“Over here! Help! Please!”
Mimicking Peak, Domenic raised Valmordion higher and sped toward the voice. He found a trio of magicians behind a utility vehicle. One slumped against the corrugated steel wall, wheezing—magical frostmaul crusted scarlet and crystalline over half her face. Another knelt beside her, his training wand quivering in his hand. The third was dead.
Dimly, Domenic’s vision tinted red as he took in the body, and that scared him even more than the corpse did. That after all the agony of remaking himself into someone stronger, someone better, there was no version of Domenic Barrow that wasn’t a little bit broken.
“It’s you,” the magician gasped. “Thank everything. I thought I’d lose her, too.”
“We won’t,” Domenic assured him, then withheld a cringe. He sounded comical.
But the man only slackened with relief and scrambled out of the way so Domenic could crouch beside the wounded magician.
She reached for him, and Domenic clasped her blood-slicked fingers. His stomach turned in aversion, though he thought he hid it well.
Immediately, she stopped shuddering. “You’re so warm.”
“In a minute, you will be, too,” he promised, training Valmordion on the creeping frostmaul. His hand trembled. Frostmaul this advanced would consume her in minutes. And healing required an uncompromising attention to detail that had always been Hanna’s forte, never his. Yet gradually, thefrostmaul melted, its sanguine water oozing down her neck and soaking into her scarf.
“Thank you.Thank you,” the man sputtered, leaning so close over Domenic’s shoulder that Domenic could smell the staleness of his breath. “The two of us came in here to hide”—he nodded at the corpse—“but when I went back to carry Manning inside, he was already…” He bit down on his fist, shaking.
“She’s going to be fine, thanks to you,” Domenic told him. Instantly, the fear on the man’s face snuffed out, replaced by hope. And even if Domenic swore he was only wearing a costume, that hope felt almost real.
After Domenic finished healing the frostmauled magician, he led them to the edge of the compound, where an NDC team ushered others out of the gate. At his approach, the commanding officer rushed toward him. The man’s jacket was spangled with medals earned in more winters than Domenic had seen in his entire life, yet he saluted him without hesitation.
“How many are left to evac?” Domenic shouted over the wind.
“The east side of the compound has been cleared. But the west…” The officer nodded dismally toward the lightning and explosions flashing through the obscurity, warning of some horror that awaited in the unknown. “We know Thundersnow took out at least half a dozen buildings. But that’s the last we heard. Our recon unit still hasn’t returned.”
“Then I’ll bring them back,” Domenic vowed immediately.
The officer smiled—he didn’t catch his falseness either.
As Domenic sprinted across the compound, he swore he was in a dream, a nightmare. It wasn’t the light ofhismagic that lanced through the darkness. It wasn’thishands that tore and bled as they sifted through rubble. It wasn’thisvoice that urged other magicians away so he could battle winterghasts alone.
It couldn’t be.
Their shoulders shook as they hugged him; their hair got inhis mouth, their blood smeared on his shirt. Many of them wept, in grief, in relief, in horror, in so many emotions that Domenic felt smoldering in them, like every tear was kerosene and he was ablaze. His hands burned from the grasp of desperate fingers. He bled where nails had stabbed into his skin. Once he swore he saved a man who’d already gone, had forced the air to return to his lungs and heard him choke back in his final breath. And it terrified him, how deeply their hope burrowed beside his own. He couldn’t bear to be made a fool.
But it felt fucking real. The costume, the act—all of it did.
After scouring the final barracks and determining it empty, Domenic allowed himself a single moment to lean against a warehouse wall. Until a sudden, familiar warmth pressed against him, and Domenic threw up a noise muffling enchantment a second before thunder detonated directly overhead.
Then Kythion’s antlered head reared over the warehouse, impossibly, grotesquely huge. Domenic clambered back, and his sight locked on a smaller shape atop the roof—Peak.
Peak aimed, and a torrent of flames spewed out of Targath toward the whirling ice of Kythion’s form. On impact, fire and lightning erupted across the sky, so powerful that every window of the warehouse shattered.
Valiant,Domenic decided. Then he shook off his exhaustion and sprinted for the eye of the storm.
The darkness embraced him, abrasive like a shroud of burlap, so dense he couldn’t breathe through his mouth without gagging. Blades of frost sliced his skin, and even as Domenic healed each scrape, leftover blood coated his hand and marbled Valmordion in crimson. He stopped twice: once to catch his breath and once to slay a ghast that lurked amidst a decimated vehicle, a corpse still dangling through the windshield where a pincer had skewered him through the glass.
When at last Domenic found the storm’s whirling center, he didn’t pause to despair at the immensity of it—far vaster eventhan the category five in Oldermere. He hurled himself within and broke through staggering and gasping. And for the second time, he found Ellery Caldwell at the base of an alban tree.
The scurge raged around them, ribbons of incandescence twisting through the blackness.
“Dom,” she choked. “Help me.”
Domenic had expected to find her trying to quell the storm from within. Instead, she pointed Iskarius at the tree, clutching the wand with two hands. The color of the leaves bled out, gold fading into brown then gray, as if in death. But no, not death—Winter. Just as the leaves tore from their branches, a frost replaced them, glittering and ominous, seeping over the canopy and down to the roots.
“No,” he rasped, as the pieces locked together. The hundreds of ghasts, Kythion showing itself…Thiswas the monsters’ true goal. Domenic and Ellery had come to the border to reclaim the fallen territory, but as it turned out, the invasion the prophecy spoke of had beenWinter’s—and it was succeeding.
