopped and stood still. It took all of my will.
My father was looking at me and his eyes told me he knew what I was thinking.
“Do it!” the ghost of Voron roared. “This is what you worked for. This is why I trained you!”
Something fluttered inside me and I realized it was hope. I wanted to live. I wanted Curran to survive this. I thought of him. I thought of Julie. Of Derek and Ascanio. Of Andrea and Raphael. Of Jim. I wanted to bring Robert back to Thomas. I wanted Christopher to smile again and tell me he was trying to remember how to fly.
Death is forever. Death is nothing. But to save a life, that’s everything. My mother understood this and now I finally did, too.
Voron had a purpose for me, but it was his purpose, not mine. I loved him, I still mourned his death on his birthday, and I was grateful because he made me what I was. But I was done living for someone else’s purpose. I had to live for mine. I had people to protect. Curran had sacrificed everything to save me from Mishmar. Now I would sacrifice my vengeance to save him from the Swan Palace.
I walked up the dais and put my hand on Robert’s shoulder. “I claim them.”
My father nodded slowly. “Take them.”
The two men rose, their eyes still glassy. I turned and walked back along the gore-splattered walkway. They followed me, two androids on autopilot. At the doorway Curran looked at my father one last time.
“I’ll see you both in Atlanta,” my father said.
Curran smiled, his eyes like two burning moons. “If you want a war, we’ll give you one.”
I passed him and kept walking, out of the room, out of the garden, into the winter, Christopher and Robert following me and Curran guarding our backs. Nobody stopped us.
• • •
I MARCHED ALONG the cobbled road, Robert and Christopher following me. They still wore the warm clothes they had brought to break me out of Mishmar, but I had left my jacket in Landon’s car. The cold was scraping the flesh off my bones.
I had met my father. I had met him and survived.
I’d failed Voron. I should’ve killed Roland, but I had walked away and I’d done it deliberately. I’d betrayed Voron’s memory. And I didn’t care. I lived. We all lived.
I felt free.
“We survived,” I whispered. The words tasted strange. “We survived.”
Curran picked me up and kissed me, his lips burning mine.
“I killed Hibla,” I told him.
“I saw,” he said. “Do you feel better?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to have a nice dinner with Martina when we get back,” he said. “I think that would be a really good idea.”
Ahead a steady pounding of hooves announced an approaching horse. A cart rolled into view, pulled by a roan horse. Naeemah held the reins. I sped up.
“Get in!” she called.
Shit. “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t have come.”
“I went to get a cart.”
Oh no. I turned back to look at the palace. “She didn’t know she couldn’t come with us.”
Silence reigned.
“She didn’t know.”
No answer. Somehow I didn’t think it would matter.
“Get in,” Naeemah called.
“Climb in,” I told Christopher and Robert. The two men didn’t move.
Curran picked them up and set them into the cart one by one. Naeemah pulled a blanket out and threw it at me. “Here. Come before Roland changes his mind.”