46. FORTY-ONE

FORTY-ONE

Kian

Iswallowedthelump in my throat as we faced the power hungry side of Cursina, the sirens and the necromancers.

They fought alongside a couple of dragons, but we had witches, warlocks, and vampires on our side.

Adjusting the glasses on my face, I stared down our enemy as magic thrummed thick in the air.

Spells spiraled back and forth, the terrifying zap cracking the air as a chill spread down my spine, signaling the necromancers.

Death and decay filled my nose, and I shuddered. I couldn’t understand how my ex-coven was able to handle it, although really, I would never understand.

“Listen, necromancer,” Trixie hissed as she threw a hand up and had one of the resurrected corpses explode from the inside out with mushrooms.

I winced and glanced at her at the same time Nightshade took over on my shoulder, casting a few spells toward the necromancers surrounding us.

“Wren would want you to be strong and confident because she’s sure of your abilities just like I am. You’re a powerful warlock, Kian. The strongest necromancer I have ever met. Let’s eliminate them together.” She gritted her teeth as a strike of orange magic jolted at our feet.

My eyes widened, and my heart slammed in my chest as I recognized the necromancer standing in front of me.

He was part of the group that was messing with the reanimated human when we visited the village just before I cut ties with them.

“Cortse!” The necromancer smiled widely, a sadistic grin splitting his face. “Fancy seeing you here. Of course you have your little furry friend with you. Didn’t you learn your lesson?”

“Didn’t you?” I asked as Nightshade threw his hand as he chanted a fatal spell with chirps, and it struck straight through the chest cavity of the necromancer, who hadn’t even tried to protect himself.

It was proof of how little necromancers feared death. What they didn’t realize was that Claude had been lying to us all. Once we were dead, we were dead. Even if our bodies came back to life. I knew that was true, deep in my soul. I always had.

“Kian!” My father’s voice was sharp and cracked like a whip among the chaos of the battle around us.

“You’ve got this.” Trixie gave my arm a squeeze before she jogged toward her sister to aid her with a whole group of necromancers that had seemed to team up on her.

“Why can’t you just be the necromancer that I know you can be?” He wiped his bloodied hands on his pants as he stared at me absolutely unguarded.

“Because you’re sick. There’s something not right in your brain. Mom was the only one who was like me in the entire coven!”

“She put shit in your head.” The ground shook with his accusation, and the sky was dark with bitter rain as the wind whipped, howling from the misery around us.

My father was always like the necromancers, and I never understood why my mom had fallen for him. They weren’t mates or anything. We didn’t get mates unless our mate was from a different species, like Wren.

Grief clogged up my throat as I kept reminding myself that the only true parent I had was my mom. Any semblance of the father I had growing up died when she did. I knew that. So why was it so difficult?

“This is how the Fates made us. What don’t you understand about that?” My father spat, and it sounded rehearsed, like he had heard it a million times. Because he had. From the mouth of Claude.

My stomach churned, and I sucked in a deep breath.

‘You can do this,’ Nightshade whispered beside me, throwing his little paw up and forming a magic circle the color of purple, like our magic. I threw my hand out and did the same, overlapping his spell.

The circle throbbed brilliant purple with the sigils of the power of my familiar and I meshing together.

“I still can’t believe you of all people got a familiar.” He shook his head.

The circle burst forth, a purple storm of lightning barreled forth.

Father threw up his arm, catching it, and just barely deflecting it. The spell burnt the flesh of his arm to show bone, and a slew of curse words left his mouth. “What is wrong with you? Why would you harm your own father? Your mother would be so disappointed in you!”

“No, Father, she wouldn’t be. She would be disappointed in you. Don’t think that I forgot how you were going to hand my mate over to those dragons after knowing what they do to dragon and drake mates. She’s my mate too! How would you feel if Mom was mated to a dragon, and they wanted her?”

His eyes narrowed into slits as he caught me off guard, throwing his hand out, no incantation at all. It served as a cruel reminder of just how powerful my father was.

A bolt of black shot toward my face before I could dodge it, but Nightshade caught the brunt of it with a wards spell. It barely made contact, but my glasses smashed from my face, the center, in between my eyebrows, throbbing in pain while my glasses shattered on the ground next to me.

Thick droplets of rain beat down around us as I waved a hand over my eyes to be able to see without them.

I preferred the glasses because every time I would do this spell, my magical energy waned, but I knew that if my father truly was this power hungry, he had to be dealt with.

I knew that even before coming here, but to actually be the one to kill my father didn’t sit well with me.

Tears pricked my eyes as I caught Nightshade’s gaze.

‘Are you ready?’His little paw patted my cheek, and I nodded.

I had to kill my father, and it was something I didn’t want to do.

I lifted a clenched fist up as I recited the spell that Blair had taught me. Nightshade lifted his paw up into a fist as he recited it with me.

A large purple sigil formed in front of us, and I watched my father’s face pale as his eyes widened.

“Where did you learn such a thing?” His voice warbled with words.

Once the spell was recited, the purple of my magic turned the darkest of blacks before fading into existence.

My father’s hand clutched his chest as he dropped backwards, his heart no longer beating. It was a spell made only for necromancers. No other witch or warlock without the necromancer subset could use it. Blair had seen it in one of her visions and taught it to me.

I’d planned on using it on Claude, but with the small amount of magical energy brimming through my veins, I didn’t stand a chance otherwise.

That spell was almost as insidious as the one I cast it against.

A sinister chill shot through me, leaving goosebumps in its wake, and a sarcastic mocking clap sounded behind me.

“I didn’t think you had it in you, boy.” Claude’s rattling voice hit my ears, and I turned to face him. “Don’t know how you learned that. Do you think you could cast it again? Or was that your first time?” His tongue pushed against his cheek as he stared at me, unflinching. “Aren’t you worried I’ll cast the same one to avenge your father?”

I shook my head before realizing he was dragging a corpse by the hair. My mother’s corpse.

“What are you doing?” My voice cut through the air, anger sizzling within it.

I despised that maniac.

“How lovely is your mother like this? She was always full of life. The odd one out in our village, much like you. You got it from her. That bitch.” He spat, pulling her reanimated corpse to its feet, and it stared back blankly, just standing there.

I had grown up around madness. True, unadulterated evil surrounded this madman.

The problem of the village did not solely lie with him. It lied in the power of necromancy. “What would you do if I stopped her body from being reanimated? What would you do if I made it so you would never see your mother again?” He tilted his head. “You cost us a lot by cutting ties with us. Roak almost took back the scale.”

I shook my head. “I lost my mother the day the human killed her. What you have is not her. It’s just a vessel that she inhabited.”

“Look at your son,” Claude demanded, but the corpse kept staring at him so he snatched her back by the hair. The scalp lifted up from the force of his hold. Her milky white eyes skidded over me. Not an ounce of recognition in them, and then Claude snapped his fingers.

Her skull caved in and brain matter, shards of bone, and flesh was all that was left of her head, dripping onto the already blood-soaked ground as the rain pelted down, mixing into it like a poison.

I retched, doubling over and emptying the little stomach contents I had onto the ground as the rain washed it away with how fast it beat around us. As I was puking my guts out, I was hit with a searing pain in my side that knocked me off my feet and onto the blood-soaked ground.

My palms pushed into the ground, and I threw myself back up on my feet before getting struck down again. Another sizzling pain in my gut unfurled as magic zapped me.

Blair threw a healing spell my way as I felt my skin start to stitch back together from the blow, and she threw a spell at Nightshade before disappearing into the battle again.

Nightshade squeaked and stood in front of me in a protective stance. ‘I won’t let him kill you.’

“Your obsession with animals only got the animals killed. Do you need a reminder?” He snapped his fingers, and the darkness of his magic slithered toward my familiar, but Nightshade deflected it with just a wave of his paw before reciting the same incantation we did together to take out my father.

A mad giggle escaped Claude. “You really think a familiar is capable of reciting that spell without its master? For one, a familiar is not its own entity.” He shoved a hand over his head as psychotic mumbles escaped him.

I pushed up off the ground to see that Nightshade had indeed cast that spell himself.

Claude’s eyes rolled back in his head as he fell to his back.

Magic exploded around us as the necromancers realized that their coven leader had fallen at the hands of an ex-member.

They all left their fights to bring it to me and avenge their crooked master of magic.

Trixie helped me the rest of the way up, scooping me up by my armpits and setting me on my feet as Nightshade crawled up me and gave her a high five.

“Good job, little guy.” She petted behind his ear before turning her attention toward the swarm of necromancers coming our way.

Blair appeared next to us with Tabitha.

“Let’s wipe out your kind.” Trixie gave me a cold grin, and I nodded.

The necromancers left were evil, and she was right. We needed to wipe them out, and once they were gone, we were one step closer to the peace that I wanted more than anything.