Helen Price ignored Stavros, watching Axer with a pinched expression. “That's great. Just great. Nice, Ren. Just give the Dares the world. Ugh. I don't want it anyway.” She shook her head, freeing herself of her guise. Olivia finally looked at Stavros with her own eyes and bit out, “Mother is unavailable.”
Marsgrove's pinstriped form rose from where “Constantine” had been kneeling. And Constantine shook free of the features of his roommate. Even knowing, even having seen their signs, staggering relief nearly felled me. Constantine was supposed to have been Mussolgranz. As Axer, he'd transferred to the most perilous role—the protections against them limited by their assumed forms, just in case.
“A bit of an overdone affair, Crown,” Marsgrove said, shaking out his suit front and wiping the blood from his mouth. “I approve.”
I wanted to say, “When Alexander Dare pulls a con, it is thorough,” but there was something I needed to know more.
“Mike?” I asked desperately, as Constantine strode forward with the other assistant—Neph, shedding her guise—and together they reconnected me fully, everything blooming intense silver and gold. “Is Mike—?”
“Fine,” Constantine said gruffly, fingers checking my wrists. “A bit roughed up. Said you owe him at least one blizzard practice space. He and Peoples are gathering the others from around the prison right now. O'Leary's bringing Bailey.”
Stavros let out a growl.
It turned my attention back to him. “Surprised?”
He bared his teeth at me.
I prowled toward him. “You had to think you had won. You had to think it was because of you that you won, too. Patrick? An O'Leary? You believed he would turn, and therefore you accepted that turning.” I let the Treacherous Don confidence game rotate above my palm. “You accepted Mike's information about my parents because you thought it was given under duress—instead of plotted with deceiving you in mind and carefully cultivated by Mike and Will pretending to exchange information and memories—most notably my parents' address, a closely guarded secret. You believed you were gaining it through trickery. And therefore, you believed you had my parents. Who you never had. Hidden beneath a magic so heavy, you couldn't sense that one of them was your own daughter. Brought to you by a trusted servant. Confident of your victory, you never doubted.”
The Treacherous Don morphed to the Five Man Act with all of us located around our target. All roles other than Stavros's and mine had multiple people filling the parts—Olivia, Greyskull, and Stevens, Kaine and Axer (which had turned into Kaine/Axer/Constantine), Mussolgranz and guards.
“Destroying the seals to find you...that was a good gambit,” I said. “And if we’d located you at the end of it, we’d have run with it, but it was never the main plan.” I let the cons extinguish. “It wasn't the one where you'd let your guard down. Where you'd think that you had won.”
“You think you’ve won?” he spit.
“I think you are scared.”
“I have all of the codes pre-programmed. And I'm not without you.” He threw out the last of his magic, trying to hollow me.
I batted it away with the freshly surging connections Neph and Constantine were sharing in abundance.
Rage flew through me, nearly unchecked at what Stavros was trying to do again.
Nearly unchecked.
I took a deep breath, hand holding him firmly in the painting. Priyasha stood above him, a silent sentinel who had been forced to protect his sanctum and life, but nothing else. I could see her magic seeking to keep him alive, but she stared at me, her face relaxing into a sort of hungry peacefulness.
I took another deep breath.
The thing Stavros lacked in his ultra-empathy, was the ability to attach to the emotions himself. He understood it in others, used it, but didn't share it. Understood it, but didn't feel it.
I wanted to feel it, though. Even the sadness. Even the tragedy.
I allowed the rage to flow through me. Acknowledged it. Then let it flow away, down the stream. Steady.
Anger, sadness, happiness, they made me stronger, but they also made me weaker. It was the balance, the understanding, that I needed. To feel the emotions, but not to make decisions within the emotions. Decisions made at the height of anger, or even happiness, were decisions influenced by things outside of reason. But being entirely of reason, without influence, like Stavros, wasn't ideal either.
I looked at the boys—who were standing shoulder-to-shoulder now, where weeks ago, there would be stab wounds in their backs. Felt all the Bandits, who had banded together—a bunch of miscreants who had found a purpose—including Patrick, with his newly reconnected connections and vows courtesy of a completely fit Asafa sitting completely unharmed in Medical.
I looked at Neph, Will, and Olivia, who had been with me on my first adventures. At Greyskull and Stevens, whose fingers were encircling Raphael's wrists, as if he might disappear—Marsgrove at their side. At Priyasha, leaning forward in her frame.
I looked down at the spot which the rage was trying to erode, but couldn't touch. At the spot where my brother's memory would always hold firm, where my parents still firmly resided, even if their house was no longer the place I called home.
Love.
And I let go—let the spot release its stone hold and spread to overtake all else.
“No,” Stavros said.
And for once, the smile was on my face, not his. “Absolute power corrupts. So does absolute love, but from the opposite view.”
He struggled to stand in the frame.
“You were right.” I looked up at him through a section of escaped, wild hair—with heavy-lidded, certainty in my gaze. “I rely far too much on my friends.”
He backed away.
“Here's the thing,” I said, almost gently, pulling the silver-gold from me in a long banner of satin magic. “You were expecting me. Corrupted by power and rage. And that me, you knew how to conquer. But you didn't get that me. You got the me that is part of a bigger whole. You got us. And us doesn't just include Origin Mage powers. It includes Muses, and Bridges, and Mind Mages, it includes Sirens, and Scholars, and physical geniuses. It includes people who can manipulate frequencies, back door magics, and weaponry. And more importantly,” I leaned forward. “People who can put all of those things together into a very disruptive unit.”
The net reached farther, wider—Excelsine, Crelussa, The Western Territories—spreading, spreading, spreading until it reached all corners of the earth in all five layers.
“You didn’t just get me. You got us. And we? We defeat you.” And I cast the magic at him.
Chapter Thirty-three: How it Ends
The magic of the last seal faded and broke like a bubble popping, pulling the whole room fully into the Second Layer.
Bellacia smiled as she recorded it all. “And thus, the veils come down,” she murmured. “And a new empire will be born.”
I watched the last of the magic fall, carefully pulling it into the storage system that we had set up just for this—the ten of us at points around the sword that Will had set up in the middle. “Can't we just, I don't know, have a republic? With like, benevolent leaders interested in the common welfare of all people?”
Her tinkling laughter was her only response.