She tried to summon the red sparks of her favorite attack spell in her palm, but the Vátran breathing suit only gave her enough room for a few sparks that fizzled slowly and felt a little hotter than they should have. “I’m really not in the habit of letting other people fight for me,” she said. “Especially when those people are trying to protect us before we get where we need to be. We’ll stand with you, Royal. And the Vátra. But I really can’t do anything in this…suit.” She gazed at her hand and lowered it. “Can you take us to the surface? If we’re up there, I can get out of this to fight and breathe at the same time.”
The Vátran leader looked firmly at her and opened his fist enough to clasp it around the other end of the fake Varelos. “That is unnecessary. Your gift was passage. This attack is but a minor obstacle—”
Two massive spheres of orange light burst toward the back of the Vátran shield at the same time, and when they made impact, the force almost tossed Lily through the water and into the Royal himself. His eyes flickered quickly toward the far end of their shield, and she turned. The last attack had definitely blown a hole in whatever this traveling bubble was made of—a large hole with jagged edges that pulsed bright blue in a steady rhythm. The closest Vátra gathered around it and tried to repair the damage with their wide, webbed hands outstretched as they pumped bursts of green light at the shattered shield.
“We are so close to your destination,” the Royal told her. “Do you wish to endanger a successful passage?”
“No, I wish to not endanger everyone here because you won’t let us help.” And if we can’t get these seirí off our backs, he’s gonna know that Varelos he’s so sure about is actually a dud.
“This commitment of yours, Lily, we do not understand. There is no reason for a gigni to worry herself over the fate of our—”
A curdling scream came from the Vátra gathered around the hole in the shield. A bright orange hand with disgustingly long nails like talons had reached through the not yet repaired hole and pierced through the chest of the closest Vátra. The poor creature screamed again when the claw jerked away and vanished through the hole. A stream of black-green blood filtered through the water as the dead Vátra fell back among his fellows, all of whom immediately returned to work patching up the hole with their green-lit magic. A few of them released bright-green bursts of their own attacks through the mending breach in the shield. Lily caught a glimpse of something that looked vaguely humanoid as it darted past that hole—bright-orange skin, fiery hair, and eyes that glowed almost as brightly as the yellow cord no one else could see.
Another flare of orange light hurtled toward them and expanded until it pounded against the Vátran shield from a different direction. The traveling bubble around them crackled with electric blue streaks again, and she caught the Royal’s gaze. “It looks like they’re right on top of us now, and you’re losing your own people. You don’t have to.” Another orange light battered the shield. “Take us up.”
The Royal’s eyes narrowed at her for a brief second before he tilted his head back and gazed above them. Their escort lurched and changed direction for the surface. Vátran guards moved like a wave of parting seaweed as the Winnie floated swiftly toward Lily and Romeo. Their leader pointed at his passengers without looking at them, and both the young witch and the werewolf were deposited onto the top of the RV before it rocketed in a sudden ascent. They both threw their arms up over their heads when the Winnie rose toward the surface of the domed shield. The force of the dome pressed down on her, and for a moment, she thought she’d be crushed between it and the roof of her RV. In the next moment she, Romeo, and the top foot of the Winnebago burst through the Vátran dome and out above the surface of the Mediterranean.
“Oh, my God…” She gazed out at the churning water around them and spread her legs to keep her footing on the Winnie’s roof as the Royal still hurtled through the water at ridiculous speeds.
All around them, the sea churned with orange light that flashed and pulsated from the darkness below. In moments the seirí surfaced around them and conjured the same orange attacks in their clawed hands.
“What the—” Romeo whirled on the surface of the Winnie and steadied himself to regain his balance before he stared at the few dozen heads that emerged from the water. “I thought mermaids were supposed to be fairly decent to look at. If they even existed.”
“I don’t think that’s what these are.” Lily summoned the razor-sharp yellow light at her fingertip and focused it to slice through the second Vátran breathing suit she’d be shedding today. She ripped at the hole and turned toward Romeo to seize his hand before she made an incision through the film covering his body. “Hurry up and get that thing off. You’re right. It’s good armor but totally useless for fighting.” She peeled the suit hastily from her body but left it pooled around her shoes when she realized it actually helped her keep better footing on the seawater-slickened roof of the RV.
A seirí burst from the water directly in front of them and hurled a crackling orange sphere toward the couple. Lily had barely enough time to deflect it with a warded shield before she delivered her own red sparks with the other hand. The seirí’s gold eyes widened before the sparks seared into her face, and the unearthly screech gurgled and died when the creature fell beneath the surface.
“These things are nasty.” Her companion turned in a tight circle and left his breathing suit piled around his feet too.
Below them and from all sides, the seirí swarmed toward the Vátran shield that continued its headlong progress toward their destination. “We’re almost there.” Lily nodded toward the thin stretch of land she could barely see past the glare of the yellow cord that seemed to stretch forever in that direction. This thing is seriously messing with my ability to focus. “We only have to hold them off until then and hope the Royal doesn’t try to use that Varelos.”
“Yeah, it looked like he was really ready to do that.” Romeo clenched his hands into fists and scowled at the approaching seirí. “Lil, I don’t know how much help I’m gonna be up here.”
“Whatever you can do.” Two more of the creatures fired their churning orange attacks. Lily deflected one of them and managed to deflect the other to speed back toward its caster’s neighbor. The unlucky seirí dropped beneath the waves.
“Jeeze!” Romeo took a step back as one clawed orange hand covered in barnacles darted from the water. The dangerously sharp nails dug into the roof of the Winnie with a screech of ripping metal, and the seirí pulled herself up toward him with only her hands. She snarled and swiped at his legs. “Lily?”
“I’m a little busy.” The young witch blasted flaming attack spells at heads of wild, brown-orange hair that swept aggressively toward her above water. When her spells struck, the seirí caught fire as quickly as a pile of kindling, although the flames quenched again the second the creatures dove below.
The werewolf stepped across the Winnie’s roof and gaped in disgust at the rest of the seirí’s body emerging from the water as she clawed her way toward him—the body of a woman shifted into a tail like he’d expected a mermaid to look, except the end of that tail didn’t have a fin. Instead, it grew longer and thinner, with fluttering, sparking fins running along the top and bottom like an eel’s tail. “What am I supposed to do?”
Lily turned briefly to see the snarling, screeching creature flip her way toward Romeo. “Get it off!”
He growled and his eyes flashed with silver. “This sucks.” Fighting against all his values of not hitting what almost looked like a woman, he stooped forward and swung his fist right into the crawling seirí’s jaw. She shrieked and drove a sharpened talon through the pool of peeled-off breathing suit at his feet but he kicked her off. Her body splashed into the sea and was gone, swallowed by the water rushing past them at their top speed and the dozens of other seirí coming to join the fight.
The Vátran dome beneath them shuddered and almost knocked both Lily and Romeo onto their faces. Thankfully, they kept th
eir footing and now, the landmass took on actual shape and form in front of them. A series of bright blue and green flashes came from below the Winnie as the Vátra did what they could to fight the attacking seirí from within the dome of their shield.
“Hey, watch out!” Romeo ducked, and Lily reeled back to barely avoid a mass of sparking brown sludge that hurtled toward them. It landed on the Winnie’s roof with a wet splat, immediately followed by smoke and a hiss like acid corroding metal.
With a flick of her hand, her next spell swept the crackling acidic lump off the vehicle. A seirí directly behind them couldn’t dive fast enough out of the way. The creature’s long, grotesquely orange, eel-like tail flipped above the water before it was pelted by the brown attack from its own people. Lily could’ve sworn she heard the tail itself scream.
The young witch eliminated as many seirí faces as she could with her hurtling balls of fire and realized that the blue flames were equally as difficult for magical sea creatures to put out as they were for magicals on land. Finally, the speed at which the Vátra transported them began to slow and they approached the dry, dusty coast of Libya.
“This is it,” Lily shouted over the cracks and rumbles from the dome below them, punctuated by sirens’ shrieks and the constant rush of water as the Vátran transport continued toward the coast.
“There’s no way the Royal’s gonna beach this whole thing up there, right?” Romeo braced himself for their landing. “That’s not gonna be fun for us.”
“At this point, I’m not sure he’s too concerned about how we get off as long as we’re off. Then, he’ll try to use the Varelos.”
“Do you know that for sure?”
She turned and met his gaze, squinting against the flare of the yellow cord of light that seemed to draw her to some distant destination. “It’s a hunch.”
Twenty
The sudden deceleration almost knocked them off the top of the Winnie. Lily snapped the fingers of both hands and cast a binding spell on both her and Romeo. The Vátran dome jerked to a halt in the water, and his body flew forward while the binding spell kept his shoes glued to the roof of the RV. His hands smacked hard on the metal, and he pushed himself to his feet again and shook his head. “Ow.”
“Sorry.” She grimaced.
“No, it was a good call.”
She waited for the Royal to make his next move and deliver them to dry land where they definitely belonged. The seirí swarmed all around them now, and Lily deflected a few more attacks with warded shields. “What’s taking him so long? We could’ve jumped off and swum ashore by now.”
“But not with this thing.” Romeo pointed at the roof of the Winnie a second before it lurched into the air.
A massive wave thundered behind them, pelted them with seawater, and drenched them completely. The second wave rolled over them and didn’t let up. They began to move again and hurtled toward the dry land, but the water in her eyes and pushed down her throat made it impossible to think of how to cast another spell and make sure the Royal didn’t drown them in his attempt to get them safely onto land.
The water surged with a roar and the Winnie shuddered beneath them before it thundered onto the sand and immediately retreated. It left a dripping Winnebago Adventurer covered in its own film of Vátran protection, plus two soaked, gasping magicals bound to its roof by Lily’s spell. Romeo coughed and pulled a slimy net of seaweed and another drenched plant from his chest. She glanced down and found the peeled remains of her breathing suit completely washed away. His had done the same. She snapped her fingers again to remove the binding spell, and they sat on the roof of the Winnie to slide off it and land in the sand on shaky legs.
“That actually worked.” He flicked the water off his hands and into the sand, but it was a pointless gesture. With a scowl, he shook his drenched hair and more seawater off his face.
“We need to get out of here.” She nodded at the explosive light display beneath the surface of the water a quarter-mile out to sea. Orange, blue, and green flashes burst like fireworks under the waves, and they could still hear the screeching of the seirí that swarmed in droves toward the Vátra in open water. “I wanna be as far away as we can get before the Royal realizes what we did.”
“Yeah, I’m not gonna argue with you there.” Romeo nodded at her and turned toward the Winnie’s side door. When he attempted to grasp the handle, his hand slid off and he growled in annoyance. “Come on.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Okay, I appreciate that they wrapped the adventuremobile in Vátran plastic wrap too. We won’t have to sleep on a waterlogged mattress tonight, but I can’t—” He lowered his hand against his thigh. “I can’t even open the door.”
With a sigh, she summoned the razor-sharp light at the tip of her finger and cut a hole in the Vátran film around the Winnie directly ahead of the handle to the side door. She yanked the door open and tore an even bigger hole in the spongy, rubbery material. “We gotta take all this off first. I don’t think we’d get very far with the tires spinning on more rubber.”
“I’m on it.” He grasped two handfuls of the film around the side door and pulled hard to rip it along the side of the RV and all the way to the rear bumper and tires. Lily did the same on the other side, and they worked as quickly as they could while the sound of the Vátra battling the seirí rose from a short distance beside them in the sea.
They’d almost gotten the thin rubbery coating entirely off the Winnebago, but it wasn’t soon enough. A massive flash of blue light—brighter than anything they’d seen so far—spilled from below the surface of the water and rippled out toward the swarms of seirí who still threw everything they had at the Vátra and the Royal within their domed shield. For a few seconds, things seemed to die down. A high shriek rose with renewed force, as did the blasts of crackling orange attacks from the sea creatures who had a beef with the Vátra but didn’t care if they caught a witch and a werewolf in their crosshairs, too.
A moment later, a massive pillar of blue light and seawater erupted from the sea, straight into the air, and a monstrous voice roared from beneath the waves. “Optatus!”
“Crap.” Lily dropped the piece of film she’d tried to tug down over the Winnie’s windshield and pointed at Romeo. “Get in and start her.”
“Wait, what?” He sidled toward the driver’s door but paused to frown at her. “Lily, let’s go.”
The surf rising up to meet the beach bubbled with blue light, and the sea foamed with both cresting waves and magic. The first line of Vátra foot soldiers—who only minutes before had dedicated themselves to protecting the young couple—broke through the surface and scrambled up the beach toward them. “We’ve run out of time, Romeo,” Lily shouted. “I’m gonna buy us more. Start the RV!”
His gaze darted behind her, and his eyes widened when he saw the green-skinned creatures bob and weave on their huge, webbed feet. They flurried sprays of wet sand behind them as they made a concerted rush toward the land-dwellers who’d betrayed their sovereign. “Aw, sh—yeah. Yeah, I’m on it.” He jerked the driver’s door open and climbed behind the wheel.
The sound of the Winnie’s engine—thankfully completely dry—turning over and the clap of her hands coming together rose against the tide at the same time. I hate this. She focused on her black-cloud spell, summoned her Optatus magic, and let it build between her hands when she slowly drew her palms apart. The Vátra aren’t doing anything wrong. Not like the Black Heron. But I can’t let them have that Varelos, and I can’t let them stop us.
The roiling spell of smoke and ash and black, sparking magic churned and grew between her hands. Another line of Vátra soldiers slapped their way up the beach and slowed only a little as the first wave stopped to stare in awe at the Optatus using her powers against her previous allies. Lily had a hard enough time coming to terms with her own conscience in that moment, but then she located Watcher among the second line of green-skinned creatures sent by the Royal to stop her and Romeo. The Vát
ra who might have almost become their friend stared at her with wide, pained eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, doubtful that he could hear her. But she knew he saw the remorse on her face, even if he couldn’t hear it or her words.
A Vátra farther down the line hefted his copper spear and threw it at her. It winked in the setting sunlight, and she had barely enough time to release the full force of her black cloud before the spear would have wreaked its damage. Her spell stopped the flying weapon in its tracks, and the black cloud ballooned in an instant to block her and the Winnebago completely from view. The screams of the Vátra soldiers rose behind her against the crackle and thunderous roar of her Optatus magic, the shriek of all the seirí gathered for battle, and the bellow of multiple voices rising together as one. “You have what is ours, Optatus,” the Royal roared. “We will find you!”
Lily raced toward the Winnie’s side door and slid a little in the sand. She managed to open it and yanked it shut behind her before she scrambled up the two steps and raced to the front. “Go, go!” Romeo floored the gas pedal the minute she fell into the passenger seat. The Winnie’s back tires spat up a wave of wet sand and seawater, and the huge RV fishtailed along the beach and farther inland, away from the Vátra, seirí, and Optatus magic at their backs.
She buckled her seatbelt as they raced across the sand, then erupted into laughter like she’d lost her mind.
“Are you okay?” He tried to frown at her and navigate the Winnie over the sand at the same time.
“No. I’m not okay.” She laughed again and buried her face in her hands. “We actually rode across the Mediterranean on top of this thing”—she slapped the armrest—“at top speed and fighting other sea creatures I’ve never heard of. We escaped them all when the Royal realized what we had done, and the first thing I do is buckle up for safety.” A harsh bark of laughter escaped her again, and she covered her face with her hands until the near hysteria settled. He remained silent and gave her the time she needed to pull herself together. Finally, she raised her head, stared out at the red-gold sands all around them and the blazing yellow cord that remained like a pull-rope that stretched in front of them, and thumped her head back against the headrest. “That was awful.”
Return Of The Witch (The Witch Next Door Book 6) Page 13