THE SKY DIMS BRIEFLY, THEN THE CLOUDS ERUPT into what looks like a mirrored image of the ground. They light up and explode in orange bursts and angry heat, their thunderous noise rocking the valley.
With a flick at those clouds, I rip a lightning streak through one of the airships, taking it down before a renewed war cry rings out and the Bron soldiers rush us.
Colin snaps the stones underfoot, effectively knocking the men over before launching himself toward Breck just as Rolf and the king charge Adora. I swerve my hand to aim at her, but she’s suddenly slipped away and somehow Breck’s hands are free and the serving girl is lunging for the captain of the guard.
What the—?
She flips him in front of her, and Adora’s knife is now glinting in her fingers. Breck raises the blade to Rolf’s neck and smiles, and then it hits me: Breck’s smirk.
Breck’s smirk is toothy.
Oh good-mother-of-Faelen.
I drop my hand as my friend’s face flinches and twitches and for a moment takes on the persona of a wolf. Her body lengthens and mutates, until she looks taller and older. Sharp teeth and a flat snout sneer down at us from an ancient man’s fearsome face before she shivers and relents back into the form of Breck. Complete with those brown eyes set above freckled, rosy cheeks.
The boots of thousands of marching soldiers rise up on the wind.
The drone of the airships.
From somewhere King Odion laughs. Rich. Deep. So like his brother’s. “Well, this is an interesting twist!”
But all I can see is Breck with her bruised and disjointed face, cleaning up a pool of her own blood on my bedroom floor. A half-hidden gash on her back. Not just a gash, a clawed incision.
Adora didn’t just betray us. She’s condemned us.
Colin shakes his head and takes a step toward his sister, as if not fully comprehending.
Breck’s body gives a final, eerie shudder, causing her to drop the knife and release her grip on Rolf as her skin shimmers and tears at the seams, her flesh becoming a diaphanous wisp that dissolves into a thin pile of skin and clothes on the ground. She leaves behind a monstrous half-man, half-wolf with fur and claws and teeth as dark as the demonic atmosphere that owns this place. Draewulf.
I hold back a brokenhearted gag as black air eeks up from the stones beneath Breck’s remains and swirls like ghostly guards around the monster. Slowly, he lifts a claw and tucks a chunk of straggly hair behind a hideous, pointed ear.
And every drop of blood I own freezes to my bones.
“Noooooo!” Colin’s yell echoes out over the pass, blending into the clanging metal and falling bombs. He grabs a sword from the ground and charges the beast, lunging for its stomach.
The beast dodges with a snarling chuckle. “Didn’t you think your sister a little strange lately, boy? Or did you not care enough to notice? Too busy wanting to save the world, and yet you missed saving your own sister. So pathetic.”
A half-choked cry and Colin thrusts again, but his sword strikes air and then ground.
Draewulf’s foot comes down on the blade, snapping it at the hilt, while his other shoves up to gut Colin with those long, spindly claws. I snap down a lightning stream, causing Draewulf to lurch away, and King Sedric is there with a strike that slices the monster’s leg open.
The beast roars.
Colin scrambles away, flips over, and places both hands to the ground. A crack shreds through the courtyard and almost rips open beneath the animal.
Draewulf jumps, his grin widening as if it’s a game. “She didn’t even cry that day in the Elemental girl’s room. When she sensed what I was right before I took over. Just swore and punched me a good one. Might’ve landed it too if Adora hadn’t stopped her.”
I shut his words out. He’s sick. He’s insane. It’s not my fault what he did.
I launch three icicles that barely miss impaling the beast, and then King Sedric’s lunging in again just as something wraps around my throat.
I’m yanked back. I can’t breathe. Gagging, I kick and scratch, but whoever’s got me is bigger and stronger and my thigh is hurting like blazes.
Hands shove me to the ground and my face tastes stone and blood, and my warped fingers are being crushed by the man whose voice sounds so much like Eogan’s. “Touch another one of my ships, girl, and I’ll rip your arm from its socket.”
He flips me over.
I gasp and choke. And then spit in his face.
He slams his fist into me and I taste more blood.
“I wonder what it would take to break you enough to work for me, hmm? Watch Draewulf kill your friends? Kill your precious king?” Odion glances up. “Or maybe kill my brother?”
My eyes narrow. He laughs as if he knows his words hit home. I twist my wrist beneath him. Bend my fingers just enough to grab his hand. If I can just . . .
I let loose liquid fire straight into his veins.
He jerks back, eyes widening in shock, in horror, at the impossible realization that I can reach through his block and kill him. And he can’t let go.
Abruptly, there’s a blade in his other hand and he’s bringing it toward my chest. But I can’t release him and his body’s too heavy to push away.
The knife hesitates.
His mouth falls open.
He utters a curse followed by a gurgle, then slumps on top of me, and the blade clatters to the ground.
Eogan’s standing over us, sword in hand, stained with his own brother’s blood.
He shoves Odion aside and pulls me up. I shriek as the pain in my leg rushes in and nearly cripples me. I limp forward, but Eogan’s warm hands are sliding along my arms, my shoulders, my throat. My bruised face.
“I’m fine,” I say, trembling more from his touch than my pain. I push his hands off. I don’t want to feel him. I don’t want to pretend he cares for anything more than winning this battle. “He’s going to kill them,” I say, swerving my attention back to Colin, Draewulf, and King Sedric.
They’re still locked in a fight, and Rolf and the other knights are now working to hold off the Bron soldiers along with Princess Rasha, who’s swinging a sword more skillfully than I’ve ever seen a woman do.
Eogan nods once, grimly. “I’ll go around behind him. Distract him from the front?”
Oh, I’ll do more than distract him.
With a hitch of my leg, I step forward, refusing to allow my gaze to fall on Odion because something tells me if I look I’ll lose it, and then the backstabbing, the betrayals, Breck’s death—they’ll all become real. And right now, Colin and Faelen need me.
“Nym.” Eogan’s voice dips. “This isn’t like the airships or the wolves. Draewulf . . . he’s more dangerou—”
“I know,” I say coldly and keep walking. Let’s just get this whole sick thing finished so I can go home. To wherever home is now. I glance over and hurl an angry blast of ice at the Bron soldiers, half blinding them, before I focus my energy on Draewulf just as he backhands King Sedric into the turret wall.
Colin’s creating fissure after fissure beneath the monster’s feet at the same time he’s yanking rocks from the cliff and throwing them at the beast’s head. It’s a wonder the whole fortress is not falling down under us.
I bend low and focus on releasing another flash of ice, this time along the ground to create a slick surface on Colin’s already-uneven stones. It works, and Draewulf’s claws clack and clatter on the frozen bricks. He scuttles forward, and I bring down a lightning bolt, which he dodges before shifting his enormous body to face me.
His eyes zero in on mine over his flat, disgusting, part-man, part-animal snout.
He growls.
With one bat of his hand, he’s knocked Colin aside like a leaf and is crawling this way.
My stomach drops. He’s just been playing with them.
It’s me he wants.
Draewulf slips and claws his way toward me, with an expression wavering between hate and mockery, as I send ice picks, followed by lightning, followed by thick chunks of hail, followed by everything I think I am capable of.
It’s as if he’s a ghost walking—the way he avoids them, his movements so fluid. His glare never falters as he approaches with those thick lips and pointed teeth.
I swallow. Images of Breck fill my mind—what he did to her. What he’ll do to the rest of us.
“The prized slave who just couldn’t do what she was told,” he snarls. “All you had to do was take down the fortress and you and Colin would’ve survived.”
“While you hid like a pathetic weakling beneath the skin of a blind girl.”
His eyes flash. “Why stoop to the dirty work of taking over two kingdoms when I can have slaves do it? And as far as the blind girl—what better way to know another’s weaknesses than to serve right under her Elemental nose.”
He erupts with a roar and springs for me.
I shove forth a wall of fire between us that I’m not sure is from the sky or my hand. He leaps through just as my knees are kicked out from behind. I drop and Adora’s insane laugh fills my head along with the stench of Draewulf’s smoldering flesh. I look up in time to see his claws coming down to rip my chest into a million colorful shreds.
I lash a hand out, except suddenly Colin is standing in front of me.
Abruptly. Horrifically.
He screams as the sharp nails pierce his flesh, carving through the muscle and bone before he falls.
I slash another lightning bolt at the beast, cracking it through his arm.
A howl erupts, and then Eogan is behind him and has landed his broadsword directly into Draewulf’s back. The monster staggers and roars, rips the sword from his wound, then jumps and grips the side of the turret.
He scampers up it, leaving a bloody trail as he climbs to the parapet and disappears into black shadow.
And then I’m hovering over Colin. To shield. To help.
Except there’s no amount of helping to fix the torn boy in front of me. I let loose a moan that becomes a yell so loud it shatters the sky, fracturing the clouds above into a hundred ignited thunder bellows.
Colin. The precious bald boy. My friend.
The life pulses out of him in red ribbons, and I’m pressing on his chest, covering the wounds with my hands, trying to stop the flow as the thump thump thump of his beautiful heart weakens and drains.
“What have you done?” I whimper to him, and I am both horrified and wrecked. My tears drip down to mix in his blood. “You should’ve let him take me. Why didn’t you let him take me?”
Rain begins to fall. It patters his face with caresses and misty wishes I can hardly see because my tears are pouring so thick.
His hand slides over mine. “They need you.”
“I need you. You and me—this was ours to do. Oh hulls—someone do something! Someone help him!”
“I never did this for Faelen, Nym,” he gasps. His body shivers.
“No no no no. I can’t lose you. You’re my friend.” My voice is crumbling into broken shudders, like the bones and skin from his chest now barely holding together as it heaves beneath my fingers. “We need you.”
“For me it was never ’bout them,” he whispers. “It was . . . for Breck. For givin’ her a better life.” He inhales and coughs. Quivers. “You an’ her deserved to be free.”
I’m crying harder now. “Don’t talk. It’s fine. You’ll be fine. Just don’t go. Don’t leave.”
His eyes are growing hazy. He’s looking around as if trying to focus.
I move closer, and his gaze latches on mine. His breath is thinning.
My world is thinning.
“It was for you, Nym.”
He’s slipping. Becoming incoherent. “I couldn’t let him take you.” Another cough.
“Colin . . .”
“Don’t let him take you, Nym. Don’t let him take who you are. Make him . . .” His head jerks, his lips forming and reforming the words he’s trying to get out. “Make him fear who you’ll become.”
I can’t breathe. I don’t know how to breathe, and I’m losing him, losing him—oh please no— I’m losing him.
His pupils widen and his brown eyes deepen, as rich as the Faelen earth, as his hand slips up to my heart. He presses in, and suddenly I swear I can feel my insides trembling as he’s carving, creating one last fracture.
He’s inscribing my soul with his beautiful name.
Then his hand slides from me.
His chest shudders beneath my fingers as the last breath leaves his body and drifts hot across my cheeks. A kiss of warmth as his last good-bye.
And I am left. Alone.
In the rain.
Covered in the bald boy’s blood.