Page 34 of Fallen Star

Riven’s spinning, his sword flashing, sending three of their heads flying at once. Muddy water spurts out from their open necks, and they disintegrate into puddles on the ground.

Sapphire screams as one of them claws at her, but she stabs it in the head with her dagger before it can grab her.

Ghost and I work in sync, like we’ve been fighting together for years instead of hours. When he lunges, I strike. When he dodges, I duck.

I’m not useless.

I can do this.

Sapphire’s now pelting four of them with small rocks, muddy water spraying from the holes in their bodies as they drain out.

“They keep coming!” she shouts, not letting up.

“We need to—” Riven’s warning cuts off as a particularly large nixie bursts from the pool, sending a wave crashing over us that floods my mouth and my nose, making it impossible to breathe.

Terror squeezes my chest, and I sheathe my dagger, grabbing Ghost’s fur.

I have to hold on.

His growl rumbles through his body, fierce and protective.

But the water strikes again, harder this time, a wall of ice and fury that steals the air from my lungs.

My fingers slip.

“No!” I cry out as a slimy, skeletal hand wraps around my wrist, yanking me off Ghost’s back with so much force that my shoulder pops.

I kick and scream as it pulls me close, leveling its slimy, rotted, algae-covered face with mine.

Bile rises in my throat.

If vomit is able to kill this thing, then I’m about to slay it better than I ever could with my dagger.

I don’t get a chance. Because it snarls and hurls me over the edge of the waterfall—as if I’m a rotten apple it picked from a tree—and I’m soaring, screaming, my stomach lurching as the world twists around me in a blur of stars, water, and jagged cliffs.

Then, I’m plunging downward.

I need to grab something. Anything.

But there’s only open air and the endless, violent roar of the rushing water.

Time stills and speeds up all at once.

“Zoey!” Sapphire screams, but her voice is drowned out as I crash into the pool at the bottom of the falls.

Cold seeps into my bones as the current pulls me under, spinning me in every direction as I kick and thrash, my chest burning as my lungs beg for air.

Move!I scream at myself.Do something!

But I don’t know how to move.

I don’t know how toswim.

Every muscle locks up, memories of that icy lake when I was a kid flooding back. The way the cold shocked my system, how the darkness swallowed me whole, the absolute certainty that I was going to die.

Back then, Sapphire had pulled me out, her arms shaking as she saved my life.

But she’s not here now.

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