“I have many ideas, Mother. You just never saw fit to listen to them.”
“No, you don’t…” She sputtered several angry curses, and I watched, more than a bit fascinated, as her skin slowly closed over her open wound. It wasn’t like the rapid healing I’d seen from the wolves, but it was much faster than I healed.
“I’ll kill you!” Mr. Parracida said, finally popping out from behind the linen closet and running toward his son with what looked like a dagger. Man, their plans would have been a lot harder to foil if they’d opted to use guns.
None of us were really paying attention to all the blood Mrs. Parracida had shed. Why would we? But when that slowly spreading stream of scarletOh, another alliteration! Yay!hit the edge of the spell circle, every single bit of the room lit up, and the roof of the tower above us tore in two.
“Whatnow?” Chris groaned, and I was right there with him.
This particular light show, however, wasn’t for us. Mostly because the Parracida mother truly began shrieking, scuttling backward and tipping this way and that because of her missing hand.
“No! You can’t! You haven’t upheld your part of the bargain! We haven’t won!”
The sky above the broken roof turned pitch black, and a ghostly hand with sharp nails as long as my torso began to reach down.
It was like something out of my wildest dreams, sections of the hand completely transparent while others violentlyvacillated between colors almost like a graphics card glitching in a video game. One moment it was an inky, frantic miasma, and the next it was translucent and barely visible in the corner of my vision.
“No!No!You promised!”
And that was when it spoke.
I’d seen a lot of crazy things in my life—one did when your mother was a locally famous psychic and gifted with precognition and your grandmother could talk to dead people—but nothing prepared me for the shuddering, blooming, yet also singing words that echoed through the air.
“You have broken the pact.”
“What? No, I haven’t! I gave you my wolf, sacrificed my own blood!”Wait, what now?“You haven’t given me the victory you promised yet!”
“You forget. See your heart. See your thoughts. You sought… a loophole. To break our covenant.”
“No, I didn’t! I swear I didn’t! My enemies! They—t-they?—”
“Enough, I grow bored.”
The screams that tore out of Mrs. Parracida were trulyhaunting, but I couldn’t look away as the hand slowly,leisurelyeven, descended. Was it a god? A spirit? A demon? I didn’t know. We could only watch and bear witness as it reached for the woman.
I braced myself for it to grab her, or maybe even swat her like a bug, but that never happened. Instead, one of the needle-sharp nails gently touched the top of her head.
And that was it.
One moment the woman was shrieking, begging for mercy, the next she began to glow and flicker in the same way as the arm before freezing entirely. Her voice cut off in an eerily sharp stop, then, like a puff of wind went by, she turned to ash and crumbled into little more than a dust pile on the ground.
Holy-Capital-SHIT!
“No! My darling! My Arlene!”
Mr. Parracida collapsed to his knees, sobbing, but the disembodied arm reaching down from the heavens gave him no notice.
“Contract completed.”
It was uncanny in more ways than one, but as suddenly as it happened, the hand ascended and the sky cleared, leaving the starry night that had fallen since the Parracidas had attacked our hideout. For a long, long moment, there was silence other than the weeping from Mr. Parracida and a faint wheezing from his father, who was, apparently, still alive.
“I guess she’d done enough backstabbing for a lifetime,” Sergio muttered before looking to us. “Truce?”
Luther slowly struggled forward, extending the stump where his arm had once been. Shockingly enough, Sergio rested his hand over it, almost like he was taking responsibility for the disfigurement.
“Truce,” Luther agreed.
Chapter 23