It didn’t take me long to catch up with Maggie at the top of the stairs. She was in the middle of a spell I recognized as a particularly nasty hex, akin to walking through a bear trap made of solidified magical energy.

I had left my hands free for casting, so I didn’t have my sword ready. A right cross did the trick, though. Funny how for all of a wizard’s exotic powers, a punch to the face was still just as effective.

“You brute!” said Maggie, staggering back towards the Headmaster’s protective thicket, blood flowing from a freshly broken nose.

The air positively stank of lavender. Mimic would give me no warnings if Maggie tried to use Glassblower again. So, I couldn’t give her the chance.

“You think I wouldn’t hit a woman? I’m a damned demonkin! Diamond Shower!” As livid as I was, I knew I had to conserve energy until I was ready to strike the final blow. The shards of ice didn’t penetrate Maggie’s armor, but the yellow flashes showed I was draining her more.

“I thought you were at least a little refined, Not-Soren,” she spat, drawing her weapon again. “Can I have your real name? I want to know who I’m really fighting.”

“No!” I snapped, following suit. I lunged forward, my sword glinting in the afternoon sun. I couldn’t relent for a moment. She was too slippery. There would be no escape for her this time.

“Then I think Magpie will do,” she said, blocking with her own blade. “It’s the name Kiyo gave you. It’s the only one I know that belongs to you.”

“I told you, keep her name out of your mouth!”

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” she replied, parrying another strike from me. “If she was so great, she wouldn’t have abandoned you.”

“She didn’t,” I said, the sense of loss making my heart heavy.

Realization dawned in Maggie’s eyes. “Oh, did my trap catch her? Good. I was worried I’d missed.”

“Don’t sound so satisfied!” I was being sloppy, brute forcing my way through the sword fight. If she hadn’t been just as spent and flustered as I was, Maggie would have had me.

“You’ve lost, you know,” she said. “Your little friends are dead. If I finished off Jones, then the only ones left alive to contradict me are you and Tachibana. I’ll pretend to be one of the hostages.”

“You think they’ll believe you?”

“Maybe not,” she conceded. “But after you ruined everything, I need to be the one to spin the story.”

“I ruined everything? That’s some revisionist history! Who was the one who couldn’t leave well enough alone and started blackmailing me?”

She barked a humorless laugh. “You didn’t deserve any joy! You’re wearing the name of the sweetest boy I ever knew, you faker!”

“And you think you should just go right back to your cushy teaching job after everything you’ve done?”

She reared up, her haughty look of indignation worthy of a highborn devil. “Excuse me? I did my time in bloody Madagascar, and England, and even Sumatra. If teaching degenerates and losers like your stupid class is a ‘cushy job,’ then I’ve earned it!”

“Spectral Web!” This time I caught her, the aqua tendrils of energy wrapping around her ankles. I kept a lead in my hand, and I pulled as hard as I could with my off hand. She pitched sideways, her sword skittering out of reach when she slammed into the asphalt.

“To Me!” The sword flew back into her grip, and she rolled into a sitting position, slicing through my leash.

Seeing an opening, I tossed my own sword aside to free up my hands.“Bahadour!” I was low on magic, but I had plenty of rage to spare.

Maggie pumped energy into her sword, its golden runes almost blinding as she deflected the Bloody Lance away. I had to duck to avoid it.

“How did you do that?” I had never seen the reinforcing runes on a human sword do that before.

“A lady has to have a few secrets,” she said, slashing the last of my web. “Why do you think I chose this sword?”

“Because it’s all your scrawny little arms could manage,” I quipped. If her blade could stop a spell like that, I’d have to separate it from her before I launched the killing blow. Riling her up would make her sloppy, and it was good fun in its own right.

Her sword returned to normal as she raised it into a defensive pose. “There’s nothing scrawny about me. If you hadn’t been so set on Jones, I’d have let you find out firsthand.”

“No thank you. Your boy toys tend to turn up dead.”

“You were singing a different tune earlier,” she cooed.

“It was an act,” I said.

“That was too good of a kiss to be an act,” she countered.

“And you kiss too much like a dead fish to be a femme fatale, but that’s what comes of chasing children instead of men.”

“They were all of age!” She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t act like you’re better than me, Magpie. You lied to Jones, and you couldn’t keep your hands off of me earlier.”

“That was… I was…” Gnawing guilt took some of the edge off my righteous indignation. “I thought I wasn’t going to see her again.”

“And now you never will,” she crowed, thrusting with her sword. “You should thank me. Jones was an irritating little twit.”

I parried her thrust, and the swordfight resumed in earnest. We were both tired and sloppy. She didn’t try any more combat magic, making me suspect that she had burnt herself out with her trick with the stained-glass window. “I can’t believe you’re the same woman who cried over Haru Obe and Soren Marlowe,” I said. “She was your student too, you heartless bitch!”

“A defective who dated a demonkin for months without noticing,” she said. “Humanity doesn’t need her weighing us down.”

“She knew the whole time,” I said. “She just didn’t care.”

“Seriously?” she asked, ducking under a sword slash. “What a rotten judge of character.”

I flinched. I wanted to disagree with her, but she was right, damn her. I steeled myself. No, I could hate myself later once Maggie was dead.

Realization dawned in Maggie’s eyes. She’d seen the moment of weakness, how her words had slipped past my armor. “As if you really cared about her, you womanizer. You tried so hard to spare her feelings, to pretend you weren’t undressing me with your eyes every moment.”

“I did! I do!” I snapped, punctuating my words with a thrust that her enchanted cape just stopped.

“You can’t hurt her anymore, so you can stop pretending now.”

“It wasn’t an act!”

“Are you sure?” She hopped back, intentionally making her sizable chest bounce. Damn my eyes, they were drawn to the movement.

Her gambit had worked, my attention split for just a moment. For the second time that afternoon, a steel blade plunged into my gut. Not as far as Kiyo had managed, but the growing slickness in my side told me it was a good hit.

Surprising me, she didn’t immediately go for the kill. Instead, she took a step back, though her sword stayed at the ready. “I knew that would work, you little horndog. Everything about you is an act. You aren’t Soren Marlowe, you aren’t a patriot of the League, you aren’t even a Holy Brother. I bet you aren’t even English. I don’t even need to know your true name to know you; you’re a little slug who’ll do or say whatever you have to, if it would save your skin. Can you just be honest with yourself for once?”

I kept my eye on her sword. I still had a few major spells in me, but I didn’t dare waste the energy until I knew they would stick.

“You’re describing yourself, my dear,” I said. “How many of your Holy Brothers have you stepped over just to get on this roof? Haru, Soren, Rei, Paul, Ratte, Frettchen, Maus, and Neci. Am I missing anyone?”

Her face flushed crimson. “Excuse me? I will not be lectured by some demonkin about morality! Not when you killed Rei and Haru yourself!”

“You forced me to!”

“There’s always a choice, Magpie.”

“Yes, be turned over to the Wizard Corps or do your dirty work,” I said. “That’s a wonderful choice!” I felt my legs wobble.

I cursed in demonic. She’d gotten me again! This little repartee was designed to bleed me out. I didn’t have the energy for another All Heal. As satisfying as it was to shove Maggie’s sins in her hypocritical face, victory would be far sweeter.

I dropped my sword, twisting my hands to cast the spell. “Svalinn’s Wrath!” Maggie was right, I did overuse the spell. Still, the ability to will a floating black dagger into an enemy’s rear was not to be underestimated.

Maggie surged forward, trying to cut me off before I could finish the spell. My side protested as I weaved out of the way of her thrust, and a single thought plunged the dagger into her back.

She lurched forward, her face blank with shock. She collapsed to her knees, the enchanted sword falling out of her grip.

I dispelled the blade, since I had better uses for my magic. “Magic Bolt!” I aimed the blue sphere at the sword’s hilt, since it did not seem to have any runes etched into it. One always must be careful of residual magic. The blue sphere punched a hole in the roof, turning Maggie’s enchanted blade into so much dust.

“What happened…” She inhaled, a wet, ragged sound. I’d pierced a lung. I must have been tired; I had been aiming for her heart. “This can’t be how it all ends.”

“It isn’t,” I said, putting my hands in a casting pose. “Bloody Lance or Rough Spout? Your choice.”

“Wait, please,” she said. “You can’t kill me without telling me why. Why did you rush things today, just to turn traitor?”

“I told you,” I replied. “It was for my freedom, and then you had to go and threaten my friends.”

“That can’t be all,” she said, blood starting to trickle from the side of her mouth. She slumped down, using her hands for support. “There’s something about you that never made sense.”

“Yet you let me into your inner circle!” I crowed, ignoring the pain in my side.

“I thought I had won you over,” she said. “That you had seen the light. Why did you do this to me?”

A feral grin spread across my lips. “My dear, are you crying? Do try not to embarrass yourself! You’re not going to save yourself after what you pulled.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, her breath barely above a whisper. “Everyone always used me. The Wizard Corps, Tachibana, Maus. I was just a tool. I thought you were different.”

“You thought I was going to fall in line because you flashed me a little cleavage and stole a few kisses? I’m not that easy!”

“No, you weren’t one of them.” Her breathing was more labored. “My special boys… I could trust them. I was their everything.”

“And then you tossed them aside like used tissue and moved on to the next year’s model,” I said. “You even berated me for trying to save Haru!”

“The cause… he was a threat to the cause… I didn’t want to…”

The look of shock in Haru’s eyes when I’d told him about Maggie’s kill order flashed through my mind. “The cause of saving Maggie Edwards’ worthless hide, you mean.” That settled it. Rough Spout it was. It was a trickier spell, but her unrepentant ass deserved to suffer. “Goodbye, my dear.” The demonic runes swirled around my hands. I might have spent longer visualizing the spell, since I wanted to savor the moment. It might well be my last bit of joy as a free man.

Maggie thrust her hand forward, nearly toppling over in the process. “Lovely Fireworks!” My eyes were dazzled by a cascade of sparks.

“Ruhspont!” I could hear the asphalt bubbling as the potent acid did its work, telling me I’d completely missed.

“Alheln!” shouted Maggie, her husky voice gasping as the hole I’d punched in her back closed up.

My vision was beginning to clear, but not quickly enough. “When did you learn-”

I doubled over as the heel of her palm struck me right in my stab wound. “I’m a spellcasting teacher, you dunce. It’s called reverse engineering. Thanks for teaching me those runes and showing me the spell.”

“D-don’t mention it,” I managed, my vision clearing to show me a fully healed Maggie Edwards looming over me. “You know I can see up your skirt, right?”

Maggie chuckled. “I’m sure you can. I hope you enjoy it, since it’s the last thing you’ll see. Enjoy a taste of your own medicine.” She leveled her hands at me. “Ruhspont!”