“You sound like a man who can’t let go of the knowledge that he lost and his rival succeeded. As for you, Cat, this childish bickering insults His Noble Highness the prince and indeed all of us forced to listen to it.”
Drake was livid. “I did not lose to him!”
Drake had the power to immolate me, but in doing so, he would burn himself up as well. Unlike Prince Caonabo, he had no catch-fires to spill away the backlash of his magic. I couldn’t help myself. I had to keep poking.
“Really? It’s never bothered you that you couldn’t spoil his love for me because he’s a better man than you’ll ever be? That the moment I found him I never thought of you again? That he’s killed your fire magic more than once and can do it again?”
Light pulsed as the forecourt’s gas lamps flared. A mist-like glamour writhed around Drake’s body. “When next I meet Andevai Diarisso Haranwy, he will crawl at my feet and admit I am stronger than he is. Fire always defeats ice in the end.”
Prince Caonabo spoke sharp words in Taino. Soldiers raised rifles. The murmuring crowd pushed back, for no one wanted to stand close when a fire mage went rogue.
“I said enough!” snapped the general. “James, go back to the house.”
“Enough is right! I’ve had enough of this bitch!” His bright blue eyes really did seem to blaze.
Heat flared in my chest, like fire kindling. I lunged, but the general yanked me down so hard I hit my shoulder and banged a knee. In that eyeblink during which I was too stunned to move, I saw what would happen by the stiffening of Rory’s shoulders, the tremor in his eyes. Like me he thought with his body. He reacted to danger in an entirely predictable way.
Rory changed as thoroughly as if the tide of a dragon’s dream washed over him to dissolve him into his true form. His body melted and flowed, clothes ripping at the seams as his shape shifted. A huge black saber-toothed cat leaped.
Reports rang out, guns going off, and the big cat stumbled and went down.
5
Heedless of claws and teeth, Luce threw her body across the thrashing cat. That was the only reason the Taino soldiers did not finish him off.
I ripped the rope out of the general’s grasp and jumped from the carriage, brandishing my cane as I ran to Rory’s side. “Call them off!”
The instant I pressed my cane against his head to make sure he didn’t bite anyone, his body melted away to become a man lying naked and bleeding on the cobblestones. He’d been hit in his right shoulder and left thigh. A liquid pulsed along his skin like blood, although it was clear, not red. His eyes were open, questing back and forth as if trying to fix on a moving target.
I grasped his hand.
“Is this death, Cat?” His voice was a whisper. “I feel my strength draining out of me. Will my spirit pass back to my mother on the other side? Or will I just dissolve into the wind?”
Soldiers blocked us in, facing the angry crowd. Caonabo came up with his catch-fires.
“Don’t touch him!” I snarled.
“Make your choice, Perdita. He may bleed out, or I can cauterize his wounds.”
His words punched the breath right out of my lungs. I shifted back to let him kneel.
“Rory, this fire mage will stop the bleeding. Allow him to touch you.”
Among Rory’s people—a pride of saber-toothed cats who roamed in the spirit world—a male trusted his mother and aunts and sisters absolutely. He watched me with eyes as amber as my own, for we had inherited golden eyes and black hair from the creature who had sired us. Luce crept to my side as the prince inspected the wounded leg. He wiped up a dab of the colorless blood, sniffed it, and glanced at me but asked no questions. A man of his education no doubt could draw his own conclusions. After assuring himself the shot had gone clear through flesh, he placed a hand on either side of the thigh.
Caonabo’s two catch-fires lit as if they were gas lamps touched to flame.
I gasped. Luce’s grip on my arm tightened.
A skin of fire radiated from the prince’s hands. Four days ago, on Hallows’ Eve, standing under the veil of my sire’s terrifying power, I had seen Prince Caonabo’s mother casting off the backlash of her magic into a net of catch-fires. The lines drawn between the cacica and her catch-fires had spanned the island of Kiskeya. She had created a woven web through which the backwash of fire magic was drained out of her, through the catch-fires, and into the seemingly bottomless well that was the spirit world. Shimmering threads spun out of Caonabo and into his catch-fires. One catch-fire alone would have burst into flame and died; two could split the backlash between them and pour it harmlessly away.