Krysty had been taught a number of arcane skills by her mother, Sonja, a woman wise in the old mystic traditions. It wasn’t just the power of seeing. It was the ability, in times of extreme need, to transform herself with almost supernatural forces, giving her an inhuman strength.
But it always drained her energy so deeply that it often took her to the brink of the grave.
“Use it!” Jak and Dean yelled in unison.
“Do it!” Ryan shouted as loudly as he could, trying to make sure that his words carried to Krysty over the screams of the spectators.
There was no sign that she’d heard them. It looked like she’d passed out and was well along the dark road from which no traveler ever returned.
Sprite sat back once more, taking a moment to release her victim, clasping her meaty hands above her head in a gesture of triumph.
“Now, lover! Call on the Earth Mother! Krysty! Fireblast, lover, do it now!” Ryan’s voice was breaking, ragged, high and desperate.
He saw the bloodless lips moving, but it was impossible to hear what Krysty was saying. Her eyes had closed, and she seemed to be concentrating all of her mental energy on taking herself to another place.
“Gaia!” she was saying, focusing inward, hands opening and closing.
Ryan realized that he was holding his breath, watching what was going to be, one way or the other, the terminal scene in the brief drama.
Sprite seemed to sense that something was going on, that there was a bizarre change happening in the helpless body clasped below her.
She reached down and resumed her grip on Krysty’s throat, fitting her fingers onto the dark bruises that marred the soft skin of her victim’s throat, smiling in triumph as she began to apply what everyone recognized was going to be the final pressure.
But Krysty seemed to have grown.
Her eyes snapped open, and the rictus of hopeless agony on her face changed into a gentle smile. It was something that Sister Sprite saw immediately, and the watchers gradually recognized as being an ominous development.
“Sprite is plucking defeat right out from the jaws of victory,” Mildred said.
Krysty reached up, almost lazily, and laid her hands on the muscular forearms of the huge woman. She flexed her entire body, with a visible surge of the Earth Mother’s power. Sprite screamed, once.
The piercing sound rose above the double snap of the bones of both her arms, radius and ulna, both breaking like fragile frosted twigs.
For a moment Ryan saw the whiteness of jagged ivory, as the broken bones tore through muscle and skin, bright blood spilling into the sunlight.
Sister Sprite screamed again, trying to throw herself clear of Krysty. But the smaller woman, the gentle smile scarily unchanging, clung to her, twisting and crushing.
The whole settlement of Hopeville was utterly silent.
“Crippled me…done for…” she moaned, hanging like a helpless rag doll in Krysty’s inexorable grip. Everyone could hear the harsh grating sound of the raw ends of bone rubbing against each other.
“To the death?” the redheaded woman questioned, pushing Sprite away from her with an unforgettable gesture of contempt. “That what you said, Brother Wolfe?”
“I said…that…I didn’t…not…” Wolfe stammered.
Sprite was hunched over, her ruined arms clasped under her, her face in the dirt, sobbing. Krysty paused to wipe sweat and leaf mold from her own face, standing over the disabled woman, holding her steady with her knees.
For a moment Ryan had a vision of Krysty astride a broken stallion.
The wind was rising, whipping up a mini tornado of circling dust, obscuring the tableau.
“Do it, lover,” Ryan called.
“Oh, I will…” Krysty answered in a voice that was barely human.
The dust cloud blew away and everyone saw that the redheaded woman had stooped over the hapless Sister Sprite, gripping her skull between her hands.
She started to twist it.
“Jesus!” Mildred breathed. “Nobody could…”
Krysty Wroth, in thrall to the Gaia power, could.
And did.
Ryan watched, unable to avert his eye from the macabre sight. Sprite’s bull-like head was revolving on her thick neck, the bulging, blood-streaked eyes staring sightless into the sky, toward the pitiless face of her tormentor.