14. Max
Max
The bridge closed on us the moment we set foot on it. We’d known it would. It was still the only way out.
Torches ahead. The burning castle behind. Black water beneath. Two hundred yards to cross and nowhere to put my back.
The archers opened first, arrows falling out of the dark in whistling sheets from the battlements behind us. I couldn’t bring those walls down, even with the Coldiron begging me to. Drop the walls and I’d drop all of us into the river with them.
“Spartans, shields up!”
Every Nightingale wore a Coldiron armguard I’d forged.
I reached down the link, and all of them bloomed at once.
The team snapped them up and locked them into a shell of living metal, roof and walls, with the rescued supernaturals, Odalys, and Josette packed inside.
Caspian took the edge of it with Missy on his back, and a plate of my metal curved over my sister like a carapace.
Arrows hammered the shields like hail on a tin roof, and we pushed through.
I threw a Coldiron dagger out through a gap, and the blade burst into half a dozen throwing stars. They went up in shrieking arcs and swept the parapet. Four archers dropped. More stepped into their places.
The enemy came at us with steel from both ends of the bridge.
Only nine of the rescued had stayed with us. None of them were in good shape, but they fought like this bridge was the last free ground on earth.
“Better to die free than go back on a fucking shelf!” Belmonte bellowed. “See you on the other side, comrades!”
Everyone could see the math. One of us for hundreds of them.
“Cut them down! Bleed those fuckers!”
“Stay together!” Caspian shouted from the rear.
“Get them out, wolf! No matter the cost,” Nikolai yelled from the front.
“On my last breath, vampire,” Caspian answered.
“Them” meant my sister and me. Only us. The rest of them weren’t getting off this bridge. Not Nikolai. Not Caspian.
What do I do? What do I do? There has to be something.
I called for my power. I begged for it. Nothing answered.
“Charge!” Nikolai roared. “It’s been an honor, all of you!”
Caspian threw his head back and let out a howl, and the team howled with him. Even those we had rescued.
“Fight to the death!”
Nikolai led the charge, draining the enemy soldiers as he went, his ax cutting a path. Belmonte on his left. Marco on his right.
Those of us at the rim killed whoever came close, and we drove down the bridge one bleeding yard at a time.
Then the sky came down on us.
A shrieking swarm poured up over the castle from beyond the wreckage. Wide leathery wings, long jaws, claws like blades. Flying mutants, from wherever they’d been bred. The Collector’s lab had just opened its cage.
Shit. The White Witch wasn’t the only one breeding weapons.
Sky, flanks, front, rear. All of it at once. Our formation buckled, reformed, buckled again. Some of ours were down.
“Max, I’m scared,” Missy cried, clutching Ross to her chest. The cub growled and trembled.
I stole a second I couldn’t afford and thumbed the tears off my sister’s face.
“It’s okay to be scared, little viper. I’m scared too. Let’s be brave together. Can you do that?”
Missy nodded and puffed out her chest to show me her bravery.
A roar came down through all of it.
A dragon.
The dragon.
He came out of the north low and fast, black and gold running like poured metal under the faint stars. Wings riding the wind down the line of the river. Neck stretched. Fire in his jaw.
Every head on the bridge turned. The mutants faltered in the air.
My eyes flooded.
Drakken had come. Knowing exactly what I was and whose blood ran in me.
He’d wanted me dead once on suspicion alone, back when his dragon first caught the scent of my cursed bloodline.
Now it was confirmed, his mortal enemy’s heir standing on this bridge, and he’d put a lifetime of hate down and crossed a thousand miles of hostile country to get to me.
There was still time to get Missy out.
The dragon’s rage rolled over the bridge like thunder. He raked the far end with a river of flame, and the enemy ranks on the other side became torches and then guttered out.
Every bow on the walls turned to him. I threw the stars at the archers, caught them coming home, threw again. It wasn’t enough. There was a legion besieging us, and if the dragon stayed, he’d die with the rest of us.
I wouldn’t have that. Some of us were getting off here, and one of them was going to be my sister. The dragon could carry a few. Everyone knew it.
“Get Max and Missy on him!” Nikolai shouted.
“No. I stay.” I didn’t leave room for argument. “My sister, Josette, and Holt.”
The eagle shifter was wounded badly enough that she could barely stand.
No time to argue. No time to get more than three of them up. And I was not leaving my team.
The dragon banked hard and came down inside our ring. Stone cracked under him. He swung his great head at me and roared close enough to blow my hair back.
He wanted me on his back. It wasn’t a request.
“Get my sister to safety, please,” I called up at him. “Then come back for us.”
Molten gold eyes held mine for a long, furious second.
Then Josette was climbing. Frost hauled Holt up the ridge of the dragon’s foreleg, and Caspian swung my sister off his back and up into Josette’s arms. Josette locked her in and gave me a nod.
“Go! Go!” I roared, throwing the stars not at the archers but over the dragon, a moving roof of my metal.
He broke off the bridge with arrows already feathering his wings, half a dozen punched clean through the membrane as he banked.
“Max! No, Max!” Missy reached back for me with both arms, thrashing, and Josette locked her against her chest. “Don’t leave me again! Please, Max!”
“I’ll find you, little viper!” My throat was raw. “I love you!”
“I love you, Max!”
The dragon took my sister and climbed into the dark. Three flying mutants broke off and chased him.
The rest of the horde fell on us, talons against our blades, wings hammering the shields. The elite mages and the Forged pressed in behind them from both ends of the bridge, wave stacking on wave.
Caspian took a mutant’s talons across the back. Meant for me. He’d thrown himself between us to take them. My dagger went through the thing’s foot, and Caspian buried his blade in its skull.
Everywhere I looked there were more of them.
Ten feet away, a Forged swung his blade down and Nikolai’s arm came off at the elbow.
Before I could get to him. Before I could shout. Before I could send the stars.
Blood gushed from the stump in a sheet.
The world stopped for me for a second. It didn’t stop for the vampire prince. Nikolai didn’t break rhythm. He spun inside the Forged’s guard and tore his throat out with his fangs, and he didn’t wait to watch him fall. He was already taking the jaw off the next one, one-handed.
I didn’t let myself break. Not from what I’d just watched, not from the noise going on inside my skull. If I broke, if any of us broke, we were dead in the next second.
And every second handed me a new terror. Caspian’s blood in the air. Nikolai’s arm on the stones. Frost down on one knee. Enna dragging a limp Marco backward by his collar.
I threw my stars until my shoulders burned, recalled them, threw again, and it wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. The Nightingale were the finest warriors this continent had to offer, but they were spent, and the enemy kept coming.
“The Nightingale and I will hold them!” Nikolai bellowed at Caspian. “Take Max and go down the river! Now!”
“Never!” I held his crimson gaze. “Don’t ever fucking ask me to leave you or anyone else behind.”
If we died, we died together. It was that simple.
I was across the deck, on two elemental mages throwing ice and fire at Frost and Nikolai, when they came for Bryn. Four arrows at once, more than one archer on her, and she had a Forged in front of her while she was shielding a rescued captive, with no way to see them coming.
My stars took three out of the air.
The fourth went into her chest.
I crossed the distance with a scream and put my blade in the gut of the Forged standing over her, dragged it free, and shoved it through his heart.
Bryn was staring down at the shaft in her chest with a look like a joke had landed late.
“No, no! Bryn, no!” I went down on my knees with both hands over the wound, as if I could hold her in.
The Nightingale crew, every one of them, the rescued supernaturals too, fought around us in a ring to buy me a minute with her, knowing they’d go next.
“I lived. No regrets, Max. It’s been an honor to serve with you.”
“Don’t you dare! We promised each other an adventure after we win the war.”
“Florida. Hope it’s still on the map,” she said. “Always wanted to see the beach.”
“We’ll go to the beach. You and me.” I was pleading with her. “I just need you to hang on a little longer.”
“You and me. Bikinis…and sunbathing on…white sand.” Blood climbed into the words, and she smiled around it.
“That’s the idea.” I couldn’t see her for the tears. “So hang on. I need you to. I’ll get us out—”
Bryn’s eyes went sightless.
She was gone.
My best friend was gone.
Grief overcame me before my team’s shouts could get through. I stopped knowing who else had gone down.
Enna’s voice tore, somewhere to my left. A mutant took Jace’s throat out. The Spartan with the dimples. Every leave he’d ever had, spent out in the wild getting justice for lions.
Ended on a bridge in an enemy kingdom.
They were everywhere, swarming, rushing, and somewhere under all of it a pattern surfaced.
The arrows bent around me. The blades checked at my skin. The mutants pulled their strikes.
The enemy was being careful not to hurt one person on this bridge.
Me.
They’d bleed everyone else around me, and at the end of it I’d be the only thing standing in a pile of my own team. I’d watch Caspian go down. I’d watch Nikolai stop breathing. And then they’d put a collar on what was left of me and carry me to their king.
I’d be part of the fucking collection, or worse.
Fuck it!
A scream rushed out of a place in me that had no bottom, grief and fear and rage fused into one sound, and my knees hit the bridge.
I screamed and screamed.
My Dark Grace erupted with everything I had, everything I was.
A ring of black fire threaded with white light surged out of me, rolling across the bridge and the black water and the shore in every direction. Where it touched, things ended.
It left my people standing.
But I had nothing left.
The bridge tilted.
Someone caught me. Strong arms, hard chest, urgent, desperate voices breaking over my name.
“Max! Sweetheart!”
“Eirath!”
I knew that I was dying.
“Go! Go!”
The dark took the rest.