“Come on.” Luna was panting as well; she looked exhausted, and now that I had the chance to notice, I could see that there was blood down her right arm. Still, her eyes were fixed on the lights in the sky. “Help Vari.”
My muscles felt like water and all I wanted to do was rest. I managed to nod, and broke into a jog, back towards Karyos’s clearing.
We came out of the trees to see Anne and Variam facing off against one another, fifty feet apart. A shield of flame surrounded Variam, making him hard to look at; only his eyes and his dark face showed above the flickering fire. Karyos stood a little way behind. The hamadryad looked hurt, but she was staying near her tree. And opposite them both was Anne, green-black light wreathing her. The shadow of the jinn extended behind and above her, a looming presence, but Anne still looked very human, and very pissed off.
“What is your problem!” Anne shouted at Variam. “Can’t you take a hint?”
“I saw this coming a long time ago.” Variam watched Anne, his dark eyes unreadable. “Alex is dumb enough to trust you. I’m not.”
“I wouldn’t have to do this if you’d all stop fighting!” Anne turned to glare at me and Luna. “Oh, and you’re here as well. Did those jann round you up? No, of course they didn’t, there’s no way they could possibly do anything useful.”
Fires were burning in half a dozen places around the clearing. Karyos’s tree seemed intact, but others had been charred, and more had been knocked over, branches and tree trunks snapped off as if by some invisible force. The spear seemed to quiver in my hands, pulling towards Anne. It wanted her . . . or the thing inside.
“How the hell are you still up?” Anne demanded of Variam. “Did you take up Harvesting in your spare time or what?”
“Like I said,” Variam said. “I saw this coming. You, though—I bet you didn’t make any plans at all. Just figured you could win without even trying.”
Anne narrowed her eyes at Variam. “It’s that cloak. Isn’t it?”
I couldn’t see through Variam’s flame shield, but now that I looked, I could sense another magical aura wrapped around him. Maybe it was the item he’d taken from Jagadev . . .
“Anne!” Luna said. “Stop! You have to see this isn’t working.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, shut up,” Anne said. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but there is a really good reason I’m doing this. As soon as the Council are done with their war with Richard, they’re going to be after us again, and who’s going to stop them? You’ve just been hiding in your shop hoping they’ll take someone else first. Vari’s working for them. The only one of you who’s done anything useful is Alex, and he still needed me to do the heavy lifting. If you don’t have a jinn of your own, then it’s just a matter of time before you end up the same way I did!”
“The Council aren’t going after her,” I told Anne.
Anne snorted. “Seen that in the future too?”
“Did you really think you were the only one who’d noticed we had a problem?” I said. “While you’ve been running around settling old scores, I’ve been calling in favours and putting together a plan. A plan which just came off. As of an hour ago, the Council have agreed to a truce. They won’t come after me or my associates. I even got them to specifically include you.”
Anne paused. “Well, they’re lying.”
“No, they’re not. Because this time I made sure I had enough leverage to back it up. Our war with the Council’s over.”
“Bullshit.”
“You did all this for nothing, Anne,” I said calmly. “You’ve been telling yourself that there’s no other way, right? Attacking me and Luna, having to fight Vari, all the compromises you made and whatever you’ve had to promise that jinn . . . in your head, it was all okay because you were the hero. But you haven’t saved anyone. Right now, you’re the one that Luna and Vari are trying to save each other from.”
Anne opened her mouth for a retort and nothing came out. She stared between me and Luna and Vari and for once had nothing to say. Emotions battled in her face, shame against anger.
“It’s not too late,” Luna said quickly. “You’ve hurt me, you’ve hurt Karyos, but it’s nothing you can’t fix. Nobody’s dead, not yet.”
“And if someone is ending up dead,” Variam cut in, “you should think about whether it might be you.”
Anne hesitated, and in one of those strange moments of insight I was suddenly sure that what Luna and Variam had done was enough. Dark Anne was ruthless and she was violent and she was terrible at thinking long-term, but she wasn’t a total psychopath. She did care about some people, the three of us most of all. We’d shown her that, to beat us, she’d have to risk killing us, and that wasn’t a price she was willing to pay.
Unfortunately, that was only a price that Anne wasn’t willing to pay. And though Anne didn’t know it, she wasn’t calling the shots anymore.
“Okay,” Anne said. Her face hardened. “Okay.”
“You started this fight with one of you and fifty jann,” Variam told her. “Now there’s one of you and zero jann. Let me break down the maths on that for you. You’re losing.”
“One of me?” Anne said softly. “Is that what you think?”
The green light around Anne seemed to die, but the darkness grew. The presence behind her loomed larger, shadows spreading across the clearing like giant, batlike wings, a sense of something watching, cold and hungry. Anne spoke again and there was an echo to her voice, dissonant and frightening. “I’ve been holding back from the moment I stepped in here. I think it’s time I showed you what you’re really dealing with.”
Vari, Luna! I snapped out through the dreamstone. Shield!
A sphere of green-black light flared outwards from Anne. It was a basic attack spell, one I’d seen before from death mages, but never on this scale. Normally my best defence against battle-magic is evasion, but evasion only works if there’s somewhere to evade to. This was a full sphere, hitting everything around her. The amount of power it must have taken was enormous. No battle-mage I’d ever met could cover half that volume.
I forced the best future I could with the fateweaver, and twisted to let my back armour take the blast, trying to lessen the impact. It did a little, but not enough. Pain and nausea swept over me, draining my energy. I stumbled and fell, black spots swimming in my vision.
Through blurry eyes I could see that Luna was on her knees. Anne was already casting another spell, this one something I’d never seen. It looked like the teleportation spells space mages used, but its weave was alien, utterly different from human magic. In one hand she was holding the gate focus that she’d used to enter our shadow realm; the other was extended towards Luna, and a net of black lines wove outward, growing through the air towards Luna like shoots of a plant.
But she’d forgotten Variam. Alone out of the four of us, Variam had a real shield, and with the instant’s warning he’d managed to weather Anne’s spell. Flame darted from his hand, blocking off the black tendrils from reaching Luna.
The grey mist of Luna’s curse darted out.
It all happened too fast to see. Luna’s curse intersected Anne and Variam’s spells, and as the three magics met, energy burst outward in a clap of thunder. Every hair in my body stood on end and the world went white.
Somehow I made it to my feet. I couldn’t see or hear, but I still had my divination and I looked ahead, searching for danger to me or to anyone else. But there was nothing. The futures were clear. Gradually my vision returned, revealing an empty clearing, the grass pressed flat and leaves blown from the trees. Fires were still burning, but the sense of menace was gone.