Page 46 of Shadow Fall: Part Two

Her lips parted on a word, but we both startled when a familiar voice screamed across the field, “It’s not him! Get out of the way! Move!”

So, so slowly I turned my face, keeping Cronus in my peripheral vision as I watched the woman racing closer, an army at her back.

My brow knotted. “Asta?”

“Move!” she screamed.

“If you are wrong—” Lili began, her voice like thunder and embers, crackling with an infinite rage.

“I’m not. Fucking move!”

I backed up quickly, my skin crawling with warning, but my feet slipped in the mud. For a horrifying moment my legs slid from under me, the sky whirling overhead, and I bit back a scream of pure terror. I couldn’t fall. I couldn’t.

I flung my hands out at my sides, scattering shades of magic. One second, I was sliding, the next moonlight shone on my skin and an arm wrapped around my waist, a solid body pressing to my back. Supporting me while I got my balance.

“I’ve got you, honey,” Wynvail said, breathless.

“Gauvan—”

“Isn’t a fighter. Kai’s got him coiled up, he’s not going anywhere.”

Asta threw up her hand as she raced closer, and I startled at the sight of a massive gun in her hand, balanced against her shoulder.

“Is that… a bazooka?” I breathed, pushing back against Wyn until he backed up, taking me with him.

Cronus laughed softly, a soft breath of amusement. He didn’t move. Didn’t fight. Didn’t attack us at all. On his other side, Lili’s mouth set in a thin line as she backed up, not taking her eyes off Cronus for a second. She visibly shook with rage, magic pounding from her halo, her hands bleeding fire.

“It’s a flamethrower,” Wyn said with the same tone as a vicious curse.

I twisted to see my other mates, my heart skipping at the vacant look on Harvey’s face and the twisted loathing on Wane’s that was somehow worse. Gauvan sat, bound in the mud, Kai’s snakes wrapped from head to toe, the one around his throat cinching tighter as I watched. He was bitten all over, blood leaking from gold skin. It was only a matter of time before he died.

Cronus had brought him back, or kept him alive, for this exact moment—to weaken my mates, to fuck with their heads.

“How do you have so much magic?” Wyn muttered, his arm tightening around me, pulling me flush to his chest. “Jesus, Haley.”

I shook with it, with the same rage that drove Lili to destruction. The pit in my stomach was almost entirely fire now, burning a hundred different jewel tones. I knew it would be like no magic I’d used before.

“Hello, asshole,” Asta purred, launching across the last few steps and discharging a stream of magic so cold it burned at Cronus. It plumed like warm breath on an icy day but moved as fast as a bullet. The temperature dropped until frost bit at my skin. “I know you can hear me; I can see you smirking. I hope you feel every moment of this.”

I frowned. Wait.

“Did she say it’s not him…?”

“Shit,” Wyn hissed, pulling me back another few steps. “He’s a fake? But where’s the real one?”

I jolted back into Wyn when the cold plume of magic hit Cronus and a wrongness filled the air, brushing through my soul. Between a breath and the next, Cronus was gone. He wasn’t unmade, and he didn’t turn to dust; the cold magic sucked the life out of him until he shrivelled and disappeared, like he’d never really existed.

“Deathfire,” Wyn whispered, shuddering. “She’s made a fucking deathfire flamethrower.”

“She’s a beauty, right?” Asta said with a sharp grin, hearing his words. There was something very unhinged about the silver-haired woman. That was what your wife getting kidnapped by a titan did to you.

“I want one,” Kai shouted from behind us, his voice strained.

I glanced back and inhaled sharply when I saw Gauvan had got himself free and had his hands wrapped around Kai’s throat. Rage poured through the pit in my gut, enflaming the last of the ashen tinder. I launched out of Wyn’s arms, cutting my dagger in a deadly slash through the air, following a deep-ingrained instinct and somehow knowing the glittering rainbow of magic would follow my command.

It tore across the space between us, moving so fast that I didn’t even blink before it drove into Gauvan’s back like a sword itself.

He staggered, but instead of crying out in pain, a low, oily laugh came from him. A familiar laugh.

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