glowed brighter—a trick Duncan himself had taught me, to unlock wards—and saw it just before the field melted into a shower of sparks: a sigil shaped like a half-moon with a squiggle on top, located in the lower left-hand corner of the ward field. I crouched low on the floor, positioned my left hand in front of where I thought it had been, and, with my right hand, held the angel stone against the ward. When the sigil flared, I placed my hand on it. Electric bolts shot up my arm, but I kept my hand on the sigil and turned. The ward field vanished and I rolled through where it had been. I scrambled to my feet and charged up the stairs. Two more wards were at the top of the stairs and one was midway down the hall. I figured out how to disarm each one using the angel stone, but the process was wearying. By the time I reached the dean’s office, I felt like a drained battery.
The office door was open. And Duncan sat behind the desk, leaning back in the sleek ergonomic chair, his feet up on Dean Book’s lovely Louis XVI desk.
“Ah, Callie,” he said, smiling at me as if I’d come to discuss my tenure review. “I’m so glad you made it. It’s always gratifying to see a student using the skills you’ve taught them. But, then, I always suspected you would be good at disarming wards. You are a doorkeeper, after all. Please have a seat. As you can see, I’ve made a fire. Winter comes early to these mountains.”
I glanced at the fireplace and saw a roaring fire in the hearth. A thick manila envelope succumbed to the flames.
“So you’re destroying all evidence of your plans?” I said. “Do you imagine that will save you?”
“I was hoping it would save the nests of gargoyles and nephilim that remain. That way, you won’t know where I’ve gone.”
“What makes you think I’m going to let you leave?” I asked, stepping closer to the desk and holding up the angel stone. “You’d only come back again—or victimize humans and witches somewhere else.”
“The latter, actually. We can usually find some war-torn corner of your world where women are so victimized that we can continue our breeding program unnoticed.” His eyes sparkled as he saw me wince. “I don’t think I’ll try for Fairwick again so soon. Not while you’re still here. But in a couple hundred years when we’ve built up our strength again …” He shrugged, one shoulder lifting higher than the other. “Who knows? And as for why you will let me go …” He took his feet off the desk and leaned forward. I saw now that, where his wing had been torn from his back, a new one was growing. I gripped the angel stone in my hand and extended my right arm, using my left to steady it. “You’ll let me go because you no longer have the power to stop me.”
I directed my power through the stone and aimed for the middle of his chest. Nothing happened. I looked down at the stone, which lay cold and inert in my hand.
Duncan laughed. “The wards,” he said, almost gently. “They drained the stone. It’s only temporary, but”—he looked down at the gleaming gold Rolex on his wrist—“it should give me enough time to get far away from here.”
He stepped over to the window, his wings unfurling. Outside, the sun was climbing higher over the eastern mountains. The light touched the tips of the feathers and limned his wings with gold, like the gilding on a Renaissance painting. He
I drew the needle from my hair, a thread of glowing red wool still clinging to it, and leapt over Dean Book’s Louis XVI desk and plunged it into Duncan’s back, just below his left rib cage. He wheeled around to face me, his fingers flailing to grab the knitting needle. He pulled it out, trailing a long red thread.
His lip curled in a sneer. “Did you really think you could kill me with a knitting needle?”
“No, but I thought this might work.” I touched my hand to his chest and pulled the thread lodged beneath his ribs up and forward. Straight through his heart. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open. I yanked harder and he gasped, black gore rising from his throat and dribbling over his lips. He fell to one knee, his wings sagging behind him. He would have fallen flat on his face if I hadn’t held him up by the thread. His eyes rolled back in his head, staring up at me.
“That’s for killing Bill,” I said, tying the knot that cut off his heart.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Frank told me later that as soon as I killed Duncan, it was as if the strings holding the gargoyles up in the air were cut. The monstrous creatures tumbled out of the air, slack and dead-eyed. A few were killed in this passive state, but once Soheila realized what had happened, she ordered a cease-fire, organizing the trows to form a cordon around the gargoyles. A few, coming to their senses, took wing and escaped, flying into the Catskills, but the rest seemed resigned to being prisoners. From the window above, I stood watching Duncan’s ashes scatter in the wind until the last speck of him vanished. By then the sun had risen high over the mountains and bathed the village of Fairwick in a rose-gold glow. Smoke still wafted from Main Street and the woods, but the fires had all been extinguished, and already the townspeople were out putting the town to rights and helping one another. Fairwick and Fairwick College would survive and, with the nephilim banished, prosper again. As long as I lived, I could serve as the door between Faerie and Fairwick and so the fey would be free to come and go, bringing the balm of Aelvesgold into this world to heal the wounds we had suffered.
But not all wounds. As I walked out of Main Hall, I felt a tug in my chest. It was as if I’d wrapped the magic thread around my own heart and pulled until I cut off the flow of blood, leaving a lifeless stone in my chest instead of a living, pumping organ. That weight grew heavier as I saw the devastation wrought by the battle. The trows, spurred by the death of their comrade, had rushed headlong into battle and suffered the worst casualties. The survivors stood around their fallen comrades, singing haunting dirges. Brownies and witches, gnomes and Fairwick students sang with them. Scott Wilder stood arm in arm with two trows, swaying as they sang. I searched the crowds for the rest of my students: I spotted Nicky and Flonia administering first aid to a wounded gnome, and Ruby Day and two other girls I recognized from the fairy-tales class were helping Ann and Jessica Chase set up a triage center. I felt a lightening of the weight in my chest when I saw that all my students had survived, and I began to look for my friends. I spotted Frank, Soheila, and Diana crouching on the ground beneath the four red maples that marked the center of the quad. As I approached, I saw that Liz was there, too, as well as Brock, Dory, Phoenix, and Jen. I put my hand over my heart and told myself that all these people were alive because William had sacrificed himself. I was lucky, I told myself, but then Soheila lifted her head and met my gaze and I felt a sirocco of grief pour off her. I hurried toward the four maples, scared to see who was at the center of the circle.
It was my grandmother. She lay on the ground on a blanket of red, which at first I thought were the leaves of the Japanese maples but then realized was her blood. Her head was cradled in Jen Davies’s lap. Liz, Diana, and Dory had spread their arms over her, forming a triangle of Aelvesgold that poured over the wound in her chest, but the color of Adelaide’s face told me that the Aelvesgold wasn’t penetrating her skin. As I knelt beside her, Adelaide’s pale-gray eyes fastened on mine, and her hand fluttered weakly in the air. I took it, alarmed at how cold she was.
“What happened?” I cried.
“A gargoyle was headed straight for Nicky Ballard,” Frank answered. “Adelaide threw a repulsion spell at him, but it wasn’t strong enough. She took the blow that would have killed Nicky.”
A garbled sound came from Adelaide’s lips. I leaned closer to hear her better.
“… make up … curse …” she gasped.
“You were making up for the curse you put on the Ballards?” I asked.
She nodded and I squeezed her hand. “Thank you,” I said, and then, turning to Diana, “Can’t you help her?”
Diana lifted her doe eyes to me and shook her head. “She isn’t absorbing the Aelvesgold. It sometimes happens when a witch has used too much Aelvesgold in her lifetime.”
Adelaide squeezed my hand and made a sound. I leaned my ear down to her lips again and heard her say,
