"Why are you doing this? I want you to leave me alone," I say firmly. I tug on my hand, but he doesn't release it. "I don't want to be with you. I'm not going to join with you. You need to leave and never come back."
He frowns. "Morgan. Stop it. This is nonsense. Now, come on." He gives a hard yank on my hand and almost pulls me out of the bed. My shoulder feels a sharp pang, as if my arm is straining against its socket. Determinedly I pull it back.
I realize now that we're in the meadow again. I don't remember where we were just seconds ago. But we're in the meadow, and there's Cal's bed at the edge of it The sun is warm on my hair, the bees' droning noise is mesmerizing-it's the most perfect, peaceful place in the world. Except Cal's in it.
Time to act. I reach forward and grab Cal's other hand, pulling it toward me. He smiles-playful Morgan-but I keep a death grip on it and won't let go. He frowns in puzzlement and tries to pull his own hand back. "Let go," he says.
I send every bit of power I have into the hold I have on his hand. "No," I say calmly. "I won't let go."
He suddenly gives a hard yank, and I hold on tighter, clenching my teeth. "You can't hurt me anymore," I grind out-
Then my eyes opened to darkness lit only by a glow of blue witchfire. I lurched up in bed and stifled a horrified scream-in my hand I was holding one leg of a dark-feath- ered hawk! The same hawk I had seen in all my dreams- the one with the cold, golden eyes. My face froze in shock as I took in the scene-the hawk's huge, powerful wings beating the air, my fist gripped around its leg tight enough to break its bone. The hawk screamed unbearably loudly, right in my face, and I squeezed my eyes shut, the horrible sound raking my eardrums.
Its beak lunged toward my face, and I ducked at the last second to avoid having my cheek ripped open. Around me I heard a commotion-moving and shouting, and then a light flashed on. Other hands were grabbing at me-I was on my knees on the bed, hanging on to the hawk's leg, avoiding its beak. Then I recognized Alyce's voice, and Hunter's and Bethany's, and it was enough to pull me back into reality. Hunter managed to grab a beating wing. Alyce grabbed the other one, holding it hard, outstretched against her body. A sudden slash made me cry out, and I saw that the hawk had managed to slice into my arm with its other taloned claw.
I let out a gasp, and then Hunter grabbed the other leg, and between the four of us we held the hawk down. It struggled fiercely, still lunging with its beak, and then Alyce reached out one hand and grabbed its neck. Her face was contorted with fierce, ruthless determination-I had never seen her look like this before.
I still held on to one leg and glanced down at the gashes on my arm, dripping blood. I stared at the hawk, at its golden eyes-they were like Cal's eyes. I looked up at Alyce to ask what should we do now, but I saw a look of horror come over her face. My head snapped back to the hawk, and then my jaw dropped in terror as the hawk's mouth opened and a wisp of thick, oily smoke emerged. In a second I remembered the last time I had seen something like that-it had been back when Selene had died, in her library. It was here now, and it was incredibly foul, this close. Just being within proximity of it made me feel like my life force was draining away, as if it was the coldness of death itself. My heart sank and my mouth went dry, and then, as the last of the smoke roiled out of the bird's mouth, it went limp and sank lifeless in our hands. It was dead.
"Quick!" Bethany shouted, dropping the bird's body on the bed and throwing herself toward the window. She slammed it down and locked it, and Alyce sprang for the door and locked that, too. I was still trying to get my bearings, but the other three witches were circling the anam, grim looks of resolve on their faces.
Then, as we watched, the nebulous smoke slowly began to achieve more form. It coiled upon itself, becoming more three-dimensional. My eyes felt like they were burning as a grisly, acid-eaten face gradually emerged from the oily fog.
It was Selene.
My mind went blank with terror. Selene! My first thought was that against Cal, we had good odds of beating him. Against Selene, who besides Ciaran was the strongest, most evil witch I'd ever come across-our odds were much worse.
Selene! How was it possible? Her anam must have been within the smoke that drifted from her mouth when she died. She must have found some other host-this hawk, or another one, or something else. Then she had decided to take revenge on me. It hadn't been Cal at all. It had never been Cal.
I felt my heart sink at this realization. The real Cal was dead-he had been dead all this time. Selene had used his image in my dreams to make me follow him. She must have known that I still had conflicting feelings about her son: anger, fear, maybe even a little fondness. But most of all, guilt. He had sacrificed his life for me. And as much as I knew he was a twisted person who had done terrible things, a small part of me still regretted that Because he might have truly loved me, in his way. And because he never really had a chance. Not with a mother like Selene.
Her death's-head grin was becoming more apparent-in life, Selene had been as beautiful as Cal, in the same sleek, golden, feline way. She was no longer beautiful. It was as if every bit of evil she had in her had eaten away at her human form, leaving only the grimacing mockery of a challenge.
Without thinking I threw out my hand, and a jagged, neon blue bolt of energy snapped from my fingers and sliced right through the smoky form. Her slash of a mouth widened in horrible amusement.
I was stiff and stupid with fear. We hadn't prepared for this. I felt pearls of cold sweat popping fully formed on my forehead, felt the ache of adrenaline tightening my muscles, the dull pain of my stomach, tight with terror. Selene.
Alyce made an incoherent sound-she and the others had been muttering spells nonstop since the hawk had died-but now I looked down and saw that dark tendrils were spinning off from lower down, and they were beginning to curl around the legs of Hunter, Alyce, and Bethany. They each quickly tried to jump away but already seemed held. They were throwing witchfire at it, spitting spells at it, and nothing they were doing was having any effect. These three witches were all strong, quick, and knew well how to protect themselves-but not even Hunter seemed to be able to stall her attack.
The smoky tendrils were weaving themselves higher, coiling insidiously around their bodies.
"Why are you doing this?" I shouted. I was going to sit here and watch my friends-and my muirn beatha dan-die, and then I was going to die myself if I didn't figure something out. A horrible, risky idea was starting to take form in my mind. I rejected it, but it kept coming back, and now I saw it as perhaps my only hope. It would be dangerous, and I didn't know if I could pull it off. I didn't even want to try.
"If it's me you want, take me, and leave them alone!" I cried.
The horrible Selene face laughed, and I realized that she wanted to see them die, that she would enjoy it. I found my mother's athame in my hand, glowing with a white heat, and without a plan I leaped forward and plunged the blade into the middle of the smoke. To my surprise, Selene actually seemed to feel it-the smoke recoiled and the face gasped. Then her expression twisted with anger, and a dreadful, perforated voice emanated from it. "You can't stop me, Morgan," it said, every word feeling like a steel nail scraped down a blackboard. "You're not strong enough. I'll take my revenge. My kind have been waiting hundreds of years to wipe out your kind, and I'm not going to let my own death stop me. You're the last of Belwicket, the last of the Riordans. Once you're dead, true Woodbanes can continue their work. I'm willing to martyr myself to that cause. Soon we'll be more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Twining vines of smoke slid toward me, running up the bedspread like fire. I edged back against the wall, then looked up to see that Bethany's neck was entwined-she was choking and gagging, and her face was tinged with blue. Bethany was going to die. Alyce and Hunter had turned their energies to saving her, but Selene's march toward death seemed unstoppable.
Unless.
Fully formed, my mother's power chant, the power chant of Belwicket, came to me, as it had on so many other occasions. The ancient, beautiful, and sometimes harsh words spilled from my mouth as I kept my eyes locked on Selene's form. "An di allaigh an di aigh an di allaigh an di ne ullah" I kept the words flowing like lifesaving water as my hand crept across the bed to the body of the dead hawk. My half brother Killian had caught a hawk once by calling its true name. If you know the true name of something, you have ultimate control over it. I knew Ciaran's true name, but no one knew mine, including me. My fingers brushed the soft feathers, felt the absence of a life force, and I included the hawk's true name in my chant.
Selene was hardly paying attention to me-perhaps she thought it would be amusing to see what I could come up with, what puff of breath I could throw against her turbulent hurricane of power. Bethany was almost unconscious now, and the coils were moving up Alyce and Hunter. I saw hard intent in his face but no fear, and my heart felt a searing pain at the thought of what he was going through and how he was facing it.
I remembered what it felt like to be wolf-Morgan. My birth father, Ciaran, had taught me a shape-shifting spell. I didn't remember most of it, but now I called on ancient Riordan power, the power of my mother and her mother before her, back through the generations. Help! I sent the message silently. Mother, help me. Help me now.
I closed my eyes, swaying for a moment as new words, at once unknown and familiar, streamed into my mind. I recognized the form of limitations of the shape-shifting spell, and silently I repeated them, putting everything I knew, everything I felt, every need I had into the words.
I was frightened, deathly frightened, yet felt I was pulled inexorably toward this future, this one direction. Silently I murmured the true name of the hawk. Then the pieces came together in my mind in a beautiful, dazzling, stained- glass window of magick, the three things I needed weaving themselves together in a spell so balanced and perfect and beautiful, I wanted to cry.
Bethany sagged in Selene's grasp. Alyce and Hunter were now fighting the deadly tethers around their necks. There was no more time-not one second.
"Rac bis han!" I shouted, throwing my arms wide. Selene whipped around to look at me. "Nal nac hagagh! Ben dan!" I had a moment to see her gaping, protruding eyes widen in shock, then I was forced double, and I was screaming in pain.
Even Alyce and Hunter stopped struggling to watch me, and I cried out, instantly regretting my decision through a thousand hours of ripping, racking pain that lasted less than a minute. My bones bent unnaturally, my skin was pricked with thousands of needles, my face was drawn forward like burning steel. There was no way of getting through this with dignity or even a show of bravery. I wailed, screamed, cried, begged for mercy, and finally ended up sputtering incoherently, lying on my side on the bed. I blinked and struggled to rise. The room was strange and hard to understand. My feet couldn't clutch the bed well, and I gave a clumsy hop so I could perch on the footboard. Hesitantly I flapped my wings, felt the latent power contained within.
I was a hawk. I had shape-shifted. I now had a hawk's laser sight, razorlike talons, and merciless, ripping beak. I sent a message to Selene: Catch me if you can. Then I gathered my wings to me, and with a brilliant burst of immense joy and an aching longing for air and freedom, I took flight, right through the closed and locked window. I felt the wood splinter, the glass shatter against my chest, but then I was soaring up, up, into openness. I heard glass raining down, and then, with a soft sound, my wings caught fire and I streaked through the sky.
A few, exhilarating moments later I sensed another hawk coming after me. It was Selene, back in the body she had usurped. However, that body had already been dead for several minutes, its systems breaking down, and as I glanced back for a millisecond, I saw that it flew with jerky, uncon-trolled movements, working hard to keep up with me.
Yet right now Selene seemed unimportant. A hawk's wild joy ignited in me as I wheeled effortlessly through the dark night air. I felt incredibly light and incredibly strong. A thousand scents came to me as I soared higher-the higher I went, the thinner and cooler the air was as it filled my lungs. I heard the flames on my wings whip fiercely through the air, but I felt no pain, no heat, only a terrible, righteous anger and an increasingly strong need for revenge. As ecstatic as I was, shooting through the night, my thoughts once again turned toward Selene. She had been haunting me all this time, appearing to me in Cal's form. She wanted me dead. She wouldn't ever stop until I was dead and the dark Woodbanes were able to flourish. I couldn't let that happen.
I tucked one wing slightly in and began a huge, sweeping arc at sixty miles an hour. The dark hawk was slowly gaining on me, and even from this great distance I saw the glint of hatred in it golden eyes, the overriding lust for my death, and I knew that this could end in only one way: her death. My victory.
Once more I began saying the Riordan power chant, hearing the words unspool in my mind, feeling my power strengthen and swell.
I'm a Riordan, I thought. I'm the sgiurs dan. This will end here, and my descendants will go on to help Woodbanes be everything they can be, on the side of good.
Then, like children responding to a dare, we squared off and faced each other, hovering for a moment in the onyx- colored sky. I felt everything in me coil and hesitate, and then, like a bolt of witchfire, I hurtled through the night toward Selene, aware that she also was streaking toward me. I was both falling and soaring, my wings tucked close, feet drawn up: I was a weapon, going eighty miles an hour downward toward my enemy.
I was on Selene so fast that I didn't have time to really expect it-it was only a few seconds before we were swerving at the last second so we wouldn't just crash into each other. Quickly I circled as tightly as I could, and then I let all my raptor instincts take over-I quit thinking like a human, quit being Morgan altogether. I let go of all that and let my hawk free.