Three years ago, what state had Bella been in? Back then she hadn't yet entered Kamar-Taj, her spells weren't a coherent system, and she'd relied on a single Ice Rapier to hold the line.
Now it was different. The Ice Spear was blindingly fast, its reach enormous, and Aro had no time to dodge.
He could only block with his right arm.
The Ice Spear was razor-sharp. It took his arm clean off, freezing solid the whole span from his elbow to his shoulder.
"Aaah! You! I'll kill you—I'll kill you!" Aro roared, his face contorting into something savage as he glared at Bella.
"Still want to kill me? Still want to turn me into a vampire? You garbage!" Bella raised the index finger of her right hand, and the Ice Whirlwind howled toward Aro.
The ice shards in the whirlwind were like a fistful of sharpened daggers. Aro darted backward, yet was still cut open in more than a dozen places across his body.
Not a single drop of blood ran from the vampire's frame, but the peeled-back flesh spoke plainly enough to the horror of the spell.
Following Bella's gesture, the Ice Whirlwind reshaped itself entirely as it accelerated—the shards became fangs, the whirlwind became a body, and a Giant Ice Serpent coiled around the vampire's left leg. Bella's Mind Poison spat at Aro again and again. The vampire's awareness went hazy; though he too had a gift for mental abilities, his thoughts turned sluggish, his thinking speed dropping seventy percent out of nowhere.
"Let me see your secrets!"
For an enemy like this, no gentle spell was needed. Bella forced the mind-read. Her eyes gave off a faint white glow as psionic energy invaded Aro's brain, roughly stripping out his most recent memories.
A quarter-hour later, she shook her head, a little disappointed.
Aro's intelligence had come from the Camarilla—the vampire organization the Kindred called the Secret Alliance. It gathered seven of the Thirteen Vampire Clans under one banner, and the Volturi were merely one powerful branch among the Camarilla's many families.
He had received a message from a vampire Antediluvian, and only afterward had drawn up the plot against Bella. While observing the future timeline, this Antediluvian had glimpsed that Bella would one day become an important figure among vampirekind—and had therefore ordered his subordinates to hunt her, Embrace her, and turn her into a vampire.
This Antediluvian had only just broken free of his confinement. And the moment he'd broken free... seemed to be exactly when the cabin in the woods was destroyed.
"Damn it!" Bella fumed. This was a textbook case of swatting the small fry only to bring the elder down on your head!
Just how much trouble had that cabin in the woods loosed upon the world? All Thor's fault, that idiot!
She griped inwardly—only inwardly, of course. To point at the heavens and curse aloud? That she still didn't dare.
Once there was no longer a single structure within Kong's line of sight that could be called intact, the battle finally, thoroughly, wound down.
Gone. All of it gone! Never mind the vampires' family courtyards—even the city of Volterra had been flattened. An immaculate slaughter.
Kong was the very model of a one-ape city-killer. He kept pounding his chest and bellowing, glancing around, the gist of it plainly: Who else?!
The mages of Kamar-Taj came walking in from several directions.
Bella had worried the vampires might scatter and flee, so she'd laid ambushes all around the city. Human soldiers had trouble against vampires, so she'd turned to Kamar-Taj's mages for help.
The Indian monk who owed her a favor from the New York Sanctum affair—mystic master Daniel—had brought his own disciples to lie in wait around the perimeter.
Kamar-Taj's spells lacked offensive power. Lacked it badly, in fact!
Even Bella, who had studied the Book of the Vishanti, had failed to learn any real attack spell from it. It was either the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak, or the Winds of Watoomb, or the Shield of the Seraphim—you could tell just from the names that every spell recorded in the Book of the Vishanti leaned defensive or supportive.
That want of offense was why Daniel—a mystic master of thirty years' cultivation—came off as rather helpless against Victor von Doom. In truth his command of magic was nothing to scoff at; at trapping foes and obscuring their sight, he was second to none.
Bella had asked these mages to lay dense arrays all around the city, layer stacked upon layer of Mirror Dimensions enclosing the whole of it. Never mind ordinary vampires—even a vampire Antediluvian couldn't have broken out in any hurry.
"Master Daniel, I've troubled you with my private affairs. Thank you." Bella was very courteous.
The dark-skinned mystic master pressed his palms together and returned the courtesy. Then a disciple beside him handed Bella several thin cloth parchments and half of a broken stone tablet.
"These are ancient vampire records we found within the courtyard. There are deeply evil spells inside—please, be very careful when you read them," Daniel cautioned her with the utmost gravity.
Bella nodded. "Understood. Rest assured."
The vampires had, by and large, all been killed by Kong; the Kamar-Taj party had come to assist but hadn't truly joined the fighting. Seeing the battle over, they opened a portal and returned to New York.
Bella picked up a cloth parchment and studied it closely.
According to the Book of the Vishanti, the origin of vampires reached all the way back to the age of Atlantis.
It had been the great Atlantean archmage Varnae who used the magic in the Darkhold to transform himself into an immortal, undying vampire. His power was too vast, his lifespan without end—and when at last he came to loathe everything, the vampire Varnae passed his sorcery down to a younger vampire, Dracula. Only then did vampires become known to the world.
By some common accounts, the Book of the Vishanti was the Book of White Magic, filled with defensive and enemy-binding spells, while the Darkhold was the Book of Black Magic, recording spells of attack and malediction.
The vampire Varnae had held the Darkhold for over ten thousand years, and his vampire descendants had, to one degree or another, inherited fragments of it. The cloth parchments and broken tablet now in Bella's hands each preserved scattered, unsystematic scraps of that knowledge.
Even at Bella's level, she couldn't make sense of the contents for the moment; the vampires' way of recording magic was far too disorganized.
Unless she slaughtered every one of the Thirteen Vampire Clans and gathered up all the Darkhold inheritance in their keeping—only then could she likely restore sixty or seventy percent of the Darkhold's contents.
She put the parchments and the tablet away.
Had the Ancient One ever read the original Darkhold? That was a question no one alive, apart from herself, could probably answer.
Bella had no intention of abandoning her current path. But glancing over the ideas within, borrowing from them to develop a few high-powered attack spells—that much was doable.
"Roar-roar! Roar!?—" Kong bellowed at Bella twice.
The angel blood had shifted Kong's temperament a little. All that long stretch of battling Skullcrawlers and devouring those savage beasts had left the ape steeped in violence; now the angel blood had thinned out those dark emotions, letting the great gorilla recover a bit of his true nature.