Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [94]
“That was a bit closer than I liked,” she said, attempting a rakish smile.
Peter couldn’t say anything over the violence of his own heart pounding in his chest.
Then Max blew another single half note on his pipe and Bo flew back again, this time disappearing entirely over the ledge, with no lucky branch within reach to help her.
“No!” Peter screamed, rushing towards the cliff’s edge.
“You’re well rid of her,” Max said. “She always was a brat and a pest.”
Peter looked down over the ledge and spied Bo lying perhaps as much as twenty feet below him, in the middle of the road, the same one he was on, which had obviously turned back on itself again, somewhere around the bend, to continue its descent down the cliff face. She seemed unconscious, but he could see that at least she was still breathing. There was some blood on her scalp and one of her arms lay twisted at an unnatural angle.
Max was standing well back from the ledge. He couldn’t know that Bo was still alive, and Peter decided to keep it that way. This should have been a fight solely between the two of us anyway, he thought. With a cry of rage, he turned on his brother, hurling his own favorite throwing knife as he did so. It splashed against Max’s invisible shield like water, which then fell to the ground in a miniature rainfall of a thousand cooling iron shards.
“I can’t believe you tried that,” Max said, “after seeing your late wife fail so miserably at the same thing.”
“I wanted to see if your magic shield worked differently, under different conditions,” Peter said, “such as if you weren’t expecting an attack from your own brother.”
“Aren’t you clever? Father always pegged you as the smart one. You should have sworn off the musical life and entered the philosophic world instead, where you could have experimented with worldly phenomena, investigated the true nature of nature, and charted the stars in their courses. But, your theory in this case was — what’s the word real philosophers use? Invalid? In any case, let me assure you, my protections aren’t all that conditional and can’t be fooled or distracted.”
“So what do we do now?” Peter said, all the while wishing with every fiber of his being that Bo should stay safely unconscious below, making no sound, until he figured a way out of this.
“Now I kill you. But before that, I’ll have my rightful inheritance — the flute that you stole from me. And though I could play a tune that would have you dancing on the end of my strings, forcing you to hand it over, I’d much rather have Frost from your hand, freely given. We both know I should’ve gotten it in the first place, and I expect you to acknowledge that much, without coercion.”
“But you have another flute,” Peter said, “much more powerful with darkest magic, from what I can see. Isn’t that enough?”
“Fire is so much more powerful than Frost that they can hardly be compared, one with the other. But, no, to answer your question direct, it’s not enough. Fire is mine by right of conquest. I found it and tamed it to my will. But Frost is also mine, because it’s my birthright. I’ll have both.”
“And after I give Frost to you, you’ll let me live, each of us free to go on our way?”
“No, not at all. Weren’t you listening? After that I’m going to kill you.”
“What happened, Max? We used to love each other. You couldn’t have simply pretended at affection for all those years. I know it.”
“So what?