Chapter 53
53
Sonny
I step closer to him and his shadows snake back around my legs, twirling upward until I’m fully engulfed in their onyx mist. We move unseen past people lashing out their gifts, resisting the urge to help those who are struggling.
I have to keep my attention on them. If I can somehow take the leaders down, the Midnight Syndicate will have nothing else to fight for.
We get within fifteen feet of where they stand, and Raze strengthens his illusion around me until I’m likely nothing more than smoke and shadows.
“Start with the small one, Angelica. She’s a Luminara,” he suggests into my mind, and I instantly find the figure he’s speaking of. Her slim shoulders can hardly hold the cloak up and it pools at her feet. She should be easy to take down. This must be why Raze suggested starting with her.
As if she senses me staring, her darkened eyes land right in the spot we’re standing.
In the blink of an eye, she vanishes into the gloom, attempting to strike me from unseen angles. Bouncing between beams of burning light and razor-sharp shadows fly past my face like bullets, I utilize every ounce of training that Griffin put me through to dodge hits and anticipate my opponent’s next move. With so much defending, there’s almost no time for me to counter with my own gifts. The other Supremes have likely caught on that I’m near, and it’s only a matter of time before they begin concentrating their nefarious powers on me too.
But with Raze’s help, we manage to pull the Luminara into some in-between place where there is no light, no shadow—only a void.
Stripped of her power, she thrashes in the nothingness, screaming for light, for dark. For anything. Her eyes are focused on me, a wild expression filled with hate and resentment distorting her face. Once she realizes her gifts don’t work wherever we are, she resorts to a physical attack. Just as she comes flying at me with fists raised, Raze reaches forward from behind and jams his blade inside her neck, instantly killing her.
He looks to me for confirmation that I’m still in one piece, then drops us back onto the streets of Nocturne Valley.
I’m nearly taken out by a towering wave of stone and fire from my left, where one of the men who dragged me down to my cell stands, his face contorted from the effort. Raze screams the warning into my mind, and my instincts take over. I counter the Primaris’s move by manipulating the wind to slice through the inferno. Then, I call on a surge of water from the creek in the woods to harden the misplaced lava into jagged spikes. The terrain shifts beneath us as I siphon his own power and use it against him.
As he lunges toward me, I wrench control of the very earth he stands on, swallowing him whole into a sudden sinkhole, his screams lost in the shifting rock.
Before I can even catch my breath, I feel someone clawing at my mental shields. I turn to see who is doing it, surprised to find a pot-bellied man staring back at me with a cruel smile playing across his face. He bangs and thrashes against my mental door until it breaks apart at the seams, and then a flood of visions fills my psyche.
Images of Poppy being killed, Raze murdering people with his bare hands, and parents’ bloody corpses lying on the ground fly past in rapid succession. I nearly fall prey to the devastation of it, my chest twisting in pain. But then I feel a second presence in my mind—a gentler, onyx thread that guides me back.
Before the man can muscle his way back in, I reverse the effect—sending his mind spiraling into his worst nightmares until his psyche shatters. With a final psychic push, I force his mind to collapse in on itself, leaving him an empty shell lying on the ground.
Another man steps toward us just as the last one collapses, and James falls into step beside him. Raze is nowhere to be seen—likely shrouded in shadows so neither man can see before he attacks them. The two circle me with sinister smiles warping their faces. I refuse to take my eyes off either one. My head aches already, my muscles fatigued, but I’m coiled like a snake, ready to fight.
The first hit comes from James—a blast of his fist against my jaw that has my head flying backward at an unnatural angle. I step forward to counter, only to find myself back in the same spot I had just been. I try again, my chest heating with rage as the nameless man releases a laugh, and I realize what he is.
An Aeternum manipulating time.
Every attempt I make to attack them is rewound, undone before it even lands. My frustration grows as I swing over and over, my fist finding nothing but empty air until it all bubbles over with a loud scream.
“Fight me, you cowards,” I roar into their faces, but they only smile.
I see multiple versions of the Aeternum at once as he manipulates time to attack from different points in his own past and future. James looks on with a giddy expression, waiting on the sidelines for his friend to allow him to make his next blow.
A blur of blonde rushes past me, intercepting one version of the Aeternum before he can land a hit on me. He stumbles back, surprised to see Divina standing before him, her expression twisted in pure loathing.
It’s enough of a distraction for me to realize that instead of fighting time, I need to start controlling it myself.
I seize control of his very lifeline, forcing him into an endless loop of his last breath. Over and over, he watches himself die, but never fully fades. Trapped in eternity, he screams, but no one hears.
Raze has snuck up behind James and wrapped his arm around his neck, his face scrunched with effort as he squeezes with all his might. I step forward and swing a right hook, my fist landing against his cheek bone as payback for my sore, swollen jaw.
But James’s smile only grows wider as he maneuvers out of Raze’s death grip. He shrugs off every attack, his body absorbing impacts and redirecting them with explosive force.
I punch and kick and stomp, but no weapon, no strike, no magic seems to break him. I’m ready to give up, my body nearly depleted from the constant physical effort. I have to pause to catch my breath, drawing on the wisdom of my ancestors to help me find a way out of this while Raze continues the useless efforts.
And then it hits me.
He absorbs energy. So, what happens when I overload him?
I stand back and take a deep breath. Raze looks over at me, a question in his eyes as I raise my arm and channel everything—every ounce of kinetic force, every raw element, every temporal shift—into a single strike. And to my utter shock, the sheer, uncontainable energy makes him implode from within. For the first time, he cannot contain what he has taken. His body detonates before my eyes, a final, near-earth-shattering boom marking his end.
Raze leaps in front of my chest to shield me from impact, but I’ve already got a large, protective bubble wrapped around our kneeling bodies where time slows and all the gore passes by without touching us. We wait beneath it, still as stone, until the last drop of James’s blood falls to the ground. Only then do I remove the bubble.
I look to the right and find another body lying on the ground a few feet away, the face wrinkled and unrecognizable and covered in James.
“Viridian,” he explains, out of breath when I shoot him a confused look. “Fucker healed every strike I made against her. It took way too long for me to realize I could warp her mind until she accelerated her healing right to death.”
Damn. So that’s where he disappeared off to.
“It’s too quiet,” I mutter, turning my head to try to listen for the next Supreme. My ear drums must be completely blown out, because I can’t even hear the sounds of struggle coming from the rest of the rebellion. Power thrums against my veins, energy desperate to be released.
Aunt Divina sits up from her spot on the ground a few feet away, her face covered in a splattering of blood.
“Where is the next one?” I ask Raze, flexing my fingers. I’m a little irritated that they haven’t shown themselves already.
“That’s all six,” he explains slowly, standing to his full height.
I frown. That can’t be right. There was the Luminara, then the Primaris...I think the Valerian jumped in after that...
Raze grabs my elbow to stop me, tugging me into a standing position. With his arms wrapped tightly around my shoulders, he lowers his lips until they’re directly against my ear.
“That was all of them,” he assures. “Take a look at what you’ve done.”
Pulling away, he tilts his head toward the town’s square, where everyone has gone still to look in our direction. They gawk at us with widened eyes, weapons still poised in their hands as if they were just about to strike the person standing next to them before James exploded.
All six Supremes are dead. The Midnight Syndicate is leaderless—their strongholds abandoned, their influence erased.
“What does this mean?” I ask Raze, my voice barely above a whisper.
“It means that we’ve won. The war is over.”