Page 99 of Truthfinder’s Promise

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The hallways of the house were a battlefield. One Meredith was ill-equipped to navigate. She’d grabbed the stun baton from the cage room on her way out. While it packed a strong enough electric charge to send the thralls into temporary muscles spasms this did little to deter them from her, as they didn’t appear to feel pain.

It also wasn’t a viable weapon for mass defense, so she mostly tried to stay out of the way as more and more thralls poured into the already packed halls. Powerful though the Shifters were, they were half-starved, and there were thirteen of them to the unending masses of the thralls. If it weren’t for the natural bottleneck provided by the halls, it would have been a slaughterhouse.

Her phone chimed. She’d thrown her clutch away earlier, stuffing her cellphone into the top of her dress, just in case. It shouldn’t work inside the disorientation spell’s influence. So if it was, then maybe Val and the others had brought the spell down.

“Jensen, I need two minutes of cover.” He herded her into a corner and put himself between her and everything else.

She dug out her phone.

Val: You alive in there?

She typed back. So far. We could use some help in here.

Ellipses appeared on the screen. Meredith chewed at her bottom lip.

That’s a problem. We’re knee-deep in thralls plus every asshole Aspecter at this auction.

The attendees must have fled outside as soon as they’d heard the Shifters start tearing into the thralls.

Can you hold out another fifteen minutes?

Meredith looked at the chaos around her. They weren’t going to last fifteen minutes. She needed her Aspect.

No. Do you have enough wind Elementals to rip the roof off the house?

Yes? Why?

Just do it as soon as you can. If the roof came off it would destroy enough of the physical makeup of the nullifying spell to render it useless.

Give me three minutes.

Meredith stuffed the phone back in her dress, tapped Jensen to let him know she was alert to her own safety again, and counted the seconds in her head.

Meredith’s Aspect didn’t lend itself well to martial endeavors, but her shields were good. Not good enough to protect all the Shifters at once, but if she built a thick enough shield around herself she could barrel through the thrall-blocked hallway. At worst, it would provide a distraction. At best, she might open a path the Shifters could follow through.

One-hundred and seventy-three seconds from Val’s last text, the building rattled. It shook and groaned, and Meredith felt it as the roof tore free.

Her Aspect inundated her. She reached for it, the shielding spell at her fingertips, but froze before it could blossom. Power flowed into the circlet and the crown caught it like a person might catch their partner in a dance. Catch. Spin. Toss.

Her Aspect, amplified, shot out from the diamond between her brows, blanketing the room like a mist. It saturated every surface, every person, and through its lens she saw truth. Every thing, every person, held truths. Their very existence was a type of truth—the truth of what they were, of how they were.

The Shifters were vibrant dualities, their human side and their animal side each as real as the other. But the thralls were empty and distorted, vacant shells twisted from what they had been born to be and changed to living batteries to be drained at will. They were no longer alive in the typical sense, but mere extensions of Analisa. Meredith didn’t think necromancer had been a half bad description.

She gripped the nearest thralls in the fist of her power. Show them, she whispered to her Aspect. Like a Truthfinder’s Telling but different, more potent. Where the Telling made a person confront the things they already knew but hid from, this showed the thralls a truth they were unaware of, one Analisa’s tie kept from them. In every way that mattered, they were already dead.

Her Aspect both revealed the fact and imposed it upon them. Faced with a reality that could not be denied, could not be hidden from or ignored, the thralls had no choice but to accept it.

The ties that bound them to Analisa unraveled and they dropped like stones to the ground, their bodies disintegrating to ash. Deep in the house she heard Analisa’s anguished cry, half pain, half fury. The remaining thralls surged forward, ignoring the Shifters, ignoring everything in their frenzy to get to Meredith.

So she showed them, too, what they were, and they too fell. Not all of these disintegrated. Only the ones the circlet showed her were the oldest.

Wave after wave of thralls crashed upon her, and wave after wave fell, until bodies and dust lined the halls. Meredith picked her way through them.

By the time she emerged into the home’s main foyer, the Shifters at her back, the blood-stained hem of her dress had acquired a six-inch deep coating of ash. Analisa stood in the center of the room, her posture rigid, a deep, mutinous fire in her eyes. A ring of twenty thralls encircled her. All that remained.

“I should have killed you,” Analisa said. She sounded tired. “But I just wanted one person to understand.”