Chapter 29
Hail
At the sight of the soldiers sprinting toward the plane’s cockpits, all I can think is, Fuck, no.
I’m not letting these assholes screw up Peri’s peacemaking efforts—even if I don’t particularly want peace with them myself. Every particle of her being vibrates with the certainty that our situation will go to hell if those jets manage to take off, regardless of what happens after.
And I trust her more than even myself.
I shoot a layer of ice across the paved ground. Time for a little slip-and-slide.
The unsuspecting soldiers skid on the suddenly slick ground. A couple fall to their hands and knees, others onto their asses. I can’t restrain an upward tick of my mouth.
Serves the pricks right.
Peri is still calling out in her persistently sweet voice, and other magical effects warble past me, but I focus on my own powers. I turn the ice as slick as I can make it. The soldiers flail around as they try to stand up.
But I can’t keep them down forever. One and then another manage to shove to their feet, stiffening their legs against the glass-smooth surface.
Fine. If what’s on the ground isn’t enough to stop them, I’ll just have to throw some obstacles into the air too.
A gust of snow and frigid wind whips from me to whirl around the soldiers. The dense fall of snowflakes obscures their vision and turns them into a blur to even my eyes.
But they keep pushing through it. The assholes are fucking stubborn, I’ll give them that much.
Why can’t they be that determined about something that’ll actually help us?
I’d blast them with even more snow, but outright freezing them would go against Peri’s insistence that we don’t hurt them—at least, not too badly. Where the hell is that brute of a basilisk shifter? Why isn’t he toppling them?
I risk a glance around in time to see Raze roaring as he focuses his attention on a horde of soldiers barging toward us from the nearby buildings. His stance rigid, he aims his gaze at one and another, knocking them unconscious before they can finish raising their massive guns.
Okay, he’s stopping our Cream Puff from being battered with bullets. I can’t say his priorities are misguided.
Mirage leaps by with a swirl of his foxy tails through the air, and the image comes back to me of the glittering illusion he created minutes ago. Inspiration lights in my head.
“Fox boy,” I holler. “Make my snow sparkle!”
The fox shifter doesn’t appear to mind being bossed around. He spins toward me and peers at the blizzard I whip up even faster around the trudging soldiers.
The snowflakes flare with a sudden intense gleam. The soldiers stumble and swing their arms as if trying to clear it, but it’s obvious they’re totally blinded now.
With wallops of wind—forceful but not bone-breaking—I shove them around on the ice they’re still standing on until they’re no longer facing the planes.
Shouts of consternation and yelps of fear bounce between them. They take a few straining steps in one direction, then in the other, squinting against the shimmering snow.
It’s perfect, until some jerk I can’t see starts hollering directions from another vantage point. “Kirkland, fifty degrees to your left then straight ahead. Alverez, you’re going the right way now, just keep at it!”
The soldiers start making progress toward the jets again. Damn it.
I grit my teeth. I need a strategy that’ll stop them in their tracks without literally freezing them in place.
With a wave of my arm, I send walls of solid ice shooting up around the soldiers. For good measure, I surround the jets too, walling them off from their prospective pilots.
That wuss of a naiad who Peri befriended, the one we always called “the Drip,” sees what I’m doing—and it turns out she’s not any more of a wuss than Peri is. Which maybe I should have expected at this point.
Setting her face with concentration, Fen extends her hands and tosses out not just drips but a whole torrent of water that rises against my walls. Catching on to her intent, I freeze the deluge as soon as it rushes into place, making my walls twice as thick.
The naiad flashes a grin at me, and a flicker of friendly warmth kindles in my chest despite all the wintery power I’m tossing around.
This is how I dreamed about my life being, isn’t it? Supporting my fellow shadowkind, working together with them to create a place in this world we’d all be happy in.
Okay, so I didn’t dream about pursuing that goal by hemming in soldiers on a military base, but it’s progress all the same.
There are shadowkind who’ll look to me for an example of what to do. Shadowkind who’ll jump to help me the second I ask. That’s all I really need to see my goals through, however exactly the safe haven I pictured comes into existence in the end.
I enjoy that sense of satisfaction for about five seconds before everything goes to hell again.
The soldier pilots have rifles too. A blare of gunfire rings out, and my icy walls start to crack.
Fuck.
Scowling, I push even more ice in to fill the cracks. Fen sloshes out more water for me to freeze, but her arms tremble as if she’s on the verge of running dry. I’m not sure she’s ever pushed her powers even this far before.
It’s not enough. More cracks spider through the glistening walls with every passing moment and every new blast. Shards start to fragment off.
Any second now, my prison will shatter completely.
Anger twists inside me, and for an instant all I can see is those razor-sharp shards whipping around in the wind and spearing the assholes straight through. Tearing them apart like the men in the woods did to my fae mentor all those years ago. Splashing blood and gristle all across the icy yard.
They’d deserve it, wouldn’t they? They want to blow up not just the rift but everything that’s come out of it, including us.
I suck in a breath, and a ball of guilt sinks in my gut like a stone.
No.
I know that isn’t the right way—not just because Peri would be upset, but because I’ve seen how hanging on to resentment ruins everything.
I almost lost her, the best thing I’ve ever had in my life, because I couldn’t see past the animosity that was eating away at me.
How much more awful will humans get if this situation devolves into a real war?
As the soldiers pummel the frozen walls, breaking off whole chunks now, I yank my gaze to the jets.
They’re the real problem. If they can’t get in the air, they can’t drop any bombs.
And no one’s going to get as upset about broken planes as they will about broken skulls.
My awareness of our environment prickles with an uneasy tremor. The materials that make up those aircraft started with natural sources, but they’ve been warped to human ends.
All the same… The fuel that fills the tank deep inside the steel-and-aluminum shell is a liquid like any other.
Every liquid has a freezing point.
My hands clench at my sides. I narrow all my attention onto the pockets of fuel I can sense in each of the jets.
I will wave after wave of cold into the planes. Sharpen the chill more and more, well past the point where water would be rock solid.
Not quite enough. Again. Again.
An ache forms behind my eyes and across the top of my head. Every inch of my frame has stiffened with the effort I’m exerting. But I’m not finished.
If I can just see this through…
Freeze. Freeze. Freeze.
My head feels as if it’s cracking right open, but I taste the moment when the fuel goes solid. The tanks crack too, unprepared for that kind of pressure at such a low temperature. The massive metal bodies groan.
More shouts are bombarding me from all sides. My head is spinning.
I open my mouth, not even sure what I’d want to say, and all that comes out is a groan.
My legs give. I sag over, anticipating the smack against the ground in a distant sort of way.
It doesn’t come. My body hits two solid arms instead.
Raze grips me, his voice turning growly as he speaks to someone—Peri? “I’ve got him! He’s still alive.”
Yes. The blare of pain in my head can confirm that, but it’s overwhelming me.
As my consciousness fades into blackness, the last thing I hear is Mirage’s wry tone roughened with a note of urgency. “Oh, look. Colonel Hubris has arrived.”