Page 57 of Shadow Fall: Part Two

I shook my head, discarding her bloody arm and panting through the pain of the arrow embedded in me. All I could smell was blood, the taste wrapped around my tongue.

Kai leapt after me with a deep hiss, swinging his hands wildly to call up a swarm of serpents so thick that their scaly bodies stroked my feathers, jostling the arrow of orange magic buried in my flesh. The ground shook beneath us, a sign of Kai’s rage. I struggled to keep my footing as magic roared over our heads, crackling with heat and burning like ice.

I was hot, the arrow’s poison spreading through me, but I let out another warning scream and snapped my beak at the next threat, and the next. Kai covered my back, the air so thick with serpents that their hissing met my ears, the first time I’d ever heard them.

I stabbed my beak into the soft flesh of someone’s stomach and leapt into the air, ripping out a long strand of intestines until the pale man dropped to the muddy field, dead. But when I landed, dizziness flared so suddenly that I nearly tipped.

“Em?” Kai demanded with palpable panic. “You okay?”

I made an affirmative noise in my chest, but the world spun, the arrow making pain throb through my whole body and—I lost my grip on my shifting magic all at once, hitting two legs so suddenly that my knees sank into the mud.

“Fuck,” Kai hissed, his viscera-splashed boots rushing into my line of sight. I couldn’t lift my head, my whole body aching, thumping with pain. So heavy. “Get up, Em. Get up.”

I tried, hauling on all my strength, but my legs bucked and sent me back to the ground.

“Who the fuck shot you?” he demanded, wrapping invisible snakes around me, their scales fever-hot against my skin even though they ought to be cold. “I’ll end them.”

Kai grabbed the arrow of fiery orange power and ripped it out with a strangled snarl of pain, tossing it to the mud where it fizzled out.

“Tali, get over here!” Kai yelled, grabbing my shoulder, keeping me from eating mud when the field wavered around me, all the battle noises becoming one big smear of sound. “I need you to carry—Tali? What are you doing?”

The note of alarm in his voice made me grit my teeth and wrench my eyelids apart, but I had no strength. I had nothing left. I could only slump onto my side in the mud when Kai was ripped away from me without warning.

His grunt of pain hit me as hard as the arrow had.

“You’re not Tali.”

I roared at myself to get up, that Kai was in danger, but my last grasp on consciousness slipped away without warning.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

WANE

Iwas in a hundred places at once, my shadows cast across the field, so many of them that I struggled to hold onto each one. I was stretching myself thin, dismantling shadow soldiers at the same time I sent my own shadows at enemy gods, scanned the field for my family, and kept myself alive.

I swarmed dark magic in a cloud across the muddy battlefield, plunging into the titan’s army until they unravelled fifty at a time. It wasn’t enough—they kept coming—but if I stopped, he would win. We’d be overwhelmed, Haley would feel our deaths, and she’d falter in the final moment.

I speared my consciousness toward the shadows that hovered near my mate, the queen, and the titan, but I flinched when his towering form sending a chill down the tendril of magic until it pierced my soul. He was so powerful I felt his brand of magic from here, and I quailed in the face of it. But Haley never did. She never stopped fighting, so I wouldn’t either.

I jumped into a stream of darkness, moving from enemy to enemy, cutting them down in swaths like Asta burned them out of existence with her deathfire flamethrower. Between us, we must have cleared this field of soldiers three times over, but they were endless. Until the titan was dead, they would keep coming back.

I speared myself across the field towards Haley and Lili, barely breathing as the queen encircled the titan in a fire that burned so hot it even made my shadows flinch back. But I pressed on, sensing a weakness in their plan, seeing the place the titan would surge to escape her fire. I shored up the gap and gritted my teeth against the flash of burns on my soul, jumping across the field to my next target.

I tore past where Cerberus battled a woman with red wings I didn’t recognise, another green-skinned god caught in one of their three heads. A god-descendant with brown curls floating around her shoulders leapt for Cerberus’s vulnerable back, a sword raised over her head aimed at their spine.

No.

I raced through shadow, skidding in the mud when I jumped out the other side, and coiled a whip of shadow around her wrist. I lashed it so tight that it bit through skin and bone and left her hand hanging by a single tendon. My ears rang with her scream, the sound cutting through me like a sword through my soul, slicing my nerves, but the noise gave Cerberus enough warning to turn and snap through their next assailant.

I let out a quick breath of relief before gathering shadows around myself again—and staggered when a bright beam of light burst around me, snatching me up so suddenly that I only had a thin veil of shadows to fight back.

I could do nothing as it ripped me away, carrying me through a river of cool silk until I stumbled, the ground unsteady under my feet. Hands caught me, steadying me, and I glared—at Wynvail. My glare turned to confusion.

“I figured you wanted your head attached to your body,” he said, his silver eyes intense in his blood-streaked face. Like mine, his dark hair was plastered to his head and his leathers shone with viscera. “That fucker was about to behead you.”

I whipped my head around to look where I’d stood behind Cerberus just seconds before and saw a behemoth with tawny skin and golden wings tipped with black staring at the empty space in front of him. His broadsword was arrested mid-stroke, the angle perfect for cleaving my head from my shoulders.

I blinked fast, trying to stay aware of my surroundings even as a brittle pain filled my chest. “You saved me. Why…?”

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