Memories flooded back, of her throwing herself on his chest, begging him to bite her, turn her.
“We would have died if you hadn’t, Oliver,” she said in a whisper.
“So now you remember what happened?”
She nodded, sat up higher. “The Dark Dimension. Did we—destroy it?”
A smile lit up his face. “Yep. We did. And you were right. We had to jump off that cliff into the unknown. You and me, babe. And this.” He held up his ringed finger. “The Hale crest… I like to think that my clan embedded a legacy into this ring. It was all that was left in the burnt embers of our farmhouse when they were killed, the one thing I salvaged. Now I wonder if it was biding its time, waiting for the moment when you and I finally met. Waldo says we may never know the full depth and breadth of the magick, but we do know that it saved us, and destroyed the Dark Dimension.”
“That gruesome beast, Igor or whatever he was, what happened to him?”
“Banished to the depths of hell, where he will see out eternity.”
“And the grimaalds?”
He huffed a laugh. “Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“When their dimension was broken asunder, they all ended up in the Avella Hills.”
“Oh gods, no, Oliver, they’ll wreak absolute havoc.”
“It’s okay, Clare. A plague of brittleback toads appeared in the river that runs into Tween from the hills that very same day. A huge flock of crows descended, and proceeded to eat the lot of them.”
“Were the toads…”
“Grimaalds, yes. The magick turned them into harmless toads in our dimension. And now they’ve been exterminated.”
“Poor crows, they’ll get terrible indigestion.”
Oliver shook his head, smiling. “The runes summoned them. The crows are dark magick scouts, their job is to clean up evil forces that spread into the countryside. They will survive admirably, I’m sure, with nice full bellies.”
Clare shook her head. There was so much to this magick that none of them would ever understand. “And Matteus, and all the Kominsky vampires, were they banished to hell, also?”
“Matteus’s dark ego got exterminated but he didn’t descend into the hell realms. His powers have been stripped, he can no longer make himself invisible, or cause damage in our world. The same goes for the rest of his clan. Without the demons, they are just bog-standard vamps. They’re scattered around the place, probably hiding out in safehouses like Vlad’s. But we’ll find them and bring them to trial.”
“And Matteus? Have you any idea where he is now?”
“Under lock and key in Motham jail as we speak.” Oliver smirked. “He was found lurking around in the Wastelands, raiding bins for carcasses.”
She cocked her head. “So now what?”
“He’ll likely be put on house arrest with Dorothea. That will make her very happy, having her boy home. And he will be unfanged after his trial.”
“And the humans?”
“We have a confession from a very disgruntled and disillusioned Emmaline, and we’re following up. She was in thrall to Matteus, and so, apparently, was Quentin Jordak who ran Tween Clinic.”
“Oh my, what a humiliation for the Jordak family.”
“We are working at bringing him to justice, despite their best efforts to resist,” Oliver said grimly.
They sat holding hands, digesting all this. “So, we did it,” Clare said.
“Yes. We did.”
He kissed her, which took quite a lot of their attention for several minutes.
