Page 156 of The Eighth Isle

But Reeva didn’t. The dragons didn’t. The others were still fighting Raxae while her sisters took the longest time to make it back to their feet.

While her sisters looked at me and smiled.

Something was most definitely wrong, and it was too late to stop it now. Too late to hold back, to call out. And God, it hurt so much it was breaking me from the inside.

I could very well be dying.

When I began to choke on thin air, my body convulsed like I was having a seizure, worse than Shadow and Valentine were doing. My own eyes rolled in my skull and everything went dark so suddenly, I didn’t even feel if I fell or if I stayed on my knees. I didn’t know if Reeva had finished chanting, if the dragons were still spitting fire, or if the others were still fighting.

I saw nothing.

My mind shut down completely.

The pain was fading away.

I floated in darkness for what felt like a long time together with it, but eventually, I felt the pain retreating, leaving me in a rush.

As it did, my body became lighter. My lids, too. When I tried to pull them open, I could.

Light.

Sound came back to me at the same time, rendering me deaf for a moment. My ears whistled and my body was able to move again, and I was trying to sit up on instinct, to take in my surroundings.

I did.

Valentine was on his hands and knees, coughing, and Shadow was barely breathing on the ground. Reeva was there, too, kneeling with that box in her hands, pale skin covered in sweat, nose bleeding, eyes hollow like she was a goddamn skeleton.

She was breathing heavily, those dark, lifeless eyes on me. “We need to get to the castle—now.”

The spell had worked.

“Am I…is it…” I touched my stomach, not really able to produce more words, and Reeva nodded.

“The magic is in here. The Ruit and my spell worked, but we need to take it to safety before it’s too late.”

I hung onto her words with all my being because what she said meant…

It meant that I was free.

The whole world could have been mine in that second. I hadn’t even realized how much of a toll all of this madness had taken on me, but suddenly I felt reborn. I was breathing. I was really free.

Sadly, it was very,veryshort-lived, that freedom.

Because the next moment, the laughter began.

Reeva was on her feet, holding onto the tree roots, and I was still trying to fill my lungs with air when the sirens began to laugh. Valentine held Shadow to his chest because the little dragon was barely keeping his eyes open, completely spent. They looked just as confused as I was for a moment—why the hell are they laughing?!

Then the sirens moved.

It was more painful to see the next minute unravel before my eyes than it had been to go through that spell that had left me shaking. The sirens let out twice as much magic in the air with such ease, and they basicallythrewthe two large dragons flying over us to the sides, right into the woods. The ground shook when they hit it with heart-wrenching roars that lasted but a minute.

The dragons didn’t rise in the air again.

Then the sirens turned to the others, too. Grey and Mama Si and Amika. Their magic hit them, taking them all down at the same time.

A scream ripped from my throat and I took off running—but Valentine grabbed me by the arm and stopped me. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t get closer, wait…”

The Sirens dusted off their naked bodies, smiling ear to ear.

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