She smiles, shadows crawling up her arms. Not that they’re actually shadows. They’re dark voids of magic. Simply being around Hazel is worse than any obsidian. She moves her hands, and her magic dances around them.
With the swiftness of a viper strike, she sends one darting for me, and it nips at the wall of my magic.
“We’ve done this dance before, Hazel,” I remind her. “You lost then, and you’ll lose now.”
I weave a bolt of aether for her, but she catches it with a shadowy maw, drinking it down.
“We were on better terms then. You weren’t trying to kill my brother.” Her eyes narrow.
“You approve of his plan to destroy the realm? Even you aren’t that evil.”
She grins, but there’s nothing friendly about it. Dark wings sprout from her back, dripping with death. Not her true wings, but an illusion of them. A wave of emptiness she slings at me.
I barely manage to deflect the attack, while she catches a few of her own guards on accident. They stumble to the ground, choking on their magic. Sparks foam at their mouths as their eyes bulge from their heads.
She’s gotten stronger.
Like she can read my thoughts, her expression hardens. “I can make it painless, Wilder. One blink, and you’ll be gone.”
“I could do the same.”
“But you won’t,” she points out. “Do you know what the dead whisper? What’s come of the Collision? Of the death of the Arch to Sarrow?”
She circles, not taking her eyes off me.
I never knew she could hear the dead, but that’s unsettling. “What do they whisper?”
“That it’s closed even in the spirit plane.” Her voice drops to nearly a whisper. “Even souls can’t enter. They hang around us, consuming the very magic we scrabble for. They drink as much as the Well, until they go mad like—” She holds up her hand, watching the shadows curl between her fingers. “Many things are escapable, but death is not. Then or now. And staying here, in thisstate, will not end well for any of us. Malachi will save us from that fate.”
“By destroying everything.”
“To make is to unmake something else.”
My fingers tense as I wrangle the magical barrier between us. “And what has he promised to remake for you, Hazel? A prison of obsidian that he’ll lock you away in like he does now?”
“No.” She shakes her head, her voice cold and low. “He will not remake me at all. If I help him, he’ll let me go from existence. No After. No risk of reincarnation or these shadows swallowing me whole. He will unmake me entirely.”
Her voice is peaceful. She’s resigned to her fate. Worse, she wants it, and I can’t help thinking it is part of Malachi’s continued manipulation.
“Fae shouldn’t play gods,” I say, weaving my magic around her, looking for a striking point but not finding one.
“That’s easy to say when you wield the ability of one.” Her shadows strike back with every attack, big or small. “You cannot win, Wilder. Not when you fight for so many.”
“I don’t need to win; I just need to get past you.” I can fall in this battle so long as I can get to Malachi first. So long as Elorie lives, my fate is inconsequential. “Nothing you do will stop me.”
“Really, nothing?” Hazel’s eyebrow tics, and her gaze darts behind me.
Her magic weaves in and out of the Guard. Malachi’s army grows as more guards spill from the palace, flooding the courtyard and trapping us. Elorie is tangled in a mess trying to fight beside Greer and Callum, and they are barely making progress. A shadow forms at the back of the line, near the archers, and I watch as Hazel reforms—a mirror of herself that whispers in a guard’s ear. Her darkness caresses over him, and his attention turns to Elorie.
The archer pulls back on his bow, ready to strike, and Hazel steps back, grinning.
Elorie doesn’t even see it coming. The silver spear pummels through the air. And I abandon everything to get to her.
Moving faster than thought, I cut through the crowd. I leave Malachi to his rambling and abandon my battle with Hazel. Nothing matters except reaching Elorie in time, just like in that prison. Or on the beach. Everything circles back to her.
I grab her by the hands and spin her until I’m between her and the arrow, and we’re moving in slow motion as her hair hangs suspended around her shoulders. Her scream rips through the fabric of the fates as the arrow pierces my back, spearing straight through me.
We’re back where we started.
