Page 89 of Enchantment of Silver and Sea
Nya and Kieran sprinted off again.
Turns out, lifting six adult men in raging mass of water was no less taxing than generating mini mountains of solid ice, which felt very much like a “No, shit” moment for me. My vision was pulsing now with the pounding in my head. But I managed to keep up with Nya and Kieran, and in a matter of mere minutes, the two of them felled four moreEnforcers, saving one man on our side who had been knocked to the ground. His eyes were shining with tears when Nya helped him to his feet, but he didn’t waste any time in rejoining the battle, returning the favor by coming to the aid of two more people who were being overpowered byEnforcers.
Although neither of them were enjoying the task at hand, it was clear that Nya and Kieran were in their element. They were not only excellent fighters but excellent partners. She had his back, and he had hers, in the truest sense of the phrase.
I flexed my aching fingers and wrists, readying myself for when I would be needed next. We were going to make it through this. Together. There was no alternative.
The sun’s movement across the sky was the only thing that kept me from losing all concept of time. It finally drifted above thewaves, highlighting them in vibrant gold, and then the sky became a clear, cloudless blue.
Nya, Kieran, and I took a moment to pause and try to catch our breath. The air reeked of sweat, blood, and charred flesh.
“How much pain are you in?” Kieran asked, scanning me from head to toe.
I didn’t have it in me to lie this time. “A lot.”
“Turning that whole section ofEnforcersinto an iceberg must have taken a lot of magic,” Nya mused, observing the giant block of ice that glittered on the other end of the battlefield. The heads ofEnforcers—twelve at last count—poked out of the ice in various spots, their expressions a mix of absolute bafflement and frustration. If I weren’t so focused on trying to remain standing, I probably would have found the sight hilarious.
Kieran placed his hands on either side of my face, tilting my head upward and forcing me to look him in the eye. “You need to stop using magic.”
“I don’t think I have a choice but to stop, unfortunately.” My hands, wrists, arms, and shoulders raged with flaming pins and needles. I attempted to lift my hands as if to summon Larimar’s power. Not only was the movement excruciating, but that sensation that had been becoming more and more familiar, the feeling of magic welling up in me and preparing to dispel, was almost entirely gone now.
“Find somewhere to hide and rest,” Kieran ordered. Then he added softly, “Please.”
I opened my mouth to respond. As I did, an Immobilizer blast blitzed past, an inch from Kieran’s shoulder.
We all whipped around at the same time to see Zander, the barrel of his Immobilizer smoking.
I didn’t know whether to weep at the fact that he was alive and—aside from the angry gash on his head from the fight with Kieran and some dried blood crusted on his face and hands—seemingly unharmed, or weep at the fact that he had just come within an inch of killing Kieran.
“Get out of the way, Maila!” Zander was in fullEnforcermode. There was nothing warm or familiar in his voice, only the hardness of someone who was fighting for his life. Fighting for the lives of his friends and companions. Just like us.
“Zander, don’t—” My words were lost from the moment they left my mouth.
In a flash, Kieran had lunged from where he crouched next to me, and he and Zander were trading blows. Kieran knocked the Immobilizer from Zander’s grip, but my relief didn’t last long. The punches and kicks they aimed at one another, targeting vital organs, seemed almost as deadly. In the flurry of flying limbs, Kieran managed to get an arm around Zander’s neck, slamming him to the ground with enough force that I could hear the thud over the chaos around us.
But it wasn’t long before Zander had wrenched free, and the two were tumbling over one another, grappling on the ground just as they had before, but now I was watching it play out fully before my eyes.
“Good to see you again, Maila.”
That voice. My blood froze in my veins. I was no longer on a battlefield. I was on the front lawn of my house. The blurthat was Kieran and Zander faded away. TheEnforcersbattling around them were theEnforcersgathered in my front yard. The faces twisted into battle cries melted into faces twisted with grief and guilt. And there he was, close enough to touch.
Leon.
“I would say I’m surprised you’re not in your apartment where you’re supposed to be,” he said nonchalantly. As if people weren’t killing each other on either side of us. “But lying, deceiving, and sneaking around seems to be what you’re best at these days.”
Up close, his blue eyes were the same as I remembered. Unremarkable. But the pure revulsion in them, so at odds with his level tone, pierced all the way down to my very soul. I had to avert my gaze, and it was only when I did so that I noticed his hand. Tangled in Nya’s braids. Holding the barrel of an Immobilizer to her temple.
“It’s a shame that you couldn’t understand,” he continued, “that I only do what is in the best interest of Cyllene. Someone has to do what others will not. Someone has to keep us all safe.”
He wrenched Nya’s head so that she stumbled to stay upright. Her face was schooled into that calm, quiet defiance that was so familiar, I could still see it with perfect clarity when I closed my eyes. Irene’s face, at the end.
“But here’s the thing,” Leon went on, still in that easygoing voice. Like we had all the time in the world. “There’s something else that you need to understand, too. And that something is that some of us arereally fucking sickof your shit. We are sick of catering to a moody, bratty little girl just because shemightbe able to do some good for our city one day.”
My legs were trembling. In my head, I screamed for Kieran. For Zander, even. For someone. Anyone.
“You have this ability, sure. Good-the-fuck for you. But you’re never going to do anything useful with it, Maila. I’ve known you from the time you were a child. Even then, your parents catered to you. Irene catered to you. What a spoiled little thing you were!” He laughed, and the sound was like metal crunching. “I tried to tell the rest of The Council that if we were going to waste any of our valuable time on you, we needed to do it early. Work with you, train you, figure out what you were capable of. See if there was even any hope for you, or if we just needed to cut our losses and forget your fucked-up family ever existed in Cyllene. Even you would agree that makes sense, right? More sense than letting the years go by, with you doing whatever useless shit it is you do with Cato in that library?”
There was a pause.
