The snow was coming down thick while I crunched through the woods, bundled up in a jacket and scarf in the middle of the night. Lily tried chucking a snowball at the back of my head, but I saw it coming from a mile away and ducked to safety. The last few days had been long and dull, but productive for my health. Magically-assisted recovery times were always going to be faster than relying on natural methods, but I was still surprised I was able to be up and active again with none of the pain from before. If only it had been fast enough to prevent Lily from discovering the truth about the Adepts and what the family put us through.

The Helk hadn’t been making itself known while I was healing. Our best guess was that it was waiting for me. I couldn’t just sit at the manor forever, so it was on me to help draw it out and answer some of the mysteries surrounding the Helk. As Lily had told me, we couldn’t nail down its exact location, but the woods had shown the highest concentration of points of interest. In either case, Jane’s directives were clear: now that I was fit to fight again, I’d lure it out by going into the woods, and the squad of Adepts following me would swoop in to secure the kill. And, because she’d ordered the Adepts to let her come along, Lily was with us. I was expecting her parents to overturn that order right up until she turned up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to take on the Helk hunt.

As far as plans went, it was a pretty simple one. “Lure out the enemy and kill it to death” was a time-honored tactic going back to the days of antiquity. I felt like we should have something more to show for our efforts, but then again, I’d been forcibly bed-ridden during all of this planning. I guess I forfeited my right to complain by going along with Lily’s scheme instead of attending the rigorous planning meetings. At least we’d brought some sparkly things to throw at it, since that was the only lead we had as far as its weaknesses went.

I twirled my machete around in one hand and rubbed the glitter ball in my other out of boredom. I felt like there were plenty of dark, spooky places for it to be hiding, and I’d had my back dramatically turned away from the most obvious ambush points for most of the night already. Why wasn’t the Helk attacking?

“So, why isn’t it attacking yet?” Lily popped up beside me and echoed my thoughts. “Do you think it’s scared after last time?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe we were wrong about it targeting me after all.” I scratched my head. “It’s been a bit shy about appearing since I went off-grid. I figured it would be chomping at the bit to have another go at me.”

“Well, be careful what you wish for. If you pissed it off, then Helk hath no fury—”

“Do not finish that joke.” I warned her sternly, but a smile still crept onto my lips. It was hard to stay serious around Lily, even if we were ostensibly in a life-or-death situation.

She stuck her tongue out at me and threw the snowball she’d been hiding behind her back. This one did hit me, but only because I was laughing. I exhaled into the cold night air and stared up at the starry sky. It looked like we were going to have to go back to the drawing board on figuring out the Helk and its motivations.

I looked back down at Lily, and time slowed to a crawl. She was still smiling wide at her own joke and her maneuver with the snowball, but in the distance behind her, I saw a dim shape, growing larger as it moved silently through the woods. I tried to leap into action to push Lily aside to safety, but I felt heavy and slow, moving through the molasses that the air had become. A yell began to form in my throat, but I knew it was going to be too late. The shape came crashing through. Lily only just noticed my expression. She started to look confused. The Helk’s massive frame came forward, both arms raised up into the air, ready to pulverize Lily into the ground, and I wasn’t going to be able to stop it from happening.

Harry, however, was. He slammed into the side of the Helk, sending it off balance with a rush of air and a primal roar. It tumbled to the side as Harry followed it down, slashing at it with his sword, drawing thick, dark blood. Time rushed back into motion and I interposed myself between Lily and the Helk, holding my own weapon out. Harry was tangled up with the monster, not giving it a moment’s rest to regain its bearings as he attacked relentlessly. Puffs of glitter exploded as Harry chucked his own glitter balls toward their target, but the Helk was too fast. It reared back, and none of the sparkles reached its face. The other Adepts were still tearing through the woods after him, as his superhuman speed had allowed him to reach the fight first.

I was momentarily torn on what to do. I wanted to leap into the fray and help Harry, but that would mean leaving Lily exposed. On the other hand, I’d seen firsthand what the Helk was capable of. Harry was fast and strong, but once this thing understood how he moved, it would squish him like a bug. Tactically speaking, it seemed like a better move for both of us to fight it together. I spared a look at Lily, who had paled as she realized how close she’d come to taking that hit, and then stepped forward towards the melee. The clouds shifted in the sky, revealing a beam of moonlight that illuminated the battle between Harry and the Helk. What I saw made me freeze in place.

The Helk had changed. For one thing, it was moving faster than I’d seen before, with none of the laborious, slow windups that telegraphed its attacks previously. Its general form was the same: two huge humanoid arms attached to a bearlike torso and goat hooves, terminating in a polished skull mask with huge antlers branching off of it. That skull still showed smears of blood from when we’d last fought, but it also had a crack running down its face, splintering near the eye socket that I’d gouged out with my hand. From that crack, there was something moving. More specifically, there were many somethings moving and writhing, as if they were reaching out from underneath and trying to grip the air with tiny hands. Its antlers now came wicked points, showing they’d been sharpened since our last encounter.

I grit my teeth. It was like something had mutated the Helk to make it more dangerous, but had also put it in more pain. There was a good chance that it would fight harder and fiercer than before, and it might not be possible to drive it off. I wasn’t sure what to make of the wormlike protrusions from the crack in its mask, but I was fairly confident that they were bad news. In any case, if the Helk was going to fight more desperately than when I’d last encountered it, then Harry would need some serious help, and for now Lily and I were all the help he was going to get.

My feet propelled me into motion. I screamed as I charged the Helk, and it casually twirled on its hooves and backhanded me with one of its arms. I went flying through the air and smacked into a tree, the wind completely knocked out of me. I started peeling myself off the bark when the Helk came rocketing after me and skewered me with one of its sharpened antlers. It jabbed the antler into my abdomen and I grunted, dropped my machete and glitter, and was lifted off the ground as it rocked its head back and roared, parading me around ten feet off the ground.

I don’t think that this is how the planning meetings envisioned the fight to start.

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Harry yelled something at me, but I wasn’t able to make out any of the words. I coughed up some blood and my vision started going hazy. I slid down a couple inches on the antler, smearing my guts the whole way. A few facts crystallized in my mind at this moment: One, whatever damage Harry had done to this thing was inconsequential. Given some more time, the Helk was going to beat him. Two, the other Adepts were still outside of range to do anything useful. Three, if nothing changed from here, I was certainly going to die. Based on the fact that I was somehow still alive, I guessed nothing immediately vital was pierced by the antler. That luck would only stretch so far. I gripped the antler with one hand and squeezed my eyes shut. I reached for that power deep inside of me, the well of magical energy unlocked by Rowan’s attack, and directed all of my will towards the Helk, driving that power to unleash itself on the monster and save my life again. I focused my intent on the surging magic, driven by the adrenaline coursing through my body, and let loose.

And nothing happened. Not even a whisper of power escaped from my body. I strained and struggled to make something, anything, happen, but it was useless. The Helk roared again and charged back into the darkness of the woods, away from Harry and the other Adepts, apparently content to have secured its prize after all this time. Nobody was going to be able to help me.

Nobody except for Lily. I couldn’t see her from the angle I was dangling on the antler, but I could feel the rush of heat that erupted from the skull mask below me as a spark detonated off of it. The Helk screamed as the dark forest lit up from the explosion, and it shook its head violently. I could feel the antler tearing at my insides as it shook. The pain combined with the shockwave of the explosion snapped my mind back into focus. This was bad. I grasped the antler with both hands and, against all of the medical advice I’d ever been given, began to haul myself up, pulling my body off the antler inch by inch. The climb was excruciatingly painful, but I’d grown accustomed to pain. I tapped into the cold numbness I felt during my Adept training to bear the pain while climbing.

Lily and Harry didn’t let up on the Helk while I tried to escape. Another blast hit the side of the creature from Lily’s wand, and Harry bounded up next to it to slash at its legs with his sword. The monster howled and raged at them, pounding the ground where Harry had been standing, unable to predict where his speed was taking him for his next attack. The shaking and rocking didn’t help my efforts at all, but at least they were keeping the creature from running away to wherever it had been planning to take me. Lily’s magic exploded around me in glittering sparkles as she created as much light as possible, trying to blind the creature. The Helk spasmed and thrashed, racking its antlers across the trees. In its panic, Harry rushed up its antlers and grabbed me, hauling me the last few inches off and throwing me clear of the creature.

I reached for Harry to pull him with, but my fingers were slick with blood and clumsy. I missed him completely.

The Helk saw me soaring away. It roared in anger. Harry squatted on the antler, preparing to jump.

The Helk clapped its hand over the antler.

I screamed. The antler snapped.

The Helk’s slap pinned Harry’s body to the broken antler. When the antler tumbled down, Harry also fell. He was still breathing—but it didn’t matter.

Once Harry hit the ground, the Helk slammed its fist into his body, over and over until there was nothing left but bloody pulp.

I landed with a thud as the Helk lifted its fist, wet with gore.

Lily shrieked and let loose with another blast. She missed. The fireball exploded in the empty space above the Helk’s head. It turned to stare down at me giving me another good look at it in the new lighting. It was bleeding from where Harry had slashed it, and before, I’d only seen that its blood was dark. Now that there was light shining on it, I could see that there was something sparkling in that blood. It clicked in my mind: pixie dust. The Helk was a pixie, mutated beyond recognition, and it was lashing out at a person that it associated with pain. Me. The unlucky bastard who probably milked it before it got twisted into this monstrous form. The pixie dust in its blood had confused the tracking spell, showing us the location of every pixie near the manor, instead of just this one monster. I understood why the lights were painful to it, it was still a pixie at heart, and was easily overloaded by bright, pretty colors.

The crack in the Helk’s skull deepened with a sickening crunch. More of the worms protruded out, wriggling into the air, looking for something to latch onto. Were those what had mutated it? Or were they a side-effect of its body being changed? Whatever the case, it was in pain. Previously I had thought that it was acting out of malicious intent. Instead, it was more like a rabid animal, driven mad by something out of its control. And like a rabid animal, the only thing we could do was put it out of its misery for its own good.

I stared at what was left of Harry. It almost looked fake, like special effects in a bad horror movie. I felt my throat tighten like something was gripping me. I was shaking all over. What I was looking at was real. My fingers curled and dug into my palms. I couldn’t feel it until they drew blood.

There wasn’t much left in me. I’d barely contributed to the fight. Harry had given his life to save me without a moment’s hesitation, and now it was looking like it would all be for naught. Harry always believed in me. He must have thought saving me was worth it. I stared at the tortured not-face of the Helk while my vision darkened as the emotions caught up to me.

Harry was gone.

If I’d been faster, or more prepared, he would still be here.

My body felt cold. Numb, really. I’d lost a lot of blood, and by all rights I should have been flat on my back and completely out of it. But deep within that numbness, I felt a fire ignite and spread through me. My shaking stopped. I rose and stood on what should have been shaky feet. That well of power that had denied me earlier in my panic now roared at my call. I felt like I had the whole universe at my fingertips.

I stared past the Helk while it looked down at me. It lurched into motion, but for once it was too slow.

I looked at Harry’s mutilated corpse. I lifted my hand, my arm blazing with scarlet energy.

To hell with trying to control my emotions. I squeezed my eyes shut.

And I let it all out, directing that power at the Helk’s damaged mask.

The resulting shockwave could be heard for miles. Later, I found out that the manor’s windows shattered, car alarms went off, and the police were overwhelmed with reports of a bomb going off in the woods. By the time I came back to my senses, the trees between me and the Helk were gone. The creature itself was a hundred feet away, flat on its back, and barely breathing. The ground around me was perfectly flat. I felt the energy sapped completely from my body, and I swayed in place. Lily peered at me from behind a fallen tree, covered head to toe in dirt. Her eyes were wide in shock. She’d never seen me unleash my latent abilities before.

I stumbled in the direction of the Helk, lingering near the pulverized remains of Harry. There was no energy left in me to process what had happened to him. I saw a glint of metal near what had been his hand. His sword handle. I picked it up gingerly and willed the blade into existence with a puff of smoke. I turned back to the Helk.

The skull mask had been completely shattered. What was left was a writhing mass of worms boring into its flesh. The skin had been flayed off the Helk’s body, and it was bleeding heavily, leaking blood and pixie dust onto the ground. I approached its head, Harry’s sword held high.

“I’m sorry.” I said to it. The blade sang through the air, and with a single stroke, I lopped off its head, putting an end to the Helk. All it cost me was a friend.