Chapter 47
CHAPTER
Steeler didn’t take off his shirt to investigate the official oath pressed upon his back. He only picked up Old Veracious at his feet and looked at the crew of faeries before him.
“Anyone who wants to help is welcome to come with us.”
He held out his free hand.
I was the first to grab hold of it. Then Garvis wrestled out of the grip of the faerie who still held him, hurrying forward until his warm hand found ours. Sasha and Sylvie followed suit, then Terrin. Dazmine knelt to pick up my bag for me, slung it over her shoulder, and reached out her hand.
Terrin opened his mouth at her, but she rolled her eyes and snapped, “Get over it. I’m coming.”
All around us, the rest of the crew was watching with parted mouths. The captain herself was swinging her gaze between Steeler and me with eyes that nearly bugged out of her skull.
I lowered my blockade long enough to understand: they were shocked Steeler wasn’t forcing them to fight now that he was their official commander. More than that, though, they were shocked he’d finally become their commander after all these years.
Most of them had known him as a boy.
Now, the ink on their skin chained them to his commands above the captain’s. And judging by the hatred clenching her jaw, the captain herself was well aware of that sudden change.
“We’re coming!” boomed a familiar voice.
I looked up to find Barberro and that same silver-haired faerie in Steeler’s memories ploughing through the crowd. They just barely managed to reach between the rest of our bodies to lay a finger on Steeler’s, Barberro’s figure looming over the rest of ours by three feet.
He smiled down at me. “Hello again, girl with curly hair.”
“Hello, little faerie man.”
Barberro boomed with laughter, but it was his mate—his vigate—I found myself smashed up against, facing her for the first time in the flesh.
When Nara caught my eye, I could tell she knew exactly who I was.
“They have to brew for another twelve hours,” she whispered to me in that voice of softest satin, “but they can brew without me.”
The pills. We’d been so close to following through with the plan.
Maybe, if we survived this, we still could.
“Thank you,” I told her earnestly.
For coming with us right now, yes, but also for helping Steeler all these years behind the scenes. For helping me now. I hope my voice conveyed everything I meant in those two little words.
Nara nodded.
“Anyone else?” Steeler asked.
None of the other faeries on board so much as twitched forward. I tightened my grip on Steeler’s hand, and felt him squeeze back as the first tip of the sun broke the watery sheen of the horizon.
It was dawn.
It was time.
Darkness tore into us from every direction, the eight of us clinging to any part of Steeler we could find as he dragged us through space. The sensation would never stop my stomach from roiling when we landed, but this time I didn’t have time to gasp or retch.
Because when we landed, it was to find a world of smoke.
Flames ripped into the sky from every thatched rooftop in sight—and there were a lot of thatched rooftops here. Hundreds of seaside cottages and huts had been built into the crags of the giant clifftop that made Hallow’s Perch: what would have once been a picturesque sight.
Now, it was filled with screams.
Steeler turned to Terrin.
“Can you put out the fire?”
Terrin’s forehead squeezed as he concentrated, but after a second, his face fell. He lifted his hands and chucked a ball of water at the nearest rooftop, but it just dissipated as soon as it hit the flames.
“That’s…” Terrin’s face had gone pale, paler than I’d ever seen it. “That’s not real fire. That’s… altered fire. Like it’s been Shape Shifted. It won’t listen to me or…” He threw another ball of water that dissipated in a hiss of steam again. “…react to my magic.”
We all stared in horror at the flames that only crawled higher and higher into the sky. Was this what had ravaged Emelle’s village, too? Altered fire that the Element Wielders of the town couldn’t touch?
“Sasha, Sylvie!” Steeler had snapped into commander mode. “Go help any villager you can find—get them to that bunker that was used for tsunamis on the east side.”
The twins nodded and streaked off toward the village square. Steeler turned to Barberro and Nara.
“There’s a blacksmith and armory shop side by side over there.” He pointed down a street marked with a crooked sign called Mosscrest Avenue. “I need weapons. Anything you can find.”
The two faeries—vigates—didn’t hesitate before sprinting off, their gaits so in-sync despite the height difference that I didn’t doubt Fate had woven their very souls together.
Steeler spared a half-glance at Garvis, Terrin, and Dazmine before shifting his gaze to me and reaching out to thread his fingers through mine with his sword-free hand. The touch was brief. Too brief.
“Don’t leave my side, little hurricane,” he whispered.
Then a new scream, closer and louder than before, split the billow of smoke before us, and the rest of us rushed after the source of the noise—up Mosscrest Avenue, thick with falling ash, and around a bend.
A woman was on her knees in the middle of a dirt road, holding two small children against her chest with one hand and screaming as she pointed her other hand outward.
“I can’t!” she wailed at us when our thundering footsteps surrounded her and she looked up through red-rimmed eyes. “I can’t Summon my husband back! That thing t-took him!”
“What thing?” Terrin asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” Shaking, she pointed ahead, past a little stone church between houses.
“But it went that way! My husband’s a Shifter and couldn’t get it to—it’s okay, baby, it’s okay.
” She held one of the children tighter against her chest as the little girl began to sob.
“H-he couldn’t Shift its claws or teeth in time. ”
Claws and teeth? I exchanged a single glance with Steeler to find my own confusion and terror reflected in his eyes.
Whatever these monsters were, it seemed they were immune to Element Wielding, Object Summoning, and Shape Shifting.
Garvis bent down to touch the woman’s back.
“Can you tell us what this monster looked l—”
An ear-ringing roar burst from behind the church, and the children in the woman’s arms shrieked with renewed sobs.
Steeler looked at Terrin and Dazmine, gripping his sword tighter. “Get them to the bunker. We’ll go after the husband.”
To my surprise, even Dazmine didn’t hesitate to obey. She rushed forward to scoop one of the children up while Terrin grabbed the other one.
I snatched at her elbow just as they were about to flee.
“Be careful, Dazmine.”
Out of all of us, she was the only full-blooded human. Her lifespan was shorter, and she only had one magic.
She tossed me a dry smile over the strap of my bag still slung over her shoulder.
“I will. And you can call me Daz.”
Then she, Terrin, and the children fled down a side alleyway with the mother on their heels, the woman’s tearstained face flinging back one more time as if desperate for a last sign of her husband among the smoke.
We’ll save him for you, I wanted to tell her.
But another roar had already rattled the air so hard that I felt it reverberate through my very bones.
Steeler, Garvis, and I had barely made it to the church’s front door when a ghastly shape emerged from behind it.
A giant of a humanoid figure rose higher than the church’s steeple, covered in flakes of gray, peeling flesh and holding a man in skeletal hands that were tipped in long, curving talons.
The man lolled in its grip, head swinging, and as the monster made a rapid five steps forward on skittering legs, I saw why.
One of those talons had completely impaled the man’s chest like a needle in a pin cushion. The man was already dead.
But that didn’t stop the monster from opening a maw of sharp, jagged teeth and chomping down on the man’s head.
Leaving just his impaled body from the neck down.
I stuffed a scream deep, deep down as the sound of a crunching skull mingled with the splats of blood that joined the pavement.
Steeler had flung his free arm out in front of me as if that would have stopped me from seeing or hearing, but when he looked sideways at me, I knew it had just been a gut reaction.
He glanced at Garvis next, and the three of us nodded at each other.
Side by side, we tried to dive into the monster’s mind, but…
There were no thoughts to grab onto. Even when I allowed my eyes to close for the briefest moment, I could only sense more of that impervious fire, as if the element itself made up the creature’s mind.
Which only left Wild Whispering to use against it. But amid the flames and smoke that was stuffing itself down my throat, there were no plants or animals around to call for help. There was nothing except…
The monster’s head whipped our way, a shift in the wind alerting it to our presence.
It leapt, but my hand was faster.
My knives were already spiraling toward it, three of them, one after the other, and blood spurted in arcs as the blades hit their marks: one in the forehead, one in the neck, one in the chest.
Not enough to stop it completely, but enough to make it rear back in surprise, another one of its roars cracking my eardrums.
“Good girl,” Steeler said, pride lighting up his voice despite the situation.
Then he was gone.
One second, he had been a solid, seething presence beside me—the next he reappeared in midair above the monster’s head, swinging Old Veracious down upon its skeletal gray neck.
Blade cut through sinew and flesh and bone.
The head came thumping down moments before Steeler himself landed, catlike, on his own two feet, straightening up in time to move out of the way as the monster’s body followed.
For a moment, I gaped at the sight of him covered in splatters of dark blood and clutching his dripping sword with his fangs bared. He looked every bit like the nightmare I’d always imagined him as. The real threat. The real thing to fear in the dark. The real monster.
Then a voice boomed out from behind that sight, and I jolted.
“It looks like we’re all going to need these weapons.”
Barberro and Nara had reappeared, this time wielding axes and sickles and a variety of other sharp, shiny objects. They tossed Garvis a machete, and he caught it by its handle with surprisingly deft fingers.
I should have been rushing forward to retrieve my knives from the monster’s decaying body, but my eyes had returned to Steeler. A pallid sheen was creeping over his face as he shifted his gaze from the tip of his sword to the body and head of the thing he’d split in half.
“Steeler?” I stepped forward. He raised an expression of utter sorrow and hopelessness to my face. “What’s wrong?”
More screams shattered the sky from the direction of the village square, and every hair on the back of my neck stood on high alert at the realization that there were more—more monsters who could not be destroyed with the power of our brands, who would have to be ended with steel.
But Steeler grabbed my hand as if I’d tossed him a rope at sea.
“Old Veracious told me who it was the moment it touched his neck,” he whispered. “It gave me his real identity.”
My forehead furrowed. “His? What do you mean by his?”
I looked over his shoulder at the decapitated body, the head pitted with yellow eyes that stared unblinkingly at the destruction it had created, its victim’s lower body still skewered in its dead talon.
“I mean he’s a man.” Steeler was still whispering, and I vaguely felt the others drifting closer to listen. “His name is—was—Timothy Grandulous. Twenty-seven years old. Raised in Varchmouth. Given Element Wielding at his Branding. Failed his Final Test four years ago.”
The realization crashed into my heart, sending the beats of it into a frenzy. Nara and Garvis both inhaled sharply, and Barberro cursed.
The attackers are pale. Damaged. Altered beyond recognition, the Cardina jeweler had said.
And now I knew why.
The attackers were pale because they were being kept in that prison on top of Bascite Mountain. Damaged because they’d been tortured endlessly since their Final Test. Altered beyond recognition because they’d been given more magic—more brands—than their original human blood could handle.
The monsters attacking our villages were the exiled ones.