But this thing? If anything I had ever seen had it coming, if ever a being was deserving of receiving my violence, it was the bloodstained creature crouching over Stan’s mangled body. Everything had been taken away from me in the space of a single afternoon. My home. My family. And now, it seemed, I was about to lose my life. Well, if that was how it was going to be, if I couldn’t run without getting more innocent bystanders killed, then I would make my stand here—and I had no intention of going quietly.
I reached into that deep well of anger and began drawing it together into something as hot and violent and destructive as what I was feeling inside.
“There’s something you should know,” I said. “I skipped sixth hour today. Spanish. Which I’m not very good at anyway.”
“What is that to me?” asked the creature.
“Flickum bicus just doesn’t seem appropriate,” I replied. The heat in my right arm and shoulder concentrated into my right hand. The scent of burned hairs crept up to my nose. “And you really don’t understand where you’re standing, do you?”
The creature’s reflection looked left and right at the gas pumps on either side of it.
I kept my eyes locked on its image in the windows, extended my right hand back toward it, and formed my little fire-lighting spell into something a thousand times bigger, hotter, and deadlier than anything I had ever attempted before.
I met the thing’s eyes in the reflection, reached down to the well of energy and pure will I’d built inside me, extended my hand toward the creature, and screamed, “Fuego!”
My rage and fear poured out of me. Fire lashed out from my open hand like water from a broken hydrant. It spilled all over He Who Walks Behind and over Stan’s body, and lit up the darkness with angry golden light.
The creature let out a scream, more surprise and anger than pain, clutching at its eyes with its huge hands. The light changed the reflection in the glass and I could no longer see what was behind me. I swept the torrent of fire left and right without turning away or changing the direction my back faced. I hoped it would slow He Who Walks Behind long enough for my modified fire-starting spell to do its thing.
Gasoline pumps have all kinds of safety mechanisms built into them to reduce the odds of accidentally igniting them. They’re pretty good. I mean, how many times have you touched off an explosion while filling your car? But as reliable as they are, those measures are made to stop accidents.
And no engineer in the world ever thought about building them to stop angry young wizards.
It took a couple of seconds, but then there was a screaming sound, something metallic strained past the breaking point, and the first tank went up in a bloom of spectacular fire.
The explosion flung me back, scorching my skin and burning away the hair on my eyebrows. I landed on my ass—again—and lay there, stunned, for a few seconds. Sudden weariness, deeper than anything I had ever known, flooded over me in reaction to the energy I’d expended on my economy-sized ignition spell.
And then the second tank went up.
Hot wind and pieces of smoking metal showered against the front of the convenience store. I’m glad the first blast knocked me down. If I’d been standing, the metal shrapnel that punched out the entire front wall of windows would have gone through me first.
I stared at the flames and saw a shape within it—or, rather, I saw a creature-shaped void where the smoke and fire should have been. A voice emerged from the fire, something huge and terrifying, a voice that belonged to gods and monsters of myth.
“HOW DARE YOU!” it roared. “HOW DARE YOU RAISE YOUR HAND AGAINST ME!”
Then that not-figure crashed to its knees and fell limply onto its side.
The roaring flames swept in and consumed it.
And my first true battle was over.
Chapter Thirty-three
“That was my first fight,” I said quietly to my godmother. “I’d never used magic to hurt anything before.” I rubbed my hand over my head. “If I hadn’t cut class that day . . . I don’t know. I might never have become what I did.”
“Is that the lesson you took from the memory?” Lea asked, her smile spreading. “You were clearly being prepared to be an enforcer.”
“It seems that way,” I hedged, trying to read her expression. “But Justin never actually tried to get me to hurt anyone.”
“Why would he wish you to be armed against him before he was certain of your loyalty?” Lea asked. “He would have. It was inevitable.”
“Probably,” I said. “But there’s no way we can know, really. It’s a long way from breaking boards in practice to breaking bones in life.”
“Quite. Because convincing a young mortal to believe that it is right and proper to use magic for violence is a delicate process and one that cannot be rushed.”
I grunted and leaned my head back against the wall of my grave.
“All the wishing in the world will not change the past, my godson,” Lea said. “You would like to believe that perhaps Justin had hidden good intentions of some sort. That what happened between you was some kind of misunderstanding. But you understood him perfectly.”
“Yeah. Probably. I’d forgotten how much it hurt—that’s all,” I said quietly. “I’d forgotten how much I loved him. How much I wanted him to be proud of me.”
“Children are vulnerable,” Lea said. “They are easily deceived and notoriously subject to such delusions. You are no longer a child.” She leaned forward slightly and said, with slight emphasis, “I am bound to answer two more questions. Will you ask them now?”
“Yes,” I said. “Give me a moment to consider them.”
“As you wish,” Lea said.
I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to clear my thoughts. Asking questions of inhuman entities can be a tricky and dangerous business—with the fae more than most. You almost never got direct answers from one of the lords of Faerie, the Sidhe. Asking them direct questions, especially questions touching on information relevant to a conflict of some sort, was likely to elicit obscure and maliciously misleading answers. I was on good terms with my godmother, as human-Sidhe relationships went, but that was no reason not to cover my bases.
So I thought over recent events for a while and looked for the blank spots, but I kept getting distracted by the memories of that night in the convenience store. They chewed at me and refused to be pushed aside—especially the conversation with He Who Walks Behind.
“Priorities,” I said out loud. “This is about priorities.”
“Oh?” Lea asked.
I nodded. “I could ask you a lot of questions about my past—and you’d answer them.”
“That is true.”
“Or I could ask you about what is happening right now in the city. I could find out how I could best help Murphy.”
Lea nodded.
“But I was sent back here to find my killer,” I said. “I’m supposed to be hunting down whoever killed me, and yet I’ve been doing a whole lot of everything but that.”
“In point of fact,” Lea said, “you’ve been doing little else.”
I blinked.
She gave me an enigmatic, feline smile.
“Oh, you bitch.” I sighed. “You just love doing that to me.”
Lea demurely lowered her gaze. She fluttered her eyelashes twice.
I scowled at her and folded my arms over my chest. Lea had been involved in my life since I was born, and probably before that. She could tell me any number of things I’d been quietly dying to know since I was old enough to ask questions at all. She was up on all the current events, too. All of the high Sidhe are fanatic gatherers of information, and my godmother was no exception. Of course, they tended to guard their knowledge as ferociously as a dragon guards its gold—and they parted with it almost as reluctantly.
The Sidhe aren’t dummies. Information is a great deal more valuable than gold, any day of the week.