A Soul Like Glass (Kingdom of Betrayal #4)

Chapter 23

Chapter 23

T here are too many of them.

So many that my heart plummets and panic threatens to choke me.

I thought I knew what I’d encounter: a monster that I could fight on the ground.

I never expected a swarm of airborne beasts that seems to be growing in number with every passing second.

Already, I count more than thirty, and still, the clouds writhe with more.

All of them resemble birds in some way, although none of them look like Blackbird, and none appear to create lightning within its body like he does. It’s a small relief that none of them appear to be a thunderbird like him, but that’s where my relief stops.

In a flash, I make out sharp teeth, tusks, antlers, and claws. Some have furred legs—two or four or even six legs—and others have scaled, snake-like bodies that writhe in the air. Still others have stingers on their tails like those of insects.

Some of them are smaller, allowing them to dart through the gaps between others’ wings. The beaks on those small creatures may not be as large, but I have no doubt they could rip my throat open with ease.

Blackbird reacts faster than I can flinch.

He banks left, avoiding the downward swoop of a feathered creature whose talons would have sliced off my head and tears away in the opposite direction, heading northward across the vast plain.

Bless him, he’s luring the creatures away from the city, but the fact that they stream after us tells me we’re their target.

“Asha!” Erik is reaching for his sword, but he doesn’t slide it free. “I need your permission to kill them.”

When I thought we would face one monster, my choices were simpler. My chances of saving it were higher. But not so for a swarm.

“You need to land!” he shouts. “We won’t survive in the sky. There are too many of them. I can make a gap for you!”

A single downward glance tells me that the creatures are swarming beneath us, flying parallel to Blackbird.

My eyes widen as I realize that they’re not only following us, but also forming barriers around us. Soon, it won’t matter how quickly Blackbird darts and weaves—we’ll be surrounded.

“Asha.” Erik draws my attention back to him. Back to his solemn eyes and the grim press of his lips. “I need your permission.”

I told him that my hammer won’t kill.

I transformed Blackbird instead of killing him.

But it will be impossible to transform all of these creatures. There are simply too many of them.

They’ll kill me before I can save them. And if they swarm toward the city, they could do extreme damage to the humans there. Wherever the humans are hiding, they won’t be safe.

I cling to Blackbird, painfully aware that the longer I take to decide, the more danger I’m putting us in.

“Let me do the cutting,” Erik says so quietly that I nearly don’t hear him.

Let Erik do the cutting.

My heart hurts, heavy with my decision. “Do it.”

He gives me the quietest nod. “Get to the ground. Stay alive. I’ll come to you.”

With that, he propels himself away from me, leaping from Blackbird’s back and out into the storm.

He draws his sword as he jumps.

My breath catches as he lands on the back of the nearest creature—a beast with antlers—his sword slicing neatly through its neck before he jumps off it again. He catches the wing of another beast but swings himself—impossibly—beneath its belly, striking up through the underside of its scaled chest before dropping onto the back of the flying beast below the first and cutting its head clean off.

The creatures were closing in around us, but Erik’s already created a gap for Blackbird to dive through.

Blackbird doesn’t waste our chance. He heads straight for the gap, sailing through the clear space before it closes again behind us.

My heart is in my throat as I twist, trying to look back to see Erik through the swarm of feathers and malformed bodies.

I need to see him!

But the flying creatures are clearly aware of the threat in their midst. Half of them have closed in around the location where I last saw Erik.

The other half have broken away to follow me.

We have a few seconds’ head start, and Blackbird isn’t squandering them.

He tucks his wings to his sides, covering my legs with them, before dropping into a dive so steep that all I can do is cling to his back.

If I had a medallion right now, I’d be strong enough that holding on to Blackbird would be easy, but I’m relying on my human strength to fight the force of our descent.

He angles toward the northern end of the wasteland farthest from the city, and all I can do is hold my breath while the ground rushes up at me, anticipating the moment when he levels out enough that I will be able to reach back for my weapon and leap to the ground.

Soon…

Soon…

The angle of our descent eases just slightly, and I tell myself it has to be enough.

My hand whips back. My fingers close around my hammer.

The movement upsets my position, but it no longer matters.

Strength surges through my body.

Every muscle feels like it’s on fire.

Power floods me, and with it, the world changes.

With my power, I am whole.

Blackbird spreads his wings, releasing my legs, and at that, I leap from his back.

I gain enough air to twist mid-jump and smack my hammer into the neck of the creature that’s first on our tail.

It screeches, the sound of a bird of prey, as it tumbles through the air, crashing into the top of a nearby skeletal tree and sending charred pieces of wood flying around it before it hits the ash with a thump .

Another creature is right behind it, but that one swerves to avoid the other’s tumbling body, its speed taking it right by me.

I fully anticipate that it will circle right back.

I land safely on the ash, now hundreds of paces from the city’s northern wall, and in a clear patch of ash that will give me the space I need to fight.

My boots meet the rain-sodden mud before I spin to face my next attacker, only to discover that the creature is farther away from me than I expected.

But, damn, that isn’t a good thing because they’re coordinating their movements.

While half of them have remained in the sky, a moving mass that conceals Erik’s location from me, the other half has formed three separate groups.

Each group descends toward me in a tight spiral—one to my right, one to my left, and another behind me.

The formations are eerily similar to the tornados of snow that raged through the air up on the mountain.

They create a dizzying pattern that makes it incredibly difficult for me to anticipate which creature from which group will reach me first.

I crouch low, ready to fight, my hammer in my left hand while I draw Thoren’s dagger into my right.

Oh, for a medallion.

If nothing else, this situation has already proven to me that I can’t go up against Thaden Kane without forging medallions first.

I can only hope I’ll survive long enough to make them.

Blackbird has flown farther to my left and is circling back toward me as if he will scoop me up again, but a fourth, smaller group of creatures breaks off from the nearest spiral and races toward him, cutting him off before he can reach me. He’s forced to veer away from me, ducking and weaving through the air as he tries to get back to me.

For now, I’m on my own.

The first creature reaches me.

My reflexes fire.

My hammer sweeps the air, connecting with feathers and fur as I use it, not to crush or hit, but to push and pull and pin so that I can slash instead with the dagger in my right hand.

Within seconds, the dagger’s blade is covered in dark blood.

Every move I make is a blur. A spin, a kick, another slash. I ram my hammer down on a neck so I can cut it. I use it to shove a creature’s wings back so I can stab its heart.

But with every dead beast, another creature takes its place.

For long minutes, I fight and still they keep coming, and even though I try to use my hammer defensively, now it’s biting back.

It doesn’t like what I’m doing.

I don’t like what I’m doing.

When I jab my hammer into the next creature, a sharp energy strikes back at me. And after that, with every swing of my hammer, pain travels up my left arm.

It only grows worse with every death, until I’m screaming.

I tell myself to hold on. Erik will fight his way through the swarm that has remained in the sky. He will reach me any second now, and I won’t be alone.

He will remind me that I have no choice.

He will tell me that I have to live.

When a group of snake-skinned creatures races toward me, I leap upward, trying to upset their formation, trying to get them to scatter, only to swing my hammer into a smaller beast with a crunch .

Terrible pain strikes through me. It’s so sharp that I double over midair. A deadly loss of concentration.

A second later, talons tear across my left hand, a furred body rams into my right side, and a tusk impales my left thigh.

For a horrifying moment, I’m crushed between multiple bodies, my own pinned in midair.

I can’t breathe. Can’t think.

And then the monsters separate and I’m falling, only becoming aware while I plummet to the ground that my left hand has opened and my hammer is tumbling away from me.

Every bone in my body crunches as I hit the ash. Worse, I land on the side of the toolbox because the satchel slipped to my right during the fight, and pain strikes through my ribs before it slips out from under me.

My left leg is bent at an odd angle. My black pants are ripped across my thigh, and hot blood gushes from the wound in my upper leg.

I scream at myself to get up, but my body won’t obey me. I must be going into shock, but there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.

The flying creatures seem to be re-grouping and closing in once more, but for a few moments, there is a gap of clear air above me.

My heartbeats slow as multiple things seem to happen at once.

Fresh lightning flickers softly in the boiling clouds overhead, and I’m confused by the golden color of it since the lightning before now has been crimson red. Thunder rumbles, and my heartbeats seem to thrum with it, and then?—

Crack!

A new bolt of lightning, a thick cord of it, bursts from the clouds directly down into the ground somewhere near my feet.

I don’t see exactly where it hits. I only know that it has lit up the air around me so clearly that I can make out every detail of the attacking creatures, whose claws and talons are striking toward me.

Their eyes are filled with anger and confusion. They’re screeching and crying. They came into existence fully grown and with nothing but a tumult of predatorial impulses to drive their behavior.

It’s clear they want me dead.

The slit of the sky above me disappears as they close in.