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“Just how do you plan on keeping control over both groups at once? They’ll turn on you in an instant?’

“Now that, Marissa, is where you come in.”

“No way will I ever help you. Besides, since you murdered Calaeno, that puts Sense in direct line for the throne.”

“Not once I kill her and claim her child for my own. Without her to bear witness against me, it will seem they both gave their lives to save the babe. And
I
am Calaeno’s chosen second.
I
will rule in her stead.”

“Even if you manage to steal the Harpy throne,’ I will
not
help you rule over the Furies.”

“Oh, darling, I don’t intend you to help me rule over the Furies.” She finally stopped backing away, closing the distance between us before I could do much more than blink. “You’re going to become
Penelope’s
second, and hold down the fort over the Harpies while I claim my rightful place as Queen of the Furies.”

My mouth worked soundlessly until I managed to find my voice. “They’ll never take orders from me, no matter how much Calaeno cooperated with me. No matter what boon she promised. I’m a Fury.”

Again she purred in that very scary tone. “Not for long.”

Well, hell. The proverbial lightbulb flashed on inside my head. She hadn’t allowed the mortals to try to kill me or hire the Harpies because she’d wanted me dead. No, worse, much worse—she’d wanted them to drive me into Turning Harpy.

She fell on me with such speed and intensity that it confirmed my earlier sense that she had been holding back. She flickered from Fury to Harpy to Fury, kicking my ass up and down the room with frightening ease. Her fists and booted feet landed against my flesh and bone in near-debilitating force. I managed to block maybe half her blows. Blows that
hurt.
Her fighting style changed with every shift, each slightly familiar at its core, but different enough that I had trouble switching up my strategy for defense. Blood flowed from a dozen cuts, filled my tongue with its bitter taste, blocked my vision when it ran into my eyes. Rage stirred, growing exponentially with every painful strike. I struggled but finally managed to call on the earlier center of calm that had allowed me to claim control over the dark edge of inhuman anger. Which was when she started cutting me verbally.

“Haven’t you realized the truth yet, little girl?”

She backed off slightly, so I took advantage of the chance to catch my breath. Sweat and blood ran down my face. I flicked them both away, eyes focused on her. “What truth? That you’re my new choice for Psycho Bitch of the Year? No, make that Century.”

Derision lit hen eyes, currently yellow-green. Harpy eyes, when they had no right to that color. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you I petitioned the Conclave to let me train you rather than her?”

My breath sucked out. “You what?”

“Petitioned for the right to train you instead of hen. It was my right, as sole survivor of the wing of Furies lied in the War. I should have had first claim on any apprentice I wanted after what I suffered at the hands of those hell-spawned mortals?’

Suddenly everything seemed just a tiny bit cleaner. “So you’re willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes for nothing more than revenge?”

Her eyes shaded to bloodred on the edge. “This isn’t about revenge, girl, it’s about
justice.
Justice for centuries of their kind discriminating against ours. Justice for the War they brought about. Justice for the discrimination that even
still
nuns rampant in the system they forced us to become complicit co-conspirators in. Do you know how many arcane judges there are in mortal courts? Four, maybe five? And how large a percentage of the population do we make up? Ten percent? Well oven fifteen if you add in the half-breeds. Racial discrimination may have been outlawed decades ago, but interspecies discrimination is still alive and well, and it will continue on its same bloody course unless someone does something about it.”

I pitched my tone to its most sarcastic. “And that someone would be
you?”

“Who better? You know how I survived that ambush that took out my whole wing, Marissa? I didn’t just fail over the edge of Rage, I fucking well owned it, jumped over it full barrels blazing, claimed the Rage for my own and made it do
my
bidding. Went Harpy anti killed every last one of those mortal bastards before they even
knew what hit them. And changed right back to Fury again. That takes a strength of self and force most people only dream of having. The will you have, that I honed to the same point of perfection as my own.”

“No!” This time my voice edged on hysteria. “I’m nothing like you!”

“Think not, little girl? I made you, took the child Allegra left and made you into the always-certain-she’s-right woman you are today. But that iron-hard purpose deep inside you is all yours. You can’t tell me you’ve never felt the Calm, Marissa.”

My heartbeat became erratic and I couldn’t do anything but stare at her, mouth wide open. The Calm.

That sounded way too similar to the eerie calmness that had come over me just after Penelope—Stacia-slaughtered Calaeno. Something I had felt a handful of times over the past several years, now that I thought about it. But that couldn’t... I wouldn’t allow it to mean…

“You have it in you to become
exactly
like me, Marissa.” Her voice become smooth, cajoling. “An incredibly special, amazingly powerful being. Someone who can shift from Fury to Harpy at will, and then back again. Someone who can command both types of magic; someone who can not only channel the Rage, but claim it as her very own. No longer will it rule over you—instead,
you
will rule over it.”

A hundred emotions flooded through my heart, each warring the last for supremacy. Fear, denial, anger, hope, determination, frustration, terror, doubt, and, most of all, Rage. I fought that Rage down with every fiber of my being, refusing to let this bitch push me into the very monster she wanted to create.

“Never!” I screamed the words, pouring every one of those emotions into it. “I will
never
become what you want me to be!”

Regret seemed to flick across her face, but then she played her trump card, one I never saw coming, even though I should have. “Who do you think arranged for the idiot mortals to kidnap your mother? Arranged for her repeated rapes and forced impregnation? Arranged the same fate for Vanessa when you started distancing yourself from me? Who do you think arranged her
death?
I did.”

The red-hot fury that overtook my body in that single instant of clarity nearly knocked me to my knees.

I shuddered with its force, staggering back several steps and fighting to hold it in. Satisfaction rushed over Penelope’s— Stacia’s—face, and she focused all her attention on me. Which meant she missed the figure hurtling toward her until it was too late.

Mom wielded a hefty bar of metal like a baseball bat, winding it up and smashing it against Stacia’s back hard enough that her body flew over an entire row of desks and crashed against one of the chalkboards before tumbling to the floor. Damn. Easy to see where Con got her softball skills.

Mom looked like my very own avenging angel as she shook her makeshift, bat at the unconscious Harpy/Fury. “I always knew you were an egocentric bitch, Stacia. Had no idea you were a psychotic traitor, too.” She dropped her makeshift bat and turned to me.

Rage washed over me with more force than a hurricane, sweeping me up in a blinding vortex of anger I could no longer deny. “Oh, Mom,” I sighed. “You’re too late.” I briefly considered seeking out the Calm Stacia had put name to, then forced that temptation down. No
way
was I giving in to her. I would rather die, would rather turn pure Harpy than fall in with her psycho plans.

A peaceful smile slowly spread across my face. I knew what to do.

Mom leapt, hands grabbing me and shaking. “Fight it, Riss, do you hear me, sweetheart? Fight it back!

Don’t let her win!”

Chaos broke out in the hallway just behind her, drawing ever nearer. From the sounds of it, the good guys weren’t doing too well. We had never really stood a chance. Stacia had played us from the beginning, drawing us where she wanted so she could take out Calaeno and try to recruit me in the same fell swoop. Well, she’d half-succeeded. My gaze flew across the room at a sudden flash of motion. She might have gone down, but not for the count. Even now she was stumbling to her feet. Any moment she would regain control of her senses and launch herself at me—and the woman who stood between us as she always had. My mother.

Oh hell no. You’re not killing her, and no more of my friends will die under your fucked-up little
delusions of grandeur. This ends, here and now.

A voice shouted my name from the doorway, and I couldn’t help looking over. Scott, battered and bloody but alive. And he was damned well going to
stay
that way.

Mom’s eyes met mine, and hope flared. “Riss?”

“I’m sorry, Mom. There’s only one way this can end well for us. For all of you.”

In that instant she knew what I intended, and’ knew just as surely it would kill me. No Fury could do what I was about to do twice in so short a time. Not if she planned to survive. Good thing I had no such plans.

She would have taken my place if I let her. The look in her eyes told me that. But it was a risk I wasn’t willing to take for two reasons. One, the Rage ripping through me was so freaking strong I didn’t think I could keep from Turning Harpy anyway. And two, Mom had been out of active duty for so long, she might as well be retired. There were no guarantees she could cast the spell and survive any better than I could—especially considering the massive earth spell she had cast hours earlier to protect Vanessa’s body from predators. David and Con had gotten her back too recently to lose her again. No sense in ‘them losing both of us.

I paused just long enough to say good-bye. “I love you, Mom.”

Stacia rushed into the edge of my field of vision, taking my focus from Mom. I reached for the magical reservoirs of energy just beneath my feet but found that they had been blocked. Rage welled to towering heights I’d never before felt, and all that skittering emotion had to have
somewhere
to go. But without more energy, a whole hell of a lot more energy, I would never be able to safely funnel it away.

“Sweetheart,
I
love
you,
and hope you forgive me someday.”

I blinked vacantly. “Forgive you for what?”

“For this.” She kissed my forehead gently, leaned down, slashed her talons twice, and ripped Kiara’s bandage away from my knee. Rage immediately faded, subsumed by the inferno of agony that tore through every inch of my body. Nemesis and Nike hissed as intensely as I screamed. We dropped to the ground in a pile of writhing bodies and limbs, watching helplessly as Mom turned and ran toward Stacia.

Sapphire energy gushed from the floor and into her body, whipping her hair in a sudden magical frenzy.

Stacia backed away, horror filling her eyes as she recognized the shape my mother twisted that torrent into. The very one I’d

been planning to cast, the very one that might do to Mom what I’d been willing to let it do to me. Kill her.

Raging Justice.

Rage and pain drowned me in a sea of torment, both

warring for supremacy, both burning uselessly against the other. I realized then that my mother had saved my life by causing me excruciating pain. Rage would cancel agony out long enough for the first to die down to bearable levels, and take just enough pain away for me to survive until someone could block it away again. She had saved my life, likely at the cost of her own.

“Oh, Mom, no.” Tears blurred my vision more surely than pain. “I just got you back.”

A hammer forged of crackling blue power smashed down from my mother’s raised hands to the floor in front of her, sending out a maelstrom of black energy that sizzled outward and did to everyone what they had been planning to do to her. For those who meant her no harm, no harm was done. But for those who intended to kill her, it served as judge, jury—and executioner.

One horrifying memory speared through me as my mother made that ultimate sacrifice: the scene at the first honky-tonk when I had cast Raging Justice—and it failed to kill the suicidal Phoenix because she had not planned to kill me directly. She’d no doubt risen from the ashes of her own funeral pyre—I’d been too fucked up to go after her—which was one thing we didn’t have to worry about Stacia doing. But my former mentor was smart, and far more devious than any of us had ever realized. She was plenty smart enough to
not
have death on her mind for the only two people around who could call down that age-old deathtrap spell.

That possibility gave me the strength needed to cling to consciousness. Dizziness had my vision blacking out momentarily, but when it returned I saw Stacia, now in Fury form, drop to the ground, soon followed by every other guard and Sidheborn clone with violence on their mind; saw my mother cry out and fall as well, wanted to help her, to make sure death wouldn’t claim her as one of its own, but I couldn’t. Someone had to focus on the double traitor in our midst.

My sense of hearing seemed to follow vision in going on the fritz. Scott’s mouth screamed my name as he rushed toward me, but I couldn’t hear his voice. He threw himself down next to me, and his gleaming, wicked sharp blade clattered to the ground as well, only I couldn’t hear that either. Chaos ensued as all the clueless among us tried to figure out what the hell had taken out three-fourths of our enemies, and it became all too obvious nobody was paying attention to the biggest threat of all. Stacia.

I ignored Scott’s attempts to get me to respond. His body partially blocked mine from her view, and that worked just fine for me. My hand reached out with one last spurt of energy. He had eyes only for me, so he missed what I saw all too clearly: Stacia struggling back to consciousness, proving that she’d only planned to knock Mom out to get to me. Her form flicked from Fury to Harpy and back again so quickly it made my already fuzzy head spin. She called up a surge of her own strength, leaping to her feet and hurtling toward Scott. I didn’t know whether she planned to kill him or knock him out of the way in order to get to me—and I just plain ol’ didn’t care.