“I’m not saying it’d be wise to bet on us, but the payoff will be huge if we can do this.” I leaned into him, glad to feel him beside me. This was where I was supposed to be. “Katherine will be expecting us to beg for mercy, but we’re not going to do that. She’s taken everything from us, which gives us one advantage.”
Finch frowned. “You want to enlighten us all?”
“We’ve got nothing left to lose.” Even though I said it confidently, the pseudo-premonition that the Chains of Truth had given me still nagged away at the back of my mind. Deep down, I knew we did still have something to lose. Each other. If we went after Katherine, I didn’t know if we’d ever stand in a room like this again—all of us together.
“Whoa!” Finch staggered back from my Purge beast’s jar. The beast had launched itself at the lid, making a faint dent in the metal. As it regrouped, it spread itself over every square inch of the jar in a seething mass of concentrated smoke, so thick it looked like black sand. And that glass was starting to look really flimsy.
“It can’t get out, can it?” I stared at Krieger.
“I really don’t know,” he replied. “And, I have to say, I’m getting quite scared of that thing. I’ve never seen so much Chaos in one Purge before, not even from Alton or Katherine or any other great magical. And since it hasn’t manifested as a solid, sentient being like Tobe or Naima, I’ve got to say, this appears to be something else entirely. For that reason alone, I can’t promise the jar will hold.”
I leveled my gaze at the gathered group. “We don’t have any time to waste. Right now, Katherine is ninety-nine percent Child of Chaos, but she needs my body to bridge the gap between the human and magical world and the otherworlds. Without me, she’ll end up drifting about until she’s summoned, same as the other Children of Chaos. However, we know she’s already taken her first step by taking Chaos away from people, which means her own body is still holding up for the time being. It’s a temporary bridge. At this very moment, she’s likely redistributing magic as she sees fit.”
“It’s creeping me out to think of my mom inhabiting my sister’s body.” Finch shivered. “How is she going to do that, anyway?”
“Considering she wanted me to read from the Grimoire and tortured me to within an inch of my life to get me to do it, I’ve got a feeling there’s something in the final spell that she needs in order to take my body for herself,” I explained. “It’s the most powerful spell in there, from what I could gather. It felt the most powerful. Dangerous and dark. It gave me weird vibes in a way that none of the other spells did.”
“Always go with your gut,” Dylan affirmed.
“What have you got in mind?” Garrett asked.
“Basically, we’re looking at a race against time.” I took a breath. “I need to perform the final spell first, before Katherine can get to me. This spell is supposed to destroy her, but clearly Katherine has found a way to harness its power and use it to her advantage. She wouldn’t be stupid enough to get me to read it if that wasn’t the case. So, we need to beat her to the punch.”
Levi folded his arms across his chest. “I still don’t understand what it is you expect us to do, or what you expect to do, for that matter. You can’t read from the Grimoire anymore. Presumably, Katherine will want to pour magic back into you, temporarily, if she manages to get you back, so you can read it solely for her, but what are you supposed to do without any Chaos to help?”
I shot him a cold look. “I’m glad you brought that up. I can still read the hidden pages, but I can’t read them out loud. Levi has a point there. On top of that, the text seems incomplete somehow.” I’d skimmed the page again earlier to try and distract myself from the void of having no magic. “For a spell of this magnitude, it should be longer, but it seems to stop abruptly. There’s definitely something missing, and without my Chaos, I can’t attempt a state of Euphoria.”
If I’d been able to do that, I would’ve been able to reach out to mini-me again, but that option was completely off the table. Still, I was convinced there was something missing, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“So, you’re saying you’re clueless?” Levi muttered. “Katherine is a Child of Chaos, more or less, we’ve all had our Chaos wiped from us, Isadora is dead, Louella is dead, Gaia is dead, I have to share my body with Zalaam again, and you don’t have a single clue what you’re doing. Forgive me for not leaping with enthusiasm, because that sounds like square one to me.”
Hey, I don’t see you coming up with any bright ideas.
I was about to open my mouth to reply, but the words were knocked clean out of my lungs as the jar holding my Purge beast exploded in a blast so violent it sent us all flying backward. The glass shattered. Shards rained across the ground. My first Purge erupted out, with nothing left to keep it captive.
Two
Finch
Being Billy No-Magic was going to take some getting used to. And that wasn’t the only thing. I seriously should’ve gone back to the box dye when I’d had the chance. Shapeshifting a new look always had its glitches, but my Shapeshifting had up and left, walked right out of the building and slammed all the doors on its way out. So, now, I was not only magicless, but I was also a friggin’ redhead again. I wasn’t sure which was worse. Red wasn’t my color. I was a little too Shipton with this shade, which was going to ruin my lean toward a more Merlin vibe.
Your hair isn’t really the biggest problem, though, is it? Ah, my messed-up mind, casually putting me back on the right path. No, it wasn’t the biggest problem right now, and nobody had mentioned it, which meant darling Madre—emphasis on the “Mad”—had lobotomized everyone’s sense of humor as well as their Chaos. They’d all been standing around with freaked-out stares, like they’d walked into a room and couldn’t remember why.
Oh, and to add a great, big, fat cherry of panic onto this crapstorm gateau, we now had the whole jar-shattering-and-unleashing-a-big-old-tsunami-of-black-smoke thing to deal with. Yeah, there’s that. Priorities, Finch.
At first, the smoke just hovered, no form to speak of, just a seething mass of black fog.
Then, it seemed to get an idea into its wispy head. Not that it had a head. Or a body. Or eyes. Or any distinguishing features, really. It spread out across the cabin, making me wonder if I was inhaling unseen body parts. A second later, I could barely see my own hand in front of my face as it went wall-to-wall with its rippling mass, seeping into every crevice.
“Guys?” I clamped my hand over my mouth just in case. “Everyone alive?”
“Yeah!” a bunch of voices chorused back. They sounded scared. Understandable, I guessed, since we had zero powers to fight this thing. If it wanted a fight, that was, but since it was a little ball of hate and fury and grief, that wasn’t exactly improbable.
Harley had birthed something unpredictable, and her timing couldn’t have been worse.
Right now, the foggy Purge beast wasn’t exactly letting us know what its plan was. It just seemed content to pack itself into the cabin, blocking our view of each other. But what was it plotting? A sneak attack? A mass blinding? Did it just want to freak us out? If that was the case, then it was a job well done.