Page 63 of Soulbound

Sebastian screamed as his mother made a claw with her fingers, his body arching obscenely on the floor.

A wave of bile rose in Cleo's throat. Come on. Get up!

But he wasn't getting up, and Morgana was tying him in knots, all his skill evaporating in the wake of his emotionally compromised power.

Morgana drew her hand back, giving him an instant of relief, before she threw a vicious blue mage globe at him. Sebastian rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding it, his face tinted blue and his eyes black as the globe exploded, pitting the marble where he'd been.

Cleo's thigh muscles bunched. She couldn't simply stand there and watch. No matter how drained she felt.

But she couldn't defeat a powerful sorceress like this.

Unless...

Farshaw's book sprang to mind. Some say those disciples of the Light discipline of sorcery are the weakest, with their gifts tending toward Elemental magic, Healing, and Divination. But one forgets the most dangerous weapon of all: a skilled practitioner of the divination arts can see the future. And if that practitioner learns how to future-walk—to see ten seconds, twenty... or even a minute in advance—while still maintaining their grip in the current timeline, then they are well nigh invincible.

Cleo wasn't trained, but she knew how to open her Third Eye, and she knew how to see the future. Not in Visions anymore, but in odd flashes, in Premonition. Could she both see and react?

"All that power," Morgana whispered. "Wasted. It should have been mine."

And she drew her hand back for another strike. A red globe formed, Cleo's heart clenching in her chest in horror.

"No!" Cleo yelled, sliding to a halt between her fallen husband and his vicious mother. She wrenched back some of the power he'd stolen from her, fairly thrumming with it. "I won't let you hurt him."

"You're beginning to become something of a nuisance, girl." Morgana's eyes glittered as she flicked the battle globe directly toward Cleo.

Cleo flung her arms up, crossing them at the wrists, and her ward sprang into being; a shiny, flickering bubble that enveloped her and Sebastian. She'd been working on her wards with Ianthe in the past month, and Morgana's mage globe shattered against it, violent red sparks showering across the marble floor. The force made her stagger back a step.

Then she was staring at her adversary across the blistered ruins of the ballroom, her ward amorphous and flexible around her—but still intact.

Morgana's mouth fell open.

"Sebastian's not the only one who's been learning new tricks," Cleo warned. And whereas he might be purely offensive in his magic, she'd revealed a heretofore-unknown ability to defend herself.

Open yourself to probability, Quentin Farshaw's book had said.

Open your Third Eye.

Cleo bloomed like a flower, power flowing through the tenuous soul-bond between her and Sebastian, only this time it flowed toward her. The world suddenly changed, flat lines flowing from almost every surface as if she could see through distance. Golden threads glimmered over everything. An aura of soft white energy surrounded every human in the room.

She pushed forward. Five seconds forward perhaps.

As if in a trance, she saw Morgana unleash a shining net of golden strands that Cleo knew would destroy her if they hit.

Part the weaves, instinct told her.

And then she was back in the moment as Morgana drew her hand back to send her deathly net directly toward Cleo—

—who held both hands together, slicing apart the core of Morgana's magic network, in some method she'd never used before.

On either side of her, imps fell screaming, tangled in the remains of the treacherous web.

And Morgana's eyes widened.

The next assault appeared in her trancelike state, and Cleo countered it before it had even begun. It was so easy, so brutal, to stay several seconds ahead of her opponent, a sharp ache beginning to form behind her right eye like the insistent stab of an ice pick slowly being driven into her brain as she neutralized every single one of Morgana's assaults.

She couldn't keep it up forever. Seeing through time was a heavy burden in itself, let alone manipulating spells as well.

But neither could Morgana, and Sebastian was slowly getting to his feet behind Cleo.