I square my shoulders. “Okay. Our first priority is keeping the creatures away from us and the other students. We don’t have to kill all the voids—Salvatore, if you can wall them off like you did with Professor Jovak, that’ll be good enough. But the more we can herd together, the less strain it’ll be on you.”
“I can handle plenty,” Salvatore insists.
I ignore his bravado and go on. “Void creatures get confused if there’s a lot of intense stimuli coming from multiple directions. Bright lights, loud sounds, even intense smells. If they’re disoriented, they won’t attack, and we can drive them in a general direction. Byron, you can help with the lights. We can all make a lot of noise. Once we see what we’re dealing with out there, try to get the other students on board too.”
Byron nods and sends a few sparks crackling between his raised hands.
Elodie scoops something off the ground. When she adjusts it in her hand, I see it’s an unusual knife—with a foot-long blade that’s oddly jagged along its cutting edge.
“Captain Ross tried to slash my neck with this,” she tells me, touching her throat where a couple of disturbing ruddy smudges remain. “I guess… it would have looked like a void creature tore into me rather than a human being. This whole mess is to cover their murder attempt.”
For a second, her shadowed face looks haunted. Then she lifts her chin and shifts the weapon into a defense pose, more than ready to tackle whatever threats we might encounter next.
More affection than I knew I had in me swells through my chest with a heavy pang.
She’s been through so much, and she’s still fighting—for herself, for us, for schoolmates I’m not sure she evenlikes.
I wish I’d known this Elodie for all that time before she stumbled into our world. That I’d been the one to befriendher and have her back through my years at Luminary, the Asher who must have known her so well and built so much history with her.
But that Asher failed. He tried to save her and ended up dying in her place.
He left her with a different kind of wound—one I see every time she looks at me, no matter how hard she tries to hide the trauma.
I can do better than that for her, can’t I?
I’m going to getallof us out of this hell alive.
A shriek breaks the air from somewhere nearby. I motion for the others to follow me.
As we hurry between the trees, Byron clears his throat softly. His voice is equally quiet. “We still want to draw out the woman who orchestrated this attack and anyone else here who’s working with her.”
Elodie’s expression tightens. “Yes. I’m still bait. We can’t make me look like too difficult a target. And be ready to put a spotlight on the attack when it comes.”
My heart squeezes at the thought of leaving her vulnerable, but that was already the plan. And she’s proven over and over that she’s the least fragile out of all of us.
I aim a smile at her that I hope is reassuring. “You can still pitch in. We’ll fan out around the creatures to confuse them and herd them together. Hang back a little more than the rest of us and keep some distance from any of the other students. Like you’re in a position where you could be picked off.”
Salvatore bares his teeth. “Just don’t actually get picked off by a void. These fucking things are all over the place.”
As if to confirm his statement, we emerge from the thicker trees onto one of the paths to find a couple of our classmates standing back-to-back, hands extended to ward off the three void animals prowling around them.
Stella Kingsley and Heath Ridley haven’t gotten throughthe onslaught of voids unscathed. Blood streaks down Stella’s gray leggings from a cut on her lower thigh, and one sleeve of Heath’s hoodie is shredded and drenched in scarlet.
The bobcat in the middle of the trio of voids is bunching its muscles to pounce.
“Shout and stomp your feet, as loud as you can,” I holler to my classmates while motioning for my companions to circle the creatures.
Elodie grabs a fallen branch and whacks it against the ground as she walks. Salvatore lets out several threatening whoops. Byron joins in with a couple of flashes of lightning on either side of the path that make Stella flinch.
He’s showing off his glim in public for the first time. Can he get any satisfaction out of the moment when it’s under circumstances like these?
I slam my own feet into the earth, keeping my sword at the ready. When the void weasel in the bunch scuttles as if to dash past us, I lunge in with a swipe of my blade.
The weapon misses, but the weasel wheels backward. Heath has started yelling at the creatures too, and Stella adds a boom of ephemera to the mix.
The bewildered creatures stumble closer together, just as I hoped.
Salvatore’s eyes narrow. I’m a little afraid he’s going to jump in and attempt to chop all their heads off rather than sticking to the safer plan, but he must have some sense to go with his bravado. He thrusts out his empty hand rather than his sword.
