I scream and unleash fire point-blank.
Her skin burns under my touch, but E tears her off me too soon in an attempt to free me. Still, her pain-filled curses are deeply satisfying as we scramble back to our feet.
Nick is panting heavily, kneeling over the body of a fallen Red. He’s hurt, shallow wounds decorating his arms and legs, one hand clamped over his stomach. A shimmering blue light hovers just above the corpse.
A soul.
The remaining Reds snarl, as though they’ve only just realized we can hurt them. The sight of the blue light makes me feel all warm inside, and I step forward out of instinct. The rain and mud under my boots are tinged scarlet, blood mixing with rainwater.
The dark pool of blood under the dead body swells, and I gawk as the crimson puddle begins to thin, dripping down the flat earth toward my feet like it’s being swallowed by my gravity.
A cold trickle of fear engulfs me. The few odd times I lost a patient on the operating table, that unbearable sinking feeling when I saw their souls rise and pretended not to notice because my colleagues couldn’t see it, those horrible moments when Istood there with my gloved hands drenched in their blood, were always followed by that same empty, hollow feeling of cold.
Exactly like this.
Riley sneers at the phenomenon. “What do you think you’re doing, witch?”
I remember the sensation before it even happens: icy claws sinking into my skin, the terrible, intimate certainty of a soul being extinguished—eaten, engulfed.
By fate?
Or by me?
The Reds fighting Nick and E turn their attention to me.
An orb of light, similar to the one E used to save me from the Mist King, blooms to life, but the shimmering shield struggles to grow, each bout of rain eroding it.
There are too many angles to cover.
Too much steel.
“You should’ve stayed in Scotland, Max,” Riley chimes.
One katana kisses my forearm.
Another stabs my shoulder.
A third drives me backward, poking my rib?—
Pain explodes.
Suddenly, I’m wreathed in crimson flames.
Ibecomethem.
Heat detonates beneath my skin, my body unraveling into fire. One moment I’m flesh and panic and pounding blood, the next I’m heat and motion.
Rain never even reaches my skin, vanishing on contact, steam exploding outward in a violent hiss as Riley’s blade swings for my knees.
The steel cleaves the shape of me apart, scattering sparks instead of blood, and for one impossible, breathless second, I am nowhere and everywhere at once.
Fire doesn’t mind being cut.
Riley gasps, her eyes wide, what’s left of her blade raining across the earth in a wave of liquid solder. The handle glows red-hot, and she shrieks, dropping it into the mud.
Smoke and fury vaporize the air as my fire engulfs her. It doesn’t burn in bursts of orange or gold, but in the richer, deeper red of fresh arterial blood. The color is so intense it burns white at its core.
My serpent flames don’t simply catch her clothes or melt patches of skin this time.
