Before I could do anything though, time seemed to freeze. As in, everything stopped, but I could still see what was happening. I saw Agnes go to each of the others in turn, and talk to them. Finally she came to me. I think she could tell I'd been able to see, even though I couldn't hear the conversations, and I don't think she was happy about it. But she put her hands on me and gave me a vision.
It was Michael and me, fighting side by side in a battle. We were winning, but at the same time, I was changing. I saw my claws fall away, and my wings shrivel up, and when I tried to remove my armour, it wouldn't go. That was my future, Agnes told me as the vision faded away. But it didn't have to be. She could give me what I really wanted. The thing I tried so hard to find. A normal life, with Michael alongside me.
I know a thing or two about temptation. That was a good one. I wanted to believe her. But if there's one thing I've learned since I came to Wicker Valley it's that I don't get to have a normal life, because I'm not normal. So that's what I told her. And I told her that there was a war brewing, which was nothing to do with us. I wanted to protect this town, and right now that didn't mean siding with her.
Then she was back by the fallen tree, and time was moving again. I looked at the others, and asked if we were all on the same page. We all were except for Robin. And Alabaster. I did wonder where he'd been since he ran off after we came back from the past.
Elizabeth was understandably focussed on Alabaster. He did kill her after all. And Michael was trying to stop Robin in some way that didn't hurt him too much. I went for Agnes. I took her by surprise - I think that was the first time she'd seen me teleport - but it didn't help. My claws didn't even seem to make contact with her. Then Michael was calling me back, and magic was flying and Robin was screaming and Agnes had some kind of little bag with her like the ones she planted on us, and I tried to take it off her but she hung onto it. Agnes sent that nice little demon that's been hanging around with Elizabeth to attack her, and I had to yell at him to go away. Which he did, just in time to stop him stabbing Elizabeth in the face. And then Mary showed up.
Mary took Agnes away, and I asked her to look after my aunty, because she is still one of the few members of my family I've ever managed to get on with. We bundled the tied up Robin into the van and took him back to the junkyard for a lie down in the oubliette while we had a rest in the panic room.
We shared the different things Agnes had offered us. Michael had been offered restoring his brother's ability to walk. Adam was offered being made the head of the Foundation - or destroying it completely. Which made me feel pretty damn lucky that we'd all ended up on the same side.
After I shared mine, Elizabeth started in on the comments about me and Michael having found true love, which seemed a bit premature after one kiss. I could see Michael turning bright red. And I ended up telling them the reason I'd been holding back all this time. I was afraid of ending up like Agnes. My family do things to extremes, and while I didn't know what that looked like when it came to love until I met Agnes, that thought has been there since the day I had to stop Rusty from killing Michael.
After a nice cup of tea and a sit down, we remembered that the point of all this was to bring down the ward, and we should check on that. I teleported to just inside where the ward had been. It was still there. And it was stronger now. Enough that I could just about see it shimmering away. And I couldn't get through it, by teleporting or otherwise.
I went back to tell the others and we got back in the van and drove to the nearest road accessible part of the ward. There we found a car that looked like its insides had been painted red. Obviously the ward had stopped the people but the car had kept going. The police were there, and we encouraged them to set up barriers on all the roads out of town to make sure this didn't happen again.
So now we had to do our part and take down that ward once and for all before anyone else died. We'd got the focus, but that wasn't all. And then there was the matter of that bag Agnes had been using. It felt a bit weird asking Elizabeth to sniff my hand where I'd been holding it to see if she recognised the herbs, but she did. A hex bag, used to drain power off someone. In this case, clearly it was being used to drain Mary.
We were all pretty sure that Agnes' basement was where we needed to go to disrupt the ward, but how to get in there? Adam suggested I just teleport right in, but I couldn't do that. I'd never seen her basement. Adam then had an idea involving sending in a drone, but I had to explain it didn't work like that. I could go to places I'd been before, and people I knew well, but somewhere I just saw on camera wouldn't work. And this turned to be academic, because it turned out that in this timeline, Adam kept biscuits in the drone box.
They were chocolate hobnobs though, so we all ate some while we came up with a plan.
Michael was the distraction, with Elizabeth watching from nearby for backup. He took some cinnamon bun cake from the Wicker Stop as a peace offering while I snuck round the back with Adam. I got inside and went down to the basement. It was dark down there. Unnaturally dark. I wouldn't have known what to do if Toby the grotesque hadn't shown up again. At some point I need to ask him some questions, but for now I needed his help. He said there were dead things on the floor. And some things that weren't dead. He guided me across the room, and there I found the casting circle.
The sigil was drawn in blood, ringed with plant bits and hair, probably hers and Mary's. I wondered if I should just plunge my claws in to tear it apart, but decided on a more scientific approach. Peroxide. Now I'd been here once I could teleport back in, so I went to the chemist, bought some peroxide, and came back to destroy the circle. I got a bit too close to some of the other stuff down there as I did so, but my armour activated and that was OK.
Then Agnes was down there with me, grabbing onto me, driving her claws into my shoulders, and a moment later there was a sudden pain in my back and a much worse pain in my soul. She'd ripped off my wings.
She was standing there holding them, saying "what have I done?" over and over, and all I could do was say the same thing. And then we had a whole lot of company.
Mary seemed to be a whole different person when Michael was holding her arm. I was in too much shock to really understand what was going, but Agnes's hex bag got taken off her and disintegrated, and Mary did some kind of magic to reattach my wings. She also had some answers for me about the armour. She called it the armour of the divine protector, and said something about me being a protector for Michael. And she seemed to know something about why or what Michael had been chosen for as well.
Mary seemed to think it was strange that a hellspawn had ended up with this armour, but for me it was starting to make sense. My family take things to extremes. I guess for me that meant extreme rejection the roll of the family matriarch that they chose for me. Something to think about in the future though, because first we had to check on the ward again. At last. It was gone.
No comments:
Post a Comment