Page 65 of Shadow Fall: Part Two

The magic in my core thrashed like it was furious, offended. It had chosen me as its champion, a bastion of light sent down generations for a single moment—to destroy a great evil. It would not allow me to be beaten by a thing so rotten as Cronus.

I flexed my hands around my knives, gold power wrapping over my knuckles, winding up my wrists as my skin shone with marks of power. It gathered inside me, overflowing the pit, and rose through my body, suffusing every cell, pouring from my sigils in a declaration and warning.

Cronus scoffed. “Glow all you like, but you will never best someone as—”

Fuck that. I kicked off the blackened floor, slamming my wings down at the same time I hurled myself through the air, propelling myself at him with so much power that the house—the world—shook.

Cronus plucked me from the air like I was a fly, a pest. Cruel hands grabbed my wrists and squeezed so hard that golden light scattered, needles of his electric power stabbing into my skin. My wings faltered. My feet hit the floor again. I felt the ripple as he grasped my timeline, my lifeline. I couldn’t die here with his putrid breath wafting over me, his evil face the last thing I ever saw.

“What a pity,” he said with a mockery of sympathy, only cruelty in the line of his mouth, jealousy in the shine of his eyes. “The child you’re carrying would be the one to survive if only I wasn’t about to kill you.”

I sucked a sudden breath through my nose. The golden magic agreed, rushing, flowing, spilling from my body at the same time it graced my mind with knowledge. Cronus was right. The baby I carried would survive. The child of a legendary lineage, with so much power that their aether trickled into me even now.

He must die. Kill him, kill him, allow him close and kill him.

Cronus tightened his grip on my wrists, and I had to grit my teeth against a cry of pain when his threads of power cut into my skin in a winding pattern, coiling until they were like a cuff on each wrist. Shackled.

“If it were older,” he said, staring at me with blatant loathing, “I would rip that babe from your womb and raise it as my own weapon.”

Horror turned my fear to molten rage. Power poured from me, spreading across the charred ground, forming a river of gold that ringed us both. Trapping the titan inside it with me. I borrowed a trick from my scary friend and slammed my shoulder into Cronus’s chest, panting through the pain as I forced him back a step, and then two. The second his foot skidded into the river of magic, I locked him in place and ripped my wrists from his hands.

The magic carved my flesh apart, carved a scream from my lungs. I tore out every last blue thread, tears streaming down my face at the agony, my head swimming. Golden power streamed into the gaping wounds, like broken pottery repaired by kintsugi, but it did nothing for the pain that ravaged my body until every breath hitched. Blood and gold dripped down my arms to my hands, forming rivers between my knuckles, staining the pink hilts of my knives.

Cronus smirked. It was satisfying to watch the heinous expression fall off his face when he realised he was stuck, and that I was not.

Seek, seek, the magic urged, flowing faster with urgency.

I locked my jaw on a scream and clenched my daggers in bloody fists, surging across the two scant steps between us. Pain made the library blur, but the moment was here, finally here, and there was nothing that could stop me driving both my knives through his ribs and into his heart.

Cronus dropped to his knees, trapped in the river of gold, horror spilling through wicked eyes as the blue power at his fingers snuffed out. The aura of power around him seemed to die, leaving his skin dull, his eyes flat.

He didn’t drop dead, didn’t slump onto his face as his life bled from him. I nearly burst into tears.

Close, close, the magic soothed, flowing over the cuts on my arms, dragging a hiss of pain from my tongue even as it tried to heal me.

My hands throbbed, my arms so painful that I couldn’t fill my lungs with air. I staggered when I realised what I’d done—not killed him, but made him mortal.

As if it had been waiting for me to realise it, the golden power that had pooled on the floor reached for the walls, the ceiling, the bookcases, the mezzanines. It flowed through me with its own will, and I staggered at the force of it, of its sheer power—a magic formed of two dozen different magics, a power that was impossible and endless and capable of anything.

It sank into the foundations of the house until everything green became gold, until I felt the texture of silk curtains against my fingertips, saw the sparkle of sunlight on crystal from the chandeliers, smelled the soft florals in a vase in the kitchen I’d never seen. I saw it all, felt it all, was it all, and like folding a piece of paper in half, I folded the world back up and stuffed it back inside the sphere Verena had thrown.

I didn’t know how I made it happen, but magic whispered of memory passed down through family lines. My head spun with the knowledge—no, the sky spun above me, grey and lifeless.

Rise, the magic said softly, brushing against me as it soared from the pit inside me. Rise, bastion, and slay your enemy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Iwanted to lay there forever, to pass out and escape the pain that rampaged through my body like a pack of wild wolves, but I was too conscious that I lay in the middle of a battlefield and I was carrying a baby that would survive long enough to be born. So I summoned my last dregs of strength and rolled onto my front with a scream-groan combo, somehow getting my hands under me. Shoving up out of the mud was an unpleasant experience, not least because the gouges cut into my wrists erupted with agony at the movement and the whole world flashed white.

The field spread around me, an ocean of mud, blood, and bodies. There were pockets of people, but a heavy mood hung over each of them. The shadow army was gone. What the hell happened while I was inside the house…?

I stumbled forward, breaths sawing from my lungs in worrying wheezes. I scanned the living, feeling sicker with every fraught minute that passed, until I saw Emlyn’s broad back, and the slump of Harvey’s tawny wings. My mates clung to each other, Em’s lips against Harvey’s forehead as he shook.

Kai stood beside them, the shape of his spine defeated, hopeless.

No.

Dread rocked me back a step.

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