Infinity Son(59)

“Fascinating. I didn’t see him fighting alongside you.” Luna coughs, wiping blood from the corner of her chapped lips with a handkerchief that’s stained red and brown. There are dark shadows underneath her eyes. Some of us stay up all night editing YouTube videos and others work on formulas for immortality. “You believe I don’t deserve to live,” Luna says.

“You brought your poisoning on yourself,” I say.

“Would you say the same about your father?” Luna’s mocking grin twists my insides and tightens my fist. “Of course I know all about Leonardo Rey’s illness. I’ve studied up on Keon’s scion, your adopted brother. It’s tragic what happened to your father.” She walks around the center table and tidies her station, rolling up a blueprint I didn’t get a chance to examine. “You like stories, yes? Do you know the one about how my younger sister, Raine, was sick, and every alchemist and practitioner I trusted to save her failed us? You’re so willing to dismiss me as power-hungry, when everything I do has been for life.”

I can’t believe that this queenpin watched my videos on YouTube.

“You’ve got a lot of blood on your hands for someone who cares so much about life.”

Luna is absolutely fearless as she walks past me, smelling like woodsmoke. Her back is to me as she trails a finger through some black powder, pressing it to her tongue and sighing deeply. “Unfortunately, life must be lost to figure out how to preserve it, restore it.” She turns around, and her thinning eyebrows narrow. “You aren’t worth killing in my grand design. You weren’t even worth locking up, unlike Emil, whose true power would require us to use the heaviest of chains. You are nothing but a pawn in my possession to collect the urn your brother stole from me.”

I grab the screwdriver and thrust like it’s a dagger, but Luna smacks it out of my hand. I shove her against the table and grab the lightning potion as Dione leaps across the room.

I uncork the vial. If I’m struck with blood poisoning, it won’t go away with rest and water like some common fever, but desperate times call for desperate measures—Luna knows it, my father knew it, I know it. I drink the potion, and it tastes like cough syrup, rotten berries, and iron. I gag, but I don’t spit it out, even when I get instantly dizzy, like whenever I was a kid and Dad would spin me around in his desk chair at work. I fight back a cough as Dione grabs me by the throat and slams me against the wall.

“I have no problem snapping his neck,” Dione says with her menacing eyes.

Luna balances herself against the table. “He remains not worth it.”

Blood rushes to my head the tighter Dione squeezes, and there’s a charge running through me, crackling throughout my arms. I think back to Atlas coaching Emil on how to call his power. I’ve heard it all a thousand times from editing those clips. I focus on bringing the lightning to the surface, can feel it right beneath my skin, needing just a little more of a push. . . . I press my hands against Dione as if to shove her and bolts of white lightning blast through her. Dione’s eyes widen and her grip loosens and she falls at my feet, smoke rising around the hole in her stomach. I expect flesh to regrow and piece her back together, but she’s still.

It was self-defense. I killed her in self-defense like the Spell Walkers have. I’m more in shock over how quickly it happened than I am having had the power to protect myself in the first place. Dione has done a lot of harm, so I’m not going to twist myself up over this, especially when I can slay the monster who underestimated me.

I step over Dione’s body, and Luna backs into a corner.

She thought I was harmless. The acolyte I saw before with the crate returns, and I hurl a bolt directly through his heart. He crumples with his mouth open.

I’m a first-timer calling my power with more ease than Emil ever has; this is what I’ve been saying all along. He may have been reborn, but my blood comes from a long line of power that’s beginning again with me. Luna tries escaping, and I strike her down with bolts of lightning.

“I was wrong,” Luna whispers while pressing down on her bloody arm.

“About what?”

“You’re extraordinary.”

I nod. “Unfortunately, Luna, life has got to be lost to preserve it.”

I stand over her and cage her in lightning until she’s dead.

I’ve done what no one else could do. I killed the one Blood Caster who Eva feared confronting on the battlefield, and I executed the queenpin before she could become unstoppable. I can’t wait to bust out of here and get back to Nova to celebrate with my family and Prudencia. I’ll ask the crew what we can do about getting me some proper Spell Walker gear and then we’ll take down the next threat.

The room spins and everything reverses in rapid flashes—what little color there was returns to Luna’s face as lightning retreats back inside my hands, she’s running backward, the acolyte’s corpse rises and exits, I’m pressed against the wall again and Dione’s hand is back around my throat.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” I say in choked breaths.

“Never,” Luna says. “Especially not at the hands of some fool who cannot tell an illusion apart from reality.”

“Illusion?”

Luna eyes one of the vials. “These are potions of mine that failed to convert humans into celestials and were revealed to have hallucinatory side effects. I couldn’t keep risking the health of my acolytes, so we’ve been selling them on the streets and filming the drinkers in the event one proves to exhibit actual powers so we can study the subjects. We’ve been marketing it as Brew—Ness’s idea, but surely he told you this given that he’s on your side, correct?”