Page 4 of The Eighth Isle

My magic was getting warmer and warmer in the pit of my stomach, spreading out to the rest of my body lightning fast.

“Because ofyou,” I reminded him, even though there really was no point in arguing. It was already done. Sedelis was really going to try to take Syra’s power, and then…

What the hell would happen to us then?!

“Regardless. We need to stop?—”

A loud scream cut Valentine off and made us turn to the siren sisters again. The exit was so, so close, and a voice in my head kept whispering,too late, too late, too late.

It was too late for everything.

Syra was crying. Big tears slid down her cheeks, washing away the blood around her nose and mouth. Her hand was raised, and she’d picked upSedelis with her magic and was holding her a few feet off the ground.

Sedelis’s scream was still stuck in my head, and she was no longer chanting because she couldn’t. Her arms were stuck to her sides and her body from the neck down seemed to be completely frozen.

“You darethreaten me?” Syra said, slowly rising to her feet. “After what you did to me—youdarethreaten me?!”

“Let me go,” Sedelis spit, and she was trying so hard to break free, but she couldn’t—Syra’s magic was too strong.

Grey turned to me again, but I shook my head. We weren’t leaving until we saw what the hell happened with the sirens.

“No,” Syra whispered, shaking her head as she approached Sedelis. “Not until you pay for everything.”

“We already did!” Sedelis shouted. “We paid a thousand times over. You’ve been asleep for five hundred years, sister dearest. We’ve paid a great deal—allof us!”

That was a shock to Syra. “Fivehundred years?” she whispered.

“Yes—five hundred years is what your stupidity has cost us. Your foolishness. You ruined Ennaris, Syra. And we had to live off scraps for.Five. Centuries!”

Again, she shook her head. “No, that…that can’t be. The people?—”

“The peoplehateyou just as much as we do,” said Sedelis, and she spit. She fucking spit at Syra, but it didn’t reach even close to her feet.

Syra couldn’t have cared less. “Hateme? The people hateme?!”

“Yes, they do,” Sedelis said, groaning as she tried to free herself from the magic but couldn’t.

“Why—what have you told them? Do they know what you did?” Syra demanded. “Do the people know therealstory?” She went closer and closer to Sedelis hovering in the air, no longer crying but getting angrier by the second. “Do they know what you did?!” she shouted, and again, the very ground shook with the power of her voice. Dust and small rocks fell from the ceiling, and my magic went nuts inside me.

“Grey, we need to do something,” I whispered because this had already gotten out of hand. This had already become too much, and if we didn’t put a stop to it…

“We’re going to die,” Valentine said from my side, just as Shadow landed on his naked shoulder and wrapped his tail around his neck. “She’s going to kill her.”

“She wouldn’t kill her own s?—”

Sedelis’s scream cut me off.

It was twice as powerful as the first one, and she was fucking bleeding from her mouth and nose and eyes and ears—a horror to behold. Syra’s hair was floating around her with the raw energy of her magic as she fisted her hands, her bloodshot eyes on a screaming Sedelis.

“You tookeverythingfrom me!” she shouted at the top of her voice, and she sounded different, like a beast, like a fucking monster. “My own sisters—you took everything from me!”

She cried it out over and over again—you took everything, you took everything, you took everything—while Sedelis screamed her heart out until she was spitting out so much blood she couldn’t make another sound anymore.

“Run!” Valentine called, and Grey was already spreading his wings, his arms around my waist as he took us up in the air.

Valentine was running with Shadow on his shoulder, but my eyes were still stuck on the siren sisters, so I saw it all as if in slow motion before Grey took me off the ground. I saw the way SyrabrokeSedelis’s body in a thousand pieces, cut her off as if with a knife, and the pieces of her turned to ash within the second, piling up on the ground like she’d been burned from within by an invisible fire.

Syra fell to her knees with her shaking hands in front of her, looking at what remained of her sister—and then she turned her eyes toward us.

---