She was too late.
The Paladin was almost on top of her.
Then Questor Thews seemed to explode out of nowhere right in front of the witch, seizing the bottle before she could think to react, snatching it quickly away. Nightshade shrieked once and lunged for the wizard just as the Paladin reached her.
Fire seemed to erupt from everywhere at the point of impact.
No longer within the concealment of the Bonnie Blues, but running to reach Questor Thews and Ben, Willow and Abernathy drew up short, wincing from the sound and the heat. Fire flared, seemingly of all colors and shapes, exploding into the mist and gray like a geyser out of the earth.
Then the debris settled, and Nightshade and the Paladin were gone. Questor Thews was on his knees, both hands clutched tightly over the top of the bottle, watching stone-faced as the Darkling writhed on the scorched earth and turned to lifeless dust.
Ben Holiday returned to himself, lightheaded and dazed, with the medallion still warm against his chest. He started to sway and topple over, but then Willow was there, holding him upright, and Abernathy was beside her, and he managed to smile and say, “It’s okay now. It’s over.”
The four friends sat quietly at the site of battle and talked about what had happened.
Nightshade was gone. Whether she had been destroyed by the Paladin or escaped to trouble them another day, none of them knew. They could recall the moment of impact—a flare of light and a glimpse of the witch’s face. That was all. They were not willing to bet that they had seen the last of her.
Strabo was gone, too. He had lifted into the sky almost immediately at the battle’s conclusion, winging his way east without a backward glance. They could only imagine his thoughts. They were certain they had not seen the last of the dragon.
The Darkling, they hoped, was gone for good.
So, with any immediate danger dispelled, Ben was able—with occasional interjections from Questor—to explain to Willow and Abernathy how the puzzle of the Darkling had been solved.
“The secret was the bottle,” Ben said. “The Darkling lived in the bottle and never left it completely for long, even when freed from it, so there had to be some logical tie between them. Otherwise, the demon, who was always so anxious to be let out, would have simply abandoned its prison and gone its way. I thought, what if it can’t leave the bottle? What if that’s where it gets its power? What if the magic comes from the bottle, not the demon, and the demon stays with the bottle because it has to, if it wants to continue to use the magic? The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.”
“So the High Lord suggested to me,” Questor broke in eagerly, “that if the magic came from the bottle, then shutting off the bottle would cut off the Darkling’s power.”
“The trick was in doing that without letting Nightshade know what was happening—and then getting the bottle back before she could do anything about it.” Ben regained control of his explanation. “So while the Paladin was engaged in battle with the Darkling and Nightshade, Questor used the magic to shrink himself down and slip over to hide in the bottle’s neck. He became its stopper. He left an image of himself so that Nightshade wouldn’t know what he was up to. What Nightshade ended up destroying, when she guessed that Questor was behind the loss of magic, was just the image.”
“You might have alerted us to that much, at least!” Abernathy interrupted heatedly. “You scared us to death with that trick! We thought the old… Well, we thought he had been fried!”
“Questor sealed off the bottle,” Ben continued, ignoring his scribe’s outburst. “That shut off the source of the Darkling’s power and rendered Nightshade’s own magic, which was focused on the bottle’s, useless. It all worked exactly the way we had thought. By the time Nightshade figured out what had happened, it was too late. The creature was done, the demon was too weak to help, and the Paladin was bearing down. Questor surprised Nightshade by jumping out at her the way he did, full-size again, and snatching back the bottle. She couldn’t do anything.”