Lord of Unkindness Ch. 37

 Notes: HAVE A FINALE!!!!!

Title: Lord of Unkindness Ch. 37

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Chapter Thirty-Seven

 

Photo by Jeremy Hynes

It’s pandemonium.

Fur flies. Blood spills. Little limbs are severed even as dogs are swarmed under, rats gnawing until they’re inside the larger creatures. It’s horrific—Ciro hates seeing animals in pain, but to see them actively destroying each other as his father and cousin fight for dominance is a level of violence he’s never experienced before. It’s even worse due to the fact that his father has locked down their magic—none of the familiars can be converted into spells, none of them can be handled more efficiently, more mercifully. It’s just a vicious battle of might versus might, and as more rats pour out of the ceiling, Ciro wonders for a moment what he’ll do if Nephele succeeds in killing Victor.

Then the door to Victor’s bedroom bursts open and another two dozen dogs charge into the office. The tide, red and quivering, begins to turn.

We need to get out of here. Ciro finally pulls himself together enough to stand. He tries to go to Angelo, but can’t—the barrier is more than magical, it’s physical somehow. Angelo is standing right in front of him, less than an inch apart, and yet it might as well be a mountain—worse, because he’s on the outskirts of the familiar battle.

“What’s he using?” Angelo says, a question both rhetorical and for Ciro as he looks around the room. “What artifact can keep us apart?”

“I don’t know.” Ciro shakes his head. “Something personal, probably—something that was made by a Hambly, since it’s so attuned to Victor.”

There’s a scream from the side of the room as one of Victor’s dogs breaks through Nephele’s sea of rats to go for her leg. She grabs the vase on the plinth nearby and smashes it down on the familiar’s head, but the crack in her defenses only widens. She has to turn her familiars from going after Victor to protecting her, and shoots a frantic look at Ciro a moment later. “Help me!” she shrieks.

Ciro doesn’t know what to do. Despite everything, he doesn’t want his cousin to die like this—eaten alive by her uncle’s familiars, the ultimate pawn in his game to get Ciro under his thumb. Nephele is an awful person, but she doesn’t deserve this. “Free me and I will!”

Nephele nods shakily and reaches toward the wall behind her, but one of the dogs lunges over her protectors and hits her right in the chest, knocking her onto the floor. She screams again, shrill and pained and afraid, so terribly afraid.

Ciro can’t help her. But Angelo can. He has no reason to—she assaulted Maria, she burned his home, she forced them apart. But Ciro has always known Angelo is a better person than him, and the fact that his lover turns and extends the magic that can’t touch Ciro on Nephele, pushing all the familiars that have converged on her back, is proof of that.

A protective golden light engulfs Nephele, and a second later her rats are drawn in as well. She’s down to…lord, there have to be fewer than fifty of them left. Ciro is intimately aware of what happens to a witch like them when their familiars are taken out, and even if Nephele hadn’t been savaged by his father’s dogs, she’d probably be in shock right now thanks to the fact that over ninety percent of her familiars have died in the last two minutes.

God. His heart, already in his throat, feels like it’s going to rip right out of him when he sees the dogs turn their attention to Angelo.

“No!” he screams at his father. The entire pack is swarming Angelo and Nephele, and it’s clear that the press is a challenge for Angelo to handle. Even with his powerful kinnara magic, he’s being pushed to the edge by the ferocity of Victor’s attack. Ciro can hardly even see Ciro through the animals leaping at him, synchronized like one canine leviathan. Circling Angelo’s head, Ciro’s raven flaps its wings frantically, barely out of grabbing range from the dogs. Ciro wouldn’t put it past his father to hurt Ciro’s familiars right now.

Victor is a bit shaky on his feet, but his expression is one of brutal triumph as he moves across the floor. Tiny bodies are crushed beneath his feet, the corpses of his own familiars ignored as he moves unerringly to Ciro.

“You see the consequences of defying me now,” he says gutturally. “You have nothing left to use against me. You’ve been separated from your mate, and if you don’t agree to submit to my will and allow me to collar you appropriately, I’ll make sure Angelo Fabroa doesn’t leave this room alive. His strength won’t hold out against me forever.”

“Father—”

“Do you understand?” Victor presses. “Give me your agreement, now, or the second his magic fails I’ll have my dogs rip his limbs off. I’ll make you watch it all, son. I don’t need you sane to make good use of you.”

It’s the end of everything. Every hope, every plan, every second chance that Ciro has ever fought for. This is how it ends—on his knees before his father, begging for a chance to be his slave if it means sparing Angelo. It’s worse than he could have imagined, because he dragged the man he loves into this, and…

Don’t give up!

It’s Angelo’s voice, but the connection is coming from Ciro’s raven. Not the one on his shoulder, but the one out in the center of the office flying for its life.

Connect to your magic! Use what you gave me to bring it through. You can still save us, Ciro. I know you can.

Bring his magic through…like he did with Annette, when he manifested his familiars. Only he pulled them through himself, his own body. If he does that here, they’ll just end up trapped behind this magic with him. Wouldn’t that make his father laugh? But he has one out there…one familiar connected to his magic, one that’s linked to him in the open.

And on the other side of the country, he has an entire flock waiting to come to his rescue.

There’s no more time to question himself. His father is right there, familiars as vicious and focused as he always is while Ciro’s flounder and squawk. It’s time for this to end.

And Ciro’s going to be the one to end it.

He closes his eyes, because if he has to look at the scene in front of him right now he’ll never be able to keep his cool. He turns his attention inward, into that connection with his magic that goes deeper than the familiars themselves. This is the essence of what it is to be a witch of his caliber—to hold a reservoir of power that’s always with him, always there. It’s been so long since Ciro has done more than dip his fingertips into it, but now he reaches his self-imposed dam and rips it apart. His magic surges into him, frothing, freezing, already more than his body can handle. So he doesn’t handle it. He turns it toward the familiar in the middle of the office and encourages it to grow, grow, grow…

Come back to me.

“What the hell…” he hears his father exclaim over the roar in his ears, but Ciro doesn’t care anymore. He’s a channel, a vessel for his own power as it beats through his body and into his familiar with all the pressure of a thousand flapping wings.

When he opens his eyes again, Ciro is expecting chaos. With so many flying familiars packed in such a tight space, they might end up easy prey for the dogs, but it’s the only magic available to him.

Turns out, he’s wrong about that. He didn’t channel a thousand birds into his father’s office.

He’s created one single, enormous raven instead.

Ciro’s eyes widen as he takes in the mythological proportions of the familiar he’s brought into being. It’s twice as tall as any of the humans in the room are, its head brushing the ceiling. It can’t spread its wings out all the way in here, they’re so broad, and its beak is as long as a motorcycle. When one of the dogs rushes at it, the raven simply opens its beak and—snaps it up.

It’s the beginning of the end for Victor. The raven hunkers down so its legs are protected, closes its inner lids, and starts snatching familiars up right and left. They just vanish into its maw, and Ciro watches as his father gets more and more desperate. Victor is throwing everything he has at Ciro’s magic, and none of it is working.

Finally, as he’s down to his last few dogs, he breaks and runs for the bookcase behind his desk. The second he grabs a small silver statue in the shape of a rat, Ciro feels the spell binding their magic to familiar form break. Victor spins around, sparks at his fingertips, but it’s already too late for him. Ciro urges his familiar forward, and in one fell swoop it grabs his father up. He’s got just enough time left for Ciro to see his mouth open in a scream of his own before he vanishes into Ciro’s magic.

He can’t describe the sensation that surges through him as his father’s magic flails and fights, then dwindles into nothing. It’s like Ciro has all the magic in the world, but it’s dirty, tainted. It’s too much for him to handle. He has to get rid of it. He has his familiar turn it up and out, a tower of power blasting through space—and the ceiling.

As alarms begin to blare and smoke billows out of the roof, Ciro wobbles and falls to his knees in a move he can’t even feel. He can’t feel anything at all; his body is as numb as his hands were. He can’t feel his lungs work. He can’t feel his heartbeat. How is he even alive? The darkness crawling up in his vision is welcome—any reprieve from this awful nothing of sensation.

But at the edge of his dwindling sight, just before he loses himself entirely, Ciro sees gold.