Even as I raised my sword again, Victor used his speed magic to step up and pin me against the side of the bridge. He pressed the tip of his sword against my throat. I froze, my own sword raised in midair.

“Drop your weapon,” he hissed, pressing his sword a little deeper into my neck, breaking the skin there and making blood trickle down my throat. “Now.”

I slowly laid the sword down on the bridge ledge. I waited, wondering if Victor would tell me to take off my leather belt with its three throwing stars as well, but he just sneered at me, cold triumph gleaming in his eyes. So slowly, very, very slowly, I dropped my hand down to my side, inching my fingers toward my belt. Victor hadn’t won yet, and I could fight dirty too. All I needed was one moment of opportunity and I could finish what my mom had started all those years ago.

“I’ll admit that you put up a good fight,” Victor said, staring at me. “I didn’t expect you to have transference magic and be able to siphon off my magic into your black blade. That will be my bonus for killing you, and taking it from you will just be fun.”

I didn’t respond, although I kept crawling my fingers toward my belt.

“You might have stolen some of my magic, but I’ll use your black blade to put it right back inside my own body again,” he said, his voice ringing with triumph. “Where it belongs.”

I still didn’t say anything as my fingers reached one of the throwing stars on my belt and curled around the metal.

“Goodbye, Lila Sterling,” Victor sneered. “And good riddance to the Sterling Family once and for all—”

Even as he crowed about how he was going to kill me, I shoved his sword away from my throat. The blade cut deep into my palm, but I ignored the stinging pain, yanked the throwing star off my belt, and swiped it across his face. The star sliced his cheek, making him scream, stagger back, and lower his weapon.

Using the last of the magic in my veins, I grabbed my sword off the ledge, stepped up, and stabbed him straight through the heart with the black blade.

Victor screamed as my mother’s sword plunged deep into his chest. He staggered back, but I went with him, keeping a tight grip on the black blade. I was going to end this—now.

And that’s when his magic started pouring into me.

It was small at first, a single spark of white lightning erupting from his chest, zinging along the length of the sword, and traveling up to my blood-covered hand. The second that spark came into contact with my blood, a whole cascade of sparks erupted, until it seemed as though Victor and I were standing in the middle of a giant fireworks display.

He gasped in surprise and so did I, but we were connected by the sword in his chest and all I could do was stand there and gape, as though I were outside my own body and watching all this happen to me from someplace far, far away.

When Grant Sanderson had tried to take my magic, he’d been determined to cut me to pieces to get my power just because he wanted me to suffer. But you could also take a person’s magic by stabbing him once straight through the heart with a black blade. That’s what I’d done to Victor, not because I wanted to take his magic, but simply to end the fight. But apparently, he had so much magic, so much raw power, it was literally bursting to get out of him.

So it did—traveling straight into me.

I saw the lighting, the power, the magic, streak from Victor, up my black blade, and into my body, felt the cold burn of it in my veins, felt it gather around my own dark heart, squeezing, squeezing tight. Once again, every single part of me burned with hot, electrical pain. My legs flailed, my fingers twitched, and my teeth chattered together just like they had before. It hurt terribly—worse even than when Victor had been trying to electrocute me—but all I could do was stand there as the magic flooded into my own body.

The sharp, continuous jolts of power and pain seemed to go on forever, although they couldn’t have lasted much more than a minute. But finally, they eased up and then stopped altogether, and the white sparks went out, although I could still feel the cold chill of them in the humid night. My breath frosted in the air, as white as snow, and I felt the icy sting of power flowing through my veins, stronger than ever before. The midnight-black glow on my sword slowly lightened, then vanished altogether, until the weapon was once again its usual, dull, ash-gray color.

Victor stared at me with wide, gaping eyes. “You . . . you . . . took it all . . .” His voice failed him.

He staggered back and this time I let him, my sword sliding free of his chest. Victor wobbled on his feet for a second, then he hit the side of the bridge, fell down, and toppled over onto his side. Blood oozed down his chest and trickled onto the cobblestones, turning them a glossy, sickening scarlet. All the while, Victor kept staring at me, his golden eyes getting darker and darker, a glassy sheen slowly covering the accusation in his gaze.

And just like that, the cold light was snuffed out of his eyes and his head lolled to the side.

Dead—Victor Draconi was dead.

And I had taken all his magic for my own.

The greatest—and most terrifying—thing I’d ever stolen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Despite the magic rippling through my body, I was exhausted. My feet slipped out from under me, and I landed on the cobblestones. I looked up, expecting to see lightning flashing overhead and for the impending storm to finally descend, but to my surprise, the rain clouds had disappeared, revealing the moon and stars. I was going to take that as a good omen.

My final battle with Victor had frozen everyone in place and startled them all into absolute silence, except for Devon, who hurried over and dropped down beside me, with Oscar buzzing around our shoulders.

“Lila! Are you okay?” Devon asked, gently cupping my face in his hand.

All I could do was nod. I didn’t even have the strength to speak right now.

Slowly, all the guards, Sinclairs and Draconis alike, crept forward. So did the Ito and Salazar guards who’d come up behind the Draconis on the opposite side of the bridge. A few whispers broke out as they realized that Victor was dead, but they quickly faded away and everyone was still and quiet again. The guards all kept staring from me to Victor and back again, shocked that I had actually done it, that I had actually killed him and ended the threat he represented to the Families and everyone in Cloudburst Falls—mortal, magick, and monster alike.

“No!” a loud, anguished voice cried out. “No! Dad! No!”