The gun was special, but even this particular gun and its bullets couldn’t harm Amunet. Not really. Mortal wounds had ended her in the past, but she’d almost always allowed them to do so, just so she could come back in another form. And right now the Nomad was amped up, fortified by layers of furious, vengeful magic. Those layers slipped and slid off her in a torrent of nearly suffocating wrongness.
Even if Helena did manage to kill her, Amunet would just come back again. Like the Promised One. They had something in common.
Helena couldn’t kill her on her own. As Amunet had said, that much had been foreseen. It would take all Thirteen of the Queens.
So Helena just swallowed hard and kept her gun where it was, her mind spinning. The Nomad cocked her head to the side and regarded her with equal parts curiosity and hatred. “What does it feel like to finally have closure?”
Chapter Fifty-five
Minerva Trystaine’s head snapped up where she had landed on her hands and knees in the dirt, her attention captured by the exacting call of vengeance. She found and zeroed in on the new Time Queen across the field, then watched as Helena Dawn pulled the trigger of her oddly older modeled gun, taking down the monster in front of her.
Then she shot him again.
As a Wisher, Minerva instantly recognized the acquisition of revenge, the doling out of long-awaited justice. She recognized it even at this distance. Even as she rolled to avoid the sharp ruby-like horn of some kind of wicked unicorn as it shoved its horn into the ground beside her, Minerva managed to scramble to her feet and turn back around.
She refocused on the Time Queen. Her gaze slid again to the gun. Minerva felt something special coming from that weapon. There was more to the revolver than met the eye.
It was not of this world. Minerva was a fae who had been living in the human realm for years before she realized who and what she was. As a changeling, so to speak, she recognized the sensation of matter existing in one place – when it was formed in another.
That gun in Helena Dawn’s hand was from the alternate dimension, the one that had collided with the world they were in now and freed the Queens from their safe world bubbles. Minerva was sure of it.
She ducked and rolled again as the unicorn-Pegasus with the pretty and deadly horn rushed her. Then she turned her attention again to the gun. Yes. The gun was perhaps in fact the only thing from that by-gone world that had made it into the new one completely unaltered. In that respect, it shone like a light in the darkness.
And it gave her an idea.
It was a wonderful, hopeful, barely and probably not possible idea. But it was worth a shot. And what was more, at the moment it was all they had. The Thirteen Queens somehow needed to work together to end this fight once and for all and defeat Amunet and Ahriman. That gun might just be the way.
She wondered how many bullets were left in it. Don’t use them, she thought desperately at Helena and wished she could somehow get the message to her new sovereign sister.
Suddenly, Helena Dawn turned her head slightly as if she’d heard Minerva.
Holy shit, Minnie thought. But… did…. Either her wishing power was no longer solely revenge-based in this new world, ooooor – and this was far more likely – Helena possessed the same ability to read minds that William did. It was most likely limited when it came to powerful minds like those of the sovereigns or Nomads, but if she wanted to hear someone? And if the person trying to reach her wanted to be heard?
We have contact, Minerva thought with an almost-smile. The smile never fully formed, though. Her arms were bleeding in too many places, and she could feel the poison from the purple gas beast she had fought earlier still trying desperately to work its way into her fae body. The poison would fail; she was immune to poison. But it fucking hurt in the process. And before she could even get once more to her feet, yet another Dark World monster was all over her.
She spun to face her new foe. But as she did, Minerva simultaneously sent out messages to her other sisters, hoping they too would hear her.
*****
Helena heard a voice in her head, desperate but kind. It was a voice she instantly liked, even though she’d never heard it before. She immediately knew it was one of the other Queens.
Her name is Minerva, she told herself, coming by the information as Time continued to slowly feed her the history of the multiverse. Minerva was the Unseelie Queen, sovereign of the Dark Fae. And she’d told Helena not to use her remaining bullets.
Before Helena could understand why Minerva wanted this, much less respond to the request in any capacity, the Unseelie fae was gone from her mind, no doubt caught up in yet another battle with the monsters that continued to pour forth from the Dark World.
That door that she’d inadvertently opened in the alternate dimension was still open. The dome above them here covered their fight, shielding the raucous from the rest of the mortal world, but that shield and the power they were all exuding only acted as a beacon to the supernatural, drawing ever more Night Terrors to their location as they escaped.
We need to shut that damn door, she thought manically. The monsters would just keep coming and coming. But more pressing at the moment was the monster standing in front of Helena.
And she’d thought facing the Terror would be bad. The Nomad was absolutely petrifying in comparison. And she’d just asked Helena a question.
Helena struggled for a moment, trying to process what the ancient evil woman with the crazy glowing eyes had asked her. She wanted to know how it felt to have closure, Helena reminded herself. Closure, she thought, glancing down at the dead Terror.
Ah. I see.
If only to buy herself and the other Queens more time, she answered. “I’m… honestly ambivalent,” she said.
Amunet’s brow rose. “Oh?”
But Helena offered no further information, forcing the Nomad to ask another question instead. “How so?” Amunet asked. It was clear she truly wanted to know. “You’ve just destroyed the man who ruined your childhood. How can that be anything but satisfying?”
Helena waited a beat. Then she lowered her gun – she wasn’t supposed to use the last two bullets anyway – and actually thought about it.
The truth was, she didn’t feel any different. Her mom was still gone. She’d still suffered. Her father had still died. She’d still been orphaned and raised by her sentinel. Nothing had changed. Hell, she’d always believed the Terror was already dead. She’d only learned differently a few short minutes ago.
“Everything’s the same,” she admitted. “Whether he’s dead or not. It all still happened.”
*****
Evelynne D’Angelo looked up when Chloe Septeran called out her name from across the field. The moment she made eye contact with the blue-eyed Akyri, information was magically passed from one of them to the other.
They were playing telephone tag, in a way. That was the impression Evie had as the line of reasoning filtered into her brain, followed by instructions to pass it on. She almost laughed at one point, when she recalled playing telephone tag with classmates in fourth grade. If tonight’s message turned out anything like the message that had been botched in that class, then Minerva’s instructions to Helena could sound something like donuts snooze fast mullets instead of don’t use the last bullets.
So for all their sakes, and for mullets everywhere, Evie desperately hoped that wasn’t the case.
Chloe had been charged with contacting Evie because Evie was a warlock and Chloe was an Akyri. It was natural for things to pass from Akyri to warlock, especially magic things. So Evie absorbed the magical stream of communication as she struggled with the half-vulture, half-wolf looking thing that was determined to pull out her liver. When the message was fully sent and received, she tried her best to send back a mental nod. An affirmative of sorts.
Then she began casting a spell to help her with the monster she was fighting, and at the same time she reached out to the next Queen.
*****
Amunet regarded
Helena for a few piercing, tense, and silent moments. All around them, discord reigned. Lightning began to eat away at the dome overhead, and Amunet spared a withering glance at her sister, the redhead, where Kat sat hunched and closed-eyed behind the tree a few feet away.
Amunet was well aware of the other Nomad’s shielding spell. And Helena could tell Amunet fully planned to do away with it. But at the moment, Helena and what she had to share were just interesting enough to be more pressing than that.
So Amunet turned back to Helena and asked, “Why didn’t you set it right?”
Helena blinked, her brow furrowing. “Set what right?”
Amunet looked truly confused. And that confusion seemed to feed her anger because her voice steadily rose as she talked. “You had Time in your grasp. When you became Queen, you had the power to go back and re-write history. Just once! You could have saved your family. You could have stopped this monster then and there,” she said, gesturing to the dead Terror at their feet. “But instead, you took my son from me.” She shook her head. Her tone dropped to something barely more than a whisper. “Why?”
Helena felt slightly stunned. Amunet’s question rolled through her, and she realized that the answer was even more stunning. The truth was, it hadn’t even occurred to her that she could change things for herself. It hadn’t been important.
“Because it wasn’t about me,” she said with the same honesty she’d shown Amunet all along. “It was about Cain.”
Chapter Fifty-six
The fury leeched out of Amunet’s pretty features, leaving them relaxed but thoroughly confused. “Cain?” she repeated, not understanding. “What do you mean it was about my son?”
Helena’s gaze narrowed on the woman. “You honestly didn’t know?”
Amunet still looked confused, but a flash of defensiveness moved across her eyes now too. She didn’t say anything. So Helena spelled it out for her. “Amunet, your son was miserable,” she told her softly and with a shake of her head. “He was Death, and he took that curse with him everywhere he went. And in the end… he was so tired of it, he just wanted to die.”
*****
He’d known they would be here. For fifty years, he’d known it would all go down once and for all in a big field in the middle of the Illinois woods about an hour outside of Chicago.
That’s where he’d been when she’d sent him away, after all.
It was a lifetime ago. Generations.
Cain leaned casually against the handlebars of his motorcycle and studied the magical shield that prevented him from riding in any closer. It sank several feet below the ground and rode up over the area in a dome.
Humans wouldn’t notice the shield. They would simply get close and have the feeling that they didn’t want to go any further. They would be strangely compelled to turn around and go the other way. But Cain saw it. This was family magic, in a way.
At least, it had been, once upon a time.
He was a different man now. The being who’d once been able to call the caster of this spell family was long gone. He’d experienced five decades of life as someone capable of facing choices and their consequences. It was forever compared to the eternity he’d spent as Fate’s puppet. And that experience fleshed him out and changed him.
He would never forget his prior existence. As a once-Nomad, the memories were indelible, even while the history of them had been forever changed. Time was funny that way, and so was magic.
But while the memories were retained, the man who’d made them wasn’t. Cain had rewritten him – and now he sat back in the saddle of his bike and contemplated the dome that was meant to prevent access to what was inside.
He switched off the bike, kicked down the stand, and turned the wheel in as he gracefully dismounted. Then he strode slowly right up to the glimmering, powerful boundary, and walked right on through.
*****
It was Diana who reached out to Evangeline the Dragon Queen, nearly finishing the loop of the private conversation that shared their clandestine design from one woman to the other. The idea had glimmered to life with the pulling of a very special trigger, and Minerva Trystaine had grasped the idea firmly and altered it just so before sending it on to the second Queen.
Each woman to receive the “message” after that then branded it with her own cast of power before transferring it to the next. At last Evangeline was left to process it.
She was chosen as the second-to-final recipient because as the daughter of a Nomad, she was strong. She was powerful enough to hold the now vast store of magic that had been built up on the spell stream by the time it came around to her.
There was a lot of magic.
Eva didn’t envy Helena Dawn her upcoming task. The new Time Queen was being thrown to the sharks on her inauguration day. She would not only have to receive the “message,” that was really a spell they had each contributed to, but direct it at last to its rightful place in order for this to work.
Evelynne D’Angelo had woven into the spell the indomitable magic of the night. Siobhan Ashdown had crafted along its fabric the ominous magic of the dead. Chloe Septeran had given it the sparkling magic of stardust. Diana Piper had granted it the coveted magic of healing.
Minerva and Selene Trystaine lent it the similar but separate magics of Seelie and Unseelie wishes. Violet Kellen shaded the spell stream with the magic of shadows. Dahlia Kellen painted it red with the magic of demons. Samantha O’Neill presented it with the adaptive magic of shifters. Adelaide Lane seduced it with the magic of the Nightmares.
Finally, Poppy Nix coated it with the hard and cold magic of Winter, giving it a crystalline and deadly sheen. And now it was Eva’s turn.
As a Nomad, she could never kill one of her own kind. So she turned to her father’s magic instead when she looked inward to grace the spell stream. There, she found the niche that was waiting for her and locked into it the draconic magic of raw, primal power.
She heard a dragon’s roar as she did, and in the outside world, she swung her long black sword with vicious and determined strength, slicing through her enemy once and for all.
Her shimmering ebon dragon armor reflected the rays of the full moon overhead like black diamonds. She felt constantly on the verge of shifting into her true form, and she had to fight like the devil not to do it. If she transformed here, she would break right through her mother’s shield, and Katrielle was having too hard a time keeping that dome up as it was.
Amunet was flooding that shield with opposing magic. She had been from the moment it had gone up. Eva could feel her mother fighting against her sister and the wayward attacks of the monsters and fighting all around. Eva could hear the feverishly whispered words of her mother’s continuous spell, even as the Dragon Queen continued to battle her own monsters.
But she finished her part of the vital message she carried and prepared to send it on. The spell was a last bastion, a one-in-one-hundred chance, but if they did everything right – it was possible. Even probable.
It was all up to Helena now.
Eva replied to the Winter Queen with a kind of “affirmative” that wasn’t a word but more like a magical mental nod to indicate that she’d safely received the spell and would pass it on. In response, she could sense her sovereign sisters preparing for the final moment. It was like a unanimous drawing of breath.
This was it.
Eva finished slicing through the next monster that attempted to climb on top of her, dropped and rolled to avoid the spray of acidic blood that came from it, and pushed once more to her feet to search the field for Helena Dawn, the Time Queen.
Chapter Fifty-seven
“You really are pussy-whipped, aren’t you?” William hissed into his opponent’s face when they hit the crackling shield and rolled across it, each of them grasping the other’s throat in tight, un-giving grips. “Following her orders like a good little dog.”
Ahriman’s eyes flashed, but he smiled. “Bait me all you want, Solan, what’s done is done.”
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William raised a knee at just the right moment and managed a blow to the Nomad’s kidney. Ahriman released him, and William took the opening to shove a shoulder into his enemy’s chest. The impact was so hard, it took them both off the inner wall of the shield and flew them to the other side.
They hit the shield again, where they were surrounded by more lightning. The shield was attempting to give out beneath their weight and blows, but William could not afford to give it his attention right now. He and Ahriman rolled again across its surface and stopped facing each other once more. They were twenty feet off the ground, held there by opposing magics like two positive ends of a battery. William was Time. As a Nomad, Ahriman was the absence of it, never changing.
William smiled and shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
Ahriman sneered and slammed a fist into the side of William’s head before the Time King could duck out of the way. He felt the blow as he had all the others the pissed-off Traveler had dealt him – like a mini explosion that shook him to his core. But his new Time King body rapidly healed the wounds, and he was giving as good as he was getting, and he knew nothing Ahriman could do to him would kill him anyway.
The same was probably true for Ahriman. William couldn’t kill him. They were just passing the time.
Ahriman’s eyes lit up again, and the Nomad smiled knowingly before he let loose a chuckle of real amusement.
Now that scared William. He tried to hide his concern, but failed. “Why don’t you let me in on it?” he told his enemy, referring to whatever joke it was that had the man laughing. They struck one another a few more times, landing a few blows and blocking a few others, and the two of them slammed all over again into the sizzling magic of the ever-weakening dome.
William glanced at it this time in worry. Katrielle was the sole source of magic for that shield, and it was really taking a beating. He wondered what effect it was having on the Nomad.
Ahriman’s laughter was deep and guttural now. He was seriously enjoying something, and William didn’t like that one bit. “Spit it out already,” William hissed. “What the hell is so amusing?”