Page 87 of Gods' Battleground

“I know you’re mad,” I said. “And scared. We all are. But I need you to stay over here.”

Sierra looked at me, at all the soldiers in the room, then back at me again. “No safer here than over there,” she declared.

Gods, she really was my daughter.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “It’s not really safe anywhere.”

Not as long as Mordon and his army of evil were after her.

Seriously, when would everyone in the universe stop coming after my daughter!

“It’s ok, Mommy.” Sierra wiped the tear from my cheek. “We beat their butts together,” she said solemnly.

I sobbed out a snort.Beat their butts. I loved it. And I knew I’d enjoy beating their butts even more than I would kicking their asses.

Sierra and I rushed forward, punching through the soldiers standing between us and Nero. Another four soldiers darted in from each side, trying to grab Sierra, but my daughter was scrappy. She blinded them with an explosion of fireworks, right in their faces.

“So very good,” Mordon said, practically salivating. He looked at her like she was a shiny new race car that he just couldn’t wait to drive.

Then his gaze snapped to Nero. Nero dropped to his knees, buried under the weight of Vertigo’s vertigo. The spell held him tightly, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing the sense out of him. Nero blinked, struggling to focus. Struggling to breathe. He braced his hands against the ground, pushing, fighting to keep his head up.

Sierra saw it too. Like an angry cat, she threw herself at Mordon, knocking him off his feet. That interrupted the spell. Mordon tried to recover, tried to grab Sierra, but she shot off, powered by her buzzing wings. They were moving so fast that they were a blur.

One of the soldiers caught Sierra in a net, but she teleported right out of it. Then she turned to face the army charging toward her.

I moved to intercept them, but before I could, Sierra used a psychic blast to drop a chunk of the ceiling on top of them.

Mordon gaped at her, at the same time both excited and terrified. He motioned for the next wave of soldiers to charge.

Nero slid in next to Sierra and, swooping her up into his arms again, said, “What do you say we try that again, together this time?” He pointed at the ceiling.

Sierra let out an adorably manic cackle that echoed across the chamber like a swarm of fluttering butterflies and blossoms caught in the wind.

“On three,” Nero said. “One, two…”

“Three!” Sierra declared with glee.

There was a loud crack, like a glacier breaking off from the main ice mass, then the whole ceiling dropped.

Nero grabbed me. Then, with me on one side and Sierra on the other, he teleported us the hell out of there. The last thing I heard was an explosion of stone before the clamor was swallowed up by the silence.

The three of us teleported into Midnight Castle’s throne room, dragging an unhealthy cloud of dust and gravel along with us. Cadence was there. She looked up from the boxes of books we’d liberated from the Vault, her gaze panning across the river of tiny stones that now coated the throne room’s floor.

She hurried toward us, asking, “What happened?”

I coughed, trying to clear the dust from my throat. “The Guardians happened.”

“We bury them!” Sierra added, grinning.

“You buried them?” Cadence asked.

“Yes, under a mountain of stone,” I told her.

“They gone?” Sierra asked.

I sighed. “I doubt it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that the Guardians don’t stay buried. They always find a way out. If we want to stop them for good, we’re going to have to use something a lot stronger than a mountain to do it.”

Nero held tightly to Sierra, his eyes burning with emerald fire. He looked like he was ready to murder every last Guardian in the universe, right here and now.

---