Page 68 of Spring L.A.W.
The mimic hesitated. Just a blink, but long enough.
Rayna launched herself straight down the center. She didn’t cast. Just attacked. She figured nothing could be more confusing than a witch ripping at her own face.
The mimic turned and met her head-on. Their hands clashed. Its palms mirrored hers. The knot of chaotic magic above them pulsed andexploded. Everything went white. Sound turned into blinding light.
Rayna flew backward. So did the mimic. But something in ittore.Like its shape had been held together by chewing gum. The Joell mimic disappeared into smoke. Rayna hit the ground hard and didn’t get up. Her ears rang. Her ribs ached. She barely registered the shadow rising above her again.
The mimic re-formed, faster this time, but sloppier. One eye in the wrong place. Her mouth smeared across her chin. But it still smiled, like a creepy Picasso.
“I think we know which one is the real mimic ,” Victoria growled.
“You can’t destroy what you’ve created,” it said, voice bubbling like boiling oil. It raised a claw. And Rayna couldn’t move fast enough. But someone else did.
The claw came down.Rayna barely registered the flash of steel before it struck. A blur of motion cut through her peripheral vision, then athunkas Payne slammed into the mimic likea linebacker possessed. Both figures went down hard, rolling across the dirt in a tangle of limbs and fury.
He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t wait to see if she was okay. Hemoved.Payne’s spell-tagged blade plunged into the mimic’s shoulder. It screamed, and not just in pain, but in confusion. Payne’s tag flared red, pulsing with a nulling glyph Victoria had scrawled onto his wrist just before they left the mansion.
The mimic writhed, melting beneath him like tar left in the sun. It was still wearing Rayna’s disturbingly rearranged face. Still smiling.
“Get away from her,” Payne growled, voice low and raw. Then he plunged the spear into its side again and again.
It shuddered. Glitched, like something in its mimic-code had shorted.
Real Rayna tried to push herself up, but her body was mud and fire. Her ribs felt cracked, her magic scrambled. The glyphs on her arms sparked once, then flickered out entirely.
The mimic thrashed and caught Payne in the side with a wild, spiked elbow. He grunted, teeth clenched, but he didn’t back off. He drove the blade deeper.
Rayna could see it now. The mimic’s face wasslipping.Her features turned to Sahara’s, then to Katie’s, then to… someone unidentifiable. Then a blank canvas. No eyes. No mouth. Just smooth gray flesh trying to decide what it wanted to be. Then itspoke, but not aloud.
Rayna felt the voice in hermind.She recoiled instinctively, clutching her head. “What are you?”
“You opened me. You taught me. I am not your enemy. I am what comes after.”It turned its blank mannequin head toward her again, shapeless and twitching. “Hungry!”
And then, it burst. Not in gore, but in smoke and sound. It detonatedin a shockwave of mimic energy, knocking Payne off itand hurling him backward like a rag doll. He slammed into the base of a scorched oak and went down hard.
“Adam!” Rayna choked out.
The mimic reassembled midair, liquid limbs pulling together like mercury.
Rayna forced herself to her knees, vision spinning. The mimic had moved past her, stalking toward where Payne lay in a heap, unmoving.
The other witches moved, like they were about to surround him.
“No, no, no!”
She surged forward, half-crawling, half-dragging herself toward him. The glyphs on her skin tried to reboot. They buzzed and flickered, but her magic was still scrambled. She had nothing stable to fire. No clean spell to throw.
So, she improvised. Rayna flung both hands out and screamed, "No one touches him but me!"
The air around her cracked. A pulse of raw, unfocused magic surged from her chest like a sonic boom. It caught the mimic mid-step and flungit back further into the trees.
Rayna collapsed against Payne’s side, gasping. He groaned. Barely. But he was alive.
“Okay,” she muttered, fingers shaking as she pressed them to his pulse. “Okay, we’re still in this. We aresogoing on vacation when this is over.”
Payne blinked up at her, blood trickling from his lip. “Did… Did you just yell me into exclusive ownership?”
“I did,” she panted. “You’re mine. Deal with it.”
