Nocturna (A Forgery of Magic #1)(117)

Alfie stepped forward, eyes aflame. “That’s not true, she—”

Ignacio raised a hand and Alfie’s mouth shut, his lips mashing together as he struggled to open his mouth.

“I know who you are, boy. I can see into your head the way this magic did when you set it free.” When Alfie raised a hand to charm water, Ignacio gave another cutting gesture and Alfie’s hands fell still.

“Leave him be!” Finn made to stand in front of the prince, but Ignacio shot her a dark look.

“You move and he dies, do you understand me?”

Finn froze where she stood; when he spoke to her that way she was a helpless child again. She could barely breathe.

From behind her came a skittering sound and Finn feared that he would bind her with his strings once more, but it wasn’t strings. A pair of stone hands scuttled across the ground on their fingers—Sombra’s hands, the ones she’d seen in the palace vault. Once Ignacio had them he would become stronger than ever and they could barely handle him now. And where was the prince’s teacher? Alfie had asked her to protect the hands. Had Ignacio’s minions killed her before she had the chance?

“Prince!” Finn shouted as she made to dash for the hands. Alfie opened his mouth to speak a word of magic.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Ignacio tutted, and with a swipe of his hand Alfie and Finn were flung sideways against the nearest wall. Her ribs rang with pain as her side hit the wall. She heard the prince cry out beside her as they slid down to the ground.

“Not so fast. This is what I’ve come for, Finny. This is the beginning of my reign. Our reign, if you choose. If you listen to your father.”

Ignacio knelt down and the stone hands aligned themselves with his, opening and curling around his flesh, like sleeves and gloves of rock. Ignacio hunched over, his eyes flying wide as the stone encased his arms. His whole body shook in what looked like rapture and Finn could feel a prickle of power in the air. This, she thought, must be how the air felt just before one was struck by lightning—charged with an energy so palpable that it felt like it was pressing down on her shoulders. For a moment, there was only the sound of Ignacio’s ragged breaths.

Finn reached to her side and gripped the prince’s shirt, her fingers shaking on his sleeve. She didn’t know what else to do or say. They’d lost. He pinned her gaze beneath his and she knew he was thinking the same thing.

Ignacio straightened. With a twist of his fingers Alfie and Finn were pulled up from the ground and made to stand before him once more. A shudder skittered down Finn’s spine as he puppeted them. She would never forget the pure violation of these moments. Of feeling his will crawl under her skin and claim her as her own. He released them from his hold then, as if daring them to try to run. Neither did. What use would it be to run now?

“Now,” Ignacio said. “Where was I?” But his voice was no longer fully his own; beneath it was a timbre, low and strong, that made the hairs on Finn’s neck raise.

There beneath Ignacio’s voice, she knew, was the echo of a god.

Ignacio circled the prince predatorily. “You may look like a king, but you certainly aren’t. We both know that, don’t we? Pathetic and simpering, clinging to that little dragon like a child.” He looked at Finn with a feral grin. “Perhaps you’d like to see a real one.”

Before their eyes Ignacio began to shift. Finn could hear his bones cracking and rearranging, lengthening. He hunched his back and fell forward on all fours with a growl that belonged to a beast, not a man. His body began to stretch. In the blink of an eye the empty ballroom was taken up by the hulking body of a black dragon. Tendrils of smoke streamed from its nose, the promise of a barrage of fire to come.

“Co?o,” Finn breathed.





37


The Ultimatum


Finn flung her arms forward, and a wall of earth shot up from the ground to guard them, but the dragon’s tail swung down and cut through the rock wall as if it were warm butter, whacking them in the process. Finn and Alfie skidded down the tiled floor to the far side of the ballroom.

“We’ve got to use the dragon!” Finn shouted at him. There was no choice. Before them the black dragon inhaled, smoke surging from its flared nostrils. A wound over Alfie’s left eye was gushing with blood. He must’ve been hit by debris.

“Every time we use it things get worse!” he said back as they scrambled to their feet. “We try our best to hold him off. If we can’t manage, then we use it.”

Finn tackled him out of the way as the dragon blew a blistering stream of blue fire, scorching the spot they stood at.

“If!” Finn shouted at him as she pulled him to his feet. “You still think this is an ‘if’ situation?!”

Alfie’s eyes flew wide with panic as he looked over her shoulder at the dragon. Finn looked behind her to see another stream of fire surging their way. She raised another wall of earth and Alfie pulled her against it. Fire rushed all around them, singeing the rock. It felt like they were in an oven, the gargantuan ballroom filling with an oppressive heat.

“Charm water!” Finn shouted over the roar of the flames. She pulled more and more stone from the ground to replace the pieces that were melting from the dragon’s heat.

Alfie skimmed his fingers through the sweltering air. Only a dribble of water trailed his fingers. “The air is too dry!”