Page 48 of Shadow Fall: Part Two

“Do you have a halo that shows you what will happen should you join your mate?”

I didn’t bother replying.

“Join us and you will die. I can see it right now.”

“How?” Haley demanded, the magic lashing higher from her dagger.

“It’s a vision of silver that overlaps everything happening right now. I can see what will happen.”

“So you know if we’ll kill him,” Emlyn asked, hope entering his voice for the first time all day.

“Something will happen in an hour or so,” Lili said with a frown that sent a zip of warning down my spine. “It will block my halo, stop me from seeing whether he lives or dies. But if we keep standing here, I guarantee he will kill us.”

Haley nodded decisively. I flexed my hand on her back and wanted to scream. We’d just lost Kaida and here we were marching into another doomed battle, risking losing another baby.

“My rose,” I started, but I swallowed the words when she turned to me. The pain in her eyes knocked the breath from my lungs. She knew everything I would say and was struggling through the same pain herself. Worse, because while I loved Kaida and would do anything to get her back… Haley had carried her, given birth to her.

I pulled my mate into my arms and brushed a too-brief kiss to her lips. We would die down there. I think we both knew, all knew. It was better to be alive, even paranoid every second of the day, but Haley wouldn’t live like that, and I refused to live without her.

Into the doomed battle we went.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

HALWEN

I’d seen enough Scooby Doo episodes while on Earth to know splitting up was never a good idea, but Lili wouldn’t accept anything else. And honestly, we were so outnumbered and outmanned that I’d take any advantage no matter how slim. If Lili said she had a magic halo that helped her see the future, I was all for it.

I was less enthusiastic about the two of us taking on Cronus by ourselves while everyone else plunged into the heart of the shadow army and Asta burned a clear path for us right to the titan.

I swallowed, a tremor moving my whole body.

“He’s still weak,” Lili reminded me in her Scary Queen Voice. “You can kill him. Remember your prophecy.”

The prophecy was the bane of my damn existence. All I’d wanted was a simple life, but no. I had to be the fucking chosen one.

“I am not dying here,” I said to myself, to the universe, to anyone listening.

Lili glanced at me as we walked through the eerily empty path Asta cleared, the silver-haired woman grinning with bared teeth as she burned the shadow soldiers to nothing, sucking the magic out of them as easily as she’d drained the life from the fake Cronus and Gauvan Locke.

“Can you imbue any blade with that magic?” Lili’s eyes flicked down to my pink-hilted dagger, now flickering with coral and midnight and blood-red power.

“Not a clue,” I replied, my attention drifting across the field to where my mates and our remaining allies fought their way through Cronus’s shadow ranks. They certainly didn’t fight like scraps of darkness; they were as real and tangible as any of Wane’s shadows. I searched until I found every one of my mates, making sure they weren’t the ones who roared in pain and anger, whose blood had already begun to spill.

“Find out,” Lili said in what could only be described as an order. It was impossible to forget that she was my reigning queen right now, that she had the power to command me no matter whose legendary blood ran in my veins. I was a demon first, and I obeyed my queen. Even if she was acting strange enough to make me shudder. “Blind him.”

A ripple of cold went down my spine like a premonition. I had the out-of-body sense that I was in one of the old myths, one of the stories Dad used to tell me about clever mortals and wicked gods. Blind him.

An animal yelp came from the swarm of shadow soldiers, and I whipped my head around, searching, searching.

“Concentrate,” Lili snapped, and then visibly composed herself. “Sorry. I’ve lost—we need to concentrate on Cronus. If we don’t, all of this has been for nothing. He might die for nothing.”

Fuck being scared of her otherness. I reached for a non-fiery part of her arm and squeezed. “We’ll make it count. We’ll make him pay.”

I wasn’t the only woman whose loved ones had suffered, who suffered right with them. Take the halo and the inferno magic away, and Lili was just a woman in pain. Cronus had caused enough of that—pain. Enough for countless lifetimes. Anger caught fire in the pit of my magic, and I let it burn as I released Lili, tilting my head back when the cold brush of a shadow fell over us. Not Wane’s shadow or even Cronus’s soldiers—his true, actual shadow cast over the grassy field where he stood, looming, waiting. Like he had in Olympus, because he was arrogant and didn’t even contemplate that he might lose.

Blind him, I reminded myself, and drew a throwing star from the numerous straps and belts on my body, each bearing a weapon sharp enough to kill an ordinary man. Cronus wasn’t ordinary, but he was living, and all living things could die.

I threw a rapid glance at the bulk of the army, searching for Persephone, for Hades. Gods with dominion over the dead. We could do it, all of us together. Losing was unthinkable.

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