CoS41

## Chapter 41

**Chapter 41** of **City of Spells** follows **Wesley**.

## **Full Version**

TAVIA, SAXONY, AND EVEN KARAM—who just a few minutes before had considered Wesley’s youngest sister their worst enemy—ran to Zekia’s side like she was a precious thing they had to keep from breaking.

Thing was, Zekia had broken a long time ago. Wesley had seen to that.

He felt the moment her magic vanished into the air, like those powers were as connected to him as they were to his little sister.

He felt the shame of her having to make that sacrifice because of something he had started.

Tavia squeezed the mirror doll tight enough in her shaking hands that Dante Ashwood couldn’t even make the noise of a scream.

He just mimed the action: the gasping and the grasping.

The snarl as his demons disappeared from the world.

Wesley held out his hand for the doll.

Tavia gave it to him without question, because of all people, Tavia knew Wesley best, and she knew that this was something he had to do.

The mirror doll felt light as air in his hands.

Wesley twisted its arm, hard enough that the corpse-like creature cried out, its deathly mouth twisting in pain.

Ashwood mirrored the noise and his arm flung behind his back, bone jutting from the shadows.

“You do not want to do this,” Ashwood wheezed.

Wesley’s magic laughed beneath his skin.

*Yes*, it said. *Yes, we do.*

There were many things Wesley didn’t want, like to watch Tavia bleed out on the side of the bridge. That was still too real, still too much to even think about. And he didn’t want to have shadow demons rip at his flesh again. Or have his sister sacrifice her magic to save him. He didn’t want his city destroyed.

But if there was one thing Wesley did want, then it was to kill Dante Ashwood.

Tavia pulled a small syringe from her pocket.

“I have an idea on how we can finish this,” she said to him.

“What?” Wesley asked.

“This is time serum,” she said, holding up the syringe. “Nolan tried to sell it to me once, saying it could undo the years for a while. Like I was some old crone.”

*Of course.*

Magic to undo a person, turning back time on their body. Making them young again, for few hours or even a day, erasing all that they were, for what they used to be.

They couldn’t kill this version of the Kingpin, with all his magic and darkness, but maybe they could kill another, earlier, version.

“You’re brilliant,” Wesley said.

Tavia frowned. “Don’t sound so surprised.”

“Let me do it.”

Wesley had to be the one to end this and they both knew it.

Tavia handed him the serum.

Wesley looked down at it.

At his cuff links, dirt-smeared and crooked. To the scars they sat misshapen atop. The scars he had gotten from his mother, who had sacrificed everything she had to ensure he would not fulfill some ominous future.

And then Wesley heard it, somewhere in the back of his mind, a memory turning to a song.

A prophecy cooing in his ear like a lullaby.

*Time will be carried in strange hands,*

*across the realms and through stranger lands.*

*What is done will be undone,*

*a battle lost is a battle won.*

*When midnight rings on a child’s betrayal,*

*your every success is doomed to fail.*

His magic had been trying to tell him for months, back when it burst from the fortune orb he had helped Tavia build, when it finally reunited with him in Granka, and now, as he stood before his father.

Wesley wasn’t going to end the world.

He was going to save it.

The syringe of time swelled in bright blue waves.

Ashwood swallowed.

“You can’t kill me,” he said. “You’re my boy. My flesh. It’s why I’ve never taken your life, even after you’ve constantly disappointed me. Don’t you see, Wesley?”

Ashwood’s voice was quick and pleading.

He was desperate, trying for any way to survive.

“Family does not give up on each other,” Ashwood said. “And I’ve always wanted my son to be great.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Saxony said. “He’s just trying to get inside of your head. Malik . . . Wesley. Please just—”

Wesley held up his hand to stop her. “Enough,” he said.

It was the awful truth he never wanted to face.

Wesley thought that hearing those words spoken out loud would send him off-kilter somehow, making him doubt all that he was and imbuing him with some kind of misplaced loyalty to the Kingpin.

But it didn’t.

It didn’t matter whether it was a lie or if he and Ashwood were blood. Either way, the Kingpin had always been his father. He had raised Wesley and taught him everything he knew and a few things he wished he’d someday forget. He was kinder to him than Wesley’s other father had been and he had shaped Wesley into the man he was today.

Blood or not, Dante Ashwood was always going to be a part of him.

And Wesley surprised himself with how much he just didn’t care.

“You don’t get to claim him,” Tavia said. “Wesley is his own person and he gets to choose his family.”

Wesley looked up at her, no longer blood-soaked, the illusion faded to give way to the wonderful cherry bark of her eyes.

She gave him a hard smile and Wesley’s heart jarred.

She was right: Wesley had chosen his family long before he found them.

“I’m pretty much related to everyone nowadays,” Wesley said to Ashwood. “You’re really not that special.”

He stabbed the syringe directly into the heart of the doll.

Ashwood screamed.

The doll screamed.

The world screamed.

His body shook and convulsed, head twisting from side to side. His broken arm snapped back into place and the shadows around him blinked and staggered, like they were struggling to keep ahold of him.

Wesley’s eyes widened as he watched his once-Kingpin writhe and blur, the different sides to his face screaming away from each other and then catapulting back together.

Time was not just catching up with him, but erasing him altogether. Pulling the magic from Ashwood’s bones, reversing all that he had gleaned from years of enslavement and murder.

The years rewound inside of him.

It was undoing him.

It was sucking the power from him.

Ashwood fell onto his knees, his shadows gone, his cane broken by his feet.

And his face.

Human.

Plain for all to see.

Dante Ashwood’s face was not haggard, but rewound to give him a youthful and unaffected glow, marked only by a few pinked scars. He didn’t look much older than Wesley, with long dark hair that brushed past his chin. His skin was pulled tight across his face, pale as the ocean’s crust, with eyes the color of a serpent’s skin and a look of hate spread to the very corners of his curled lips.

Dante Ashwood, Kingpin of Uskhanya, destroyer of cities, was human.

He was just a man.

And Wesley had a lot of practice killing men.

Wesley’s gun was on the ground, where Zekia had dropped it after her illusion, and though Wesley couldn’t get to it with his leg still so jacked up, he knew he didn’t need to move to reach for it.

His magic surged, eager.

*Yes*, it said. *That, we can do.*

Wesley looked at the bone gun, licked his lips, and then watched it disappear from the ground and reappear in his own hand.

The familiar hilt, the slick way it fit to his palm, like it had been made for Wesley and nobody else.

Tavia locked her fingers between Wesley’s, and the warmth of her, the familiar scratch of her scars and calluses, steadied his heart.

He gripped the gun in his free hand.

“Wesley,” Ashwood said.

Fatherly. Perhaps pleading.

“You’re my son.”

The wind whistled in Wesley’s ears as he aimed the gun.

The clock tower that headed the Crook chimed.

*Midnight.*

“Yeah,” Wesley said. “I know.”

He fired the shot, straight through Ashwood’s newly human heart.

His father fell to the ground.

Ashwood’s eyes were wide, his hands still, his lips bloody and quivering.

His darkness, finally, fading from the world.