Page 153 of The Eighth Isle

“You…you c?—”

“Stop it,” I said, pushing his overgrown hair from his face. “Save your energy. Let my blood heal you.”

It was already doing it—his eyes weren’t swollen anymore, and that bruise on the left side of his jaw was completely healed. The tears on his arms and torso were nothing but red marks.

“You came back for me,” Valentine said. “You came back for me again, Sunshine.” And the asshole was trying to smile.

“Shut up!” I urged him. “Just shut up and save your energy. You need to heal, Valentine. Don’t speak.”

He was smiling still when he closed his eyes and rested his head on the rock because he knew I was right. The faster he healed, the sooner we could get this over with, and he seemed okay already. So, I turned to the sirens again, not letting go of Valentine, and watched while they spoke to Grey.

“…no idea what to do with it. It’s more power than you could have ever imagined,” Raxae was saying.

“We have means to contain it,” Grey insisted, slowly coming closer to us.

“Don’t be ridiculous—it cannot becontained!” Raxae insisted, like the word had offended her.

“You have to understand, Grey, that wehaveto make sure that magic is gone. To do that, we have to kill Fall—there’s no other way,” said Andya, making my stomach twist a million ways.

Valentine’s hand wrapped around my ankle, but I didn’t even look down at him—only Grey.

Grey, who had his hands in fists and was clenching his jaws so hard his teeth could break, but when he spoke, his voice was perfectly calm.

“No. That’s not an option.” The way he mastered his emotions was to be envied.

“Then we have no choice but—” Andya started, but Raxae cut her off.

“Actually, there is another way,” she said, waving her finger at us as she paced around her sisters, eyes on the ground. “If Fall was to surrender that power to us, we would be able to destroy it so that Syra may never rise again.” She stopped. Smiled. “It could all go very smoothly if we come to an agreement.” Her eyes met mine. “If you willingly give that magic to us, we can make it painless. You and your baby don’t have to die.”

Ice-cold chills ran down my back. I felt it—the feeling and the magic that was coming at me, foreign magic that I knew, but I was so focused on the sirens that it took me a second to recognize it was coming from Mama Si.

That calming magic of hers wrapped about me like a cloak. She was telling me that she was there. They all were, and if the sirens knew it, they weren’t reacting.

I forced myself to smile even though on the inside I was screaming. And I told Raxae, “Never.”

“Are you sure? You would rather die and kill your unborn baby?” Andya said, stepping in front of her sister.

“Every single time.” I would rather die than give these creaturesmorepower to fuck things over the way they had for the past five hundred years.

“Very well,” Andya said, turning to the others. “We tried the nice way. Now…”

Grey stepped to my side, right in front of Valentine’s feet. I wanted to reach out for him as tears pricked the back of my eyes, but I couldn’t. Because Grey would be fighting the sirens now. He and the others would keep them distracted, while Reeva, Valentine, and I did what we had to do to end this thing once and for all.

Fuck, it was so hard to breathe.

This is what we came for,I tried to tell myself.This is the right thing to do!

Except it felt very, very wrong.

“Now, we try the hard way.”

The voice of the siren echoed in my head. They all raised their hands at us at the same time, smiling still.

And in the next ten minutes, everything changed.

Thirty-Two

The sirens attacked.Their magic made the air thick and came at us like scorching heat from the sun.

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