Chapter 48
CHAPTER
“By the moonbeam and the mist,” Garvis muttered.
I couldn’t seem to feel the singe of overbearing flames anymore as a wave of cold crashed over me at the sight of that corpse in two pieces behind Steeler, my knives winking where I had impaled it.
An Esholian.
Steeler and I had just killed an Esholian.
And maybe I whispered that out loud, because Steeler was suddenly gripping my jaw between his thumb and forefinger, wrestling my gaze away from the carnage. Back to him.
“We did,” he said, not without gentleness. “But that Esholian just murdered a woman’s husband—a father to two young kids. And if the rest of them can’t control themselves from murdering more, we’re going to have to do it again. Do you understand?”
I started to nod, but his past words seemed to ring through my ears. I need to hear that pretty voice of yours say it out loud, Rayna.
“I understand,” I whispered.
“Good.”
Steeler wrenched one of my knives from the corpse with a sickening squelch and twirled it back to me, handle first.
At the same moment, a vibrating crash echoed from the direction of the village square, a new layer of screams pealing after it.
I grabbed my knife from him and slid it back into place before wrenching the other two blades out of the corpse and whirling into a run as Steeler took off at a pounding pace.
“The exiled are immune to our powers because they’ve been Branded with all five,” Steeler threw over his shoulder as Garvis, Barberro, Nara, and I ran after him.
“And each of those five powers are blending together in ways they can’t control.
Their minds are fire, the fire is something else that’s been Shifted, and their Shifted forms aren’t the right kind of material that Object Summoners can grab onto. ”
My lungs burned with the acrid stench of smoke that only thickened the further we plunged into it, but I didn’t let my footsteps slow even as Steeler took a sharp turn up a street bordered by shops that were collapsing in on themselves.
A single thought was roaring over the rush of my own blood in my ears.
“The regular people who pass their Final Tests with perfectly average magic—they’re the disposable ones,” I panted, terror stripping away at my bones at the thought of Fabian and Don and every Branded adult in this village, Steeler’s adoptive family included.
“It’s the people with excess power who can’t control themselves—the exiled—that she wants to use against her sister to win the throne of Sorronia. ”
If that was true, then these attacks… they were all just part of a test. Dyonisia was testing out her army on her own people. Testing to see how much destruction they could cause on other magical beings.
I’d never wanted to plunge my blade into anyone’s heart more.
“Well, then,” Barberro said in a voice that wheezed a bit too much for my liking, “let’s show traitor her army will never win.”
Finally, we charged into an opening in the smoke, and I almost ran into Steeler’s back as he stopped dead at the scene before us.
Seven or eight more monstrous figures filled the village square, raging against the handful of villagers who’d stayed behind to try to fight them. Even as we watched, though, one of them whipped out a giant, tapered tail studded with spikes and slammed it into the nearest woman.
The spikes stuck through her face, her chest, her stomach.
And blood spurted onto the cobblestone.
I could feel, in the way Steeler’s shoulders hunched and the air seemed to suck in a breath around us, that he was about to Walk. But…
“Wait!”
He jerked back. Trying to block out the image of the monster’s tail whipping the woman’s body back and forth, I pointed at it.
“Do you see that imprint on both of its shoulders? And another one in the middle of its head?”
Steeler squinted at the vague circles just barely visible on the monster’s scaly skin. I was willing to bet there’d be two more beneath each of its lizard-like arms.
“Yes?”
“Those are its brands. Killing them isn’t going to put out the fire they created, but if we can mutilate their brands…”
“…we’ll destroy their ability to use magic,” Steeler finished, his eyes widening, “and put out the fire. Did everyone hear that?”
“Damage the brands,” Garvis repeated, dipping his head and clutching his machete close to his heart.
Nara raised her two spades, and Barberro followed suit with an axe in one hand and a sickle in the other.
“COME AND GET A PIECE OF THIS, FYKA!”
He charged at the monster with the spiked tail just as it narrowed its sights on another nearby victim, Nara hot on his heels.
Garvis sprinted for the monster beyond it, but Steeler and I pivoted at the same time when a terrified holler rang out on the other side of the raised dais in the middle of the square.
A man was on his knees before a creature that looked more dragon than human, except…
no, that wasn’t right, either. The body resembled an insect more than a lizard: tall, spindly legs, horns that almost looked like antennas, and thin, membranous wings that draped alongside it like…
Like a butterfly.
I was already running, throwing a knife at its bristled, tube-like tongue as it unraveled to lash out at the man cowering beneath it.
My blade sliced through flesh before it could. The monster shrieked and turned to me while the man himself scrambled away.
Two milky, unseeing eyes stared right through me, and recognition hit me all at once, turning my kneecaps into lead.
Jenia.
Her unraveled tongue still drooped with the weight of my knife stuck through it, but she seemed to sense me anyhow. Her wings gave a few angry flaps, her monstrous form lifting into the air until she was bearing down upon me, groping at me with hooked feet covered in tiny, prickly hair.
Steeler used the moment of distraction to disappear.
When he reappeared above her, it was to carve a slice of skin from her sloped head with a flash of steel.
And one of Jenia’s brands was no more.
She shrieked again, a sound so high-pitched it had my eyes watering… but by the time she landed on those spindly legs and swung toward him, Steeler was gone.
“Here,” he said, his presence solidifying by my side as he handed me back my knife he’d ripped from her tongue.
“Thanks.”
I claimed the knife but didn’t slip it back into place, holding it poised and ready when Jenia’s giant wings began to flap toward us once more.
“Do you trust me, Rayna?” Steeler asked grimly.
My focus never wavered from Jenia, but I found the answer sliding from my lips more readily than I ever thought possible.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Then I need you to open up for me.”
Every particle in my body sang for his commands. It was easy, easier than anything I’d ever done, to funnel an opening in my blockade in his direction. And with his stream of consciousness flowing freely into my mind, merging with mine, we moved in harmony.
Whirling and ducking beneath wings and legs, we flashed in and out of existence around the monster Jenia Leake had become, slicing off the four remaining windows to her powers but never maiming anything vital.
Never touching her head or her heart. Her shrieking reached a crescendo that raked nails through my ears, but…
The glints of Steeler’s sword and my knives had fused like stardust by the time the giant butterfly collapsed back into a girl.
A sobbing, rocking girl with gaping wounds on five separate parts of her body and a marred scalp with newly-grown tufts of hair.
Disgust whirred through me. Despite the fact that we’d just saved her from herself, I wanted to rip her waste of a head from her neck for what she’d done to Rayna last year. I wanted to smear her back into nonexistence, where she belonged…
“Sorry,” Steeler murmured. “That’s me.”
The next second, I felt him close his blockade, severing the flow of consciousness between us. The absence of him vibrated in my skull for a moment with a high-pitched ringing, but after a few heavy blinks, my thoughts were purely my own again.
And my own were a bit less murderous.
I couldn’t see Jenia’s eyes because she had them pressed into her knees as she rocked, but I found myself squatting beside her anyway. Trying to steady her tremors with a hand to her back.
“Hey. It’s over. You’re okay now.”
Except I didn’t even believe my own words. It wasn’t over. It wouldn’t be okay—not for Jenia, who surely couldn’t go back to Dyonisia now that we’d dismantled her ability to use her powers.
Just as I thought this, a flash of yellow wings snagged the corner of my eye.
I whipped my head toward it to find a familiar parakeet swooping from the smoke-clogged alleyway on the other end of the square—closely followed by its owner.
Steeler had followed my gaze. We both stiffened as Kimber Leake caught sight of her sister sobbing and rocking before me.
She lurched into a sprint toward us, cloak flapping, the Good Council dot in the center of her brand gleaming like a red eye.
I shot to my feet in preparation. I could feel Steeler’s grip tighten on the pommel of his sword as vividly as if he’d squeezed my own heart. If Kimber made a single move…
But by the time she skidded to a halt before us, gasping for breath, she had eyes only for the girl on the ground.
“Jenia. Jenia. It’s okay. I’m here.”
Kimber sank to her knees to wrap her arms around her sister, her back completely exposed to us and our blades. At that touch, Jenia’s tremors finally slowed. Her sobs quieted. Her breaths evened out.
The Good Council elite—the woman who had sabotaged me last year to no end, according to the memories I had resurrected—finally looked up.
Not at Steeler. At me.
It was perhaps the first time I could remember last year’s princess of our house looking at me with anything other than pure contempt. This was something deeper. Something spiked with pure fear.
“You… you didn’t kill her.”
Her yellow parakeet fluttered onto her shoulder and cocked its head at me, but kept its beak shut. No derogatory insults this time.