Page 22 of We Steal The Flight

“Don’t get hurt,” he mutters. “If one hair on your head is injured, you’ll have four dragons losing it to get to you. Fuck the others.” I never loved him because he is a hero; it’s because he always puts me first. He breathes me in one more time before he lets go. I watch him shift, his brilliant dragon diving off into the sea.

Black’s dragon waits patiently, his eyes locking onto mine. “Just you and me, Black.”

I walk over and climb onto his back, clinging to his scales. I whisper a spell to protect me from the water before tapping him once to let him know I’m ready. Black’s dragon roars before he dives straight into the sea. I keep my eyes closed, feeling the pressure of the water and the coldness of it spread around me. It feels like minutes, literal minutes, before we break out into the air, and his huge, powerful wings are flying high into the sky. Water drips off every bit of him as he soars in the clouds, and when he comes back down through them, the noise hits me.

It’s not silent. There’s the wind, rain, and the waves, but there are the screams of people dying in battle that take my breath away. There are the screeches of the Mindless and the whoosh of magic. There are the roars of animals and the sounds of dragons that fill the night as they breathe fire down onto the battle, lighting up the dark night.

The world seems to slow for me as I stare in horror, feeling the dark taint of death in the air. I watch as three of my mates fly straight towards the chaos bursting out of the forest. It’s hard to tell what is what down there from this distance as Black flies closer and closer. It’s so much—bursts of magic, so much fire, so much everything going on, but my dragons know. They breathe lines of fire straight across the Mindless, their screeches radiating so loudly it hurts my ears, and people cheer for them as they turn and come back.

Black flies straight towards the left side of the forest, towards the entrance to the bridge that is up between Bloodstone Academy and the cliff side. I’m not sure why they left it up. I don’t question it as Black lands on the edge of the bridge, bits of it falling off into the roaring sea.

I climb off his back and nearly trip over the body of a witch. Sickness rises in my throat as I look around and see that there are bodies everywhere, mostly shifters, some witches, and plenty of Mindless. A cry catches my attention, and I turn around. There’s a bundle of three children curled around the dead body of a wolf, crying as three Mindless come towards them. I guess the Umbral Authority don’t care about not hurting children anymore. Bastards.

“No!” I scream.

Before I’ve even done anything, Black roars, fire bursting over the top of the children’s heads, missing the children completely and burning the Mindless to smithereens. Black shifts back, standing at my side, and nods once at me.

I check on the children first, seeing they’re uninjured, before we start moving through the battlefield. No one gets close to me, and Black is relentless. Mindless and witches fall at his feet from his curse. Black takes them out like it’s nothing. Some he simply touches. Others he whispers spells at or takes out with his sword. Each time he fights, it gives me time to help someone. My bag slowly becomes emptier and emptier the more potions I give out, the more people I check on, until we’re right in the middle of the battle. The smell of smoke drifts everywhere in a gray cloud, and it’s so distracting, so overwhelming, that I barely notice the crowd of Mindless parting for someone.

Bael steps forward with a smile, his hands folded in front of him. He looks at me just for a second before he turns his eyes on Black, and I don’t have time to warn him. “BLACK!” I scream, but it is too late. With a slam of magic unlike anything I’ve ever seen, Bael throws Black straight across the battlefield, miles away from me in one go, leaving me completely alone with him and surrounded by Mindless.

I drop my bag off my back and lower my hood. “So you’re still alive.”

“I’m the only one left except for your mother, and I should thank her. I hated sharing my world with others.” He steps forward. “Did she tell you about all the shifters she dragged into that basement, kicking and screaming, to die for power? How many lives she took? You look at me as a monster when you are the child of one, Juniper.”

“Yes, she told me,” I answer, glancing around and trying to make a plan.

“It’s not exactly hard to make her a villain when she already was one. The enchantress.” He sighs. “How easy it is to enslave people when they fear someone you made look worse.” He keeps getting closer. “Did you know she was the first one to suggest using people to feed it so we could live longer, so we could have more power?”

“She told me what she did, but I don’t think stealing someone’s baby, brainwashing them, using them, and rewriting their memories over and over again to win really makes you any better. You’ve got this whole world fooled that it’s real, and it’s not. You just wanted to be rulers in charge of this world, and now there’s only one of you left. When you die, they will be free.” I lift my chin. “Finally.”

“You’re an insolent child. Every time we reworked your memories, we would hope you’d be better. You never were.” He sneers. “Choosing those beasts and love over your own kind. You could have joined us and been a force in this world I own!” he shouts. “I debated over and over why we couldn’t just kill you. Every single one of us knew, and everyone we spoke to, every witch that had any sort of prophesying power, all said the same: that your death would be our ruin, but your life would be too. There was only a small chance you would ever be on our side, so of course again and again, you chose them. The vermin.”

His power snakes across the floor like red shadows. He walks towards me; I try to take a step back only to realize that my body’s frozen. I try to speak, to do a spell, but I can’t. I panic, reaching for my mates and begging anyone to get to me. Now.

“You have no idea the power we have,” he continues. “How much it gave us to feed it in the end. Lyra, she’s not been here for many years. And you, you’re not linked to it. You can die here, and your mother will die too. This world will be mine, and I will rewrite it with those cards once more. No one will remember you.”

“No world could forget my daughter. She is the best of us all.”

A blast of green magic slams into the side of him. I look over, watching as Lyra steps out of a portal, followed by her bonded. She nods once at me, her eyes soft. “The spell is done, and it will begin at sunrise in an hour. Go save them, Juniper.”

I hear Black screaming my name across the battlefield as he runs to me, but I can’t look away, a sinking feeling entering my chest. Lyra has used all of her magic to kill two of the Umbral Authority and make spells to destroy this world. She can’t fight him.

A red sphere slams up around Lyra and Bael and her bonded. The second it does, the spell on me ends, and I gasp, falling forward onto my knees. Black falls next to me, picking me up and checking me over. “We have to go.” My eyes trace back to the sphere of magic and the fight happening inside. Lyra is going to lose. “Wini’s not far from here. I can sense her. We need to get to her and open the portal. The Mindless are weakened right now. It’s working.”

“She isn’t going to win,” I whisper, crawling closer to the sphere. With Black’s arms around my chest, I watch my mother fight, and I know I can’t help. I watch them both fight. Magic swirls around them in great, dangerous attacks, hitting them all over and over. Pure power. I watch the second she makes the choice, the second I know she won’t be walking out of this place with me. Her frantic eyes search for me, and when she finds me, she smiles. Her final spell is a simple magic, one I’ve faced myself. Death magic. The gray swirls dance out of her hands, like a song being sung at sea to lure pirates into the deep depths of the water. The death magic explodes around her until there is only gray magic and four people locked in the middle.

The magic gets to Bael first, and he screams as it slams into his body and rips him apart into dust. Lyra, my mother, turns and walks to her bonded. The three of them hold each other in a circle, as the death magic swirls around them in a dance until there is nothing but the magic.

It disappears, the sphere with it, until there is nothing but dust blowing across the field. “NO!” I scream, my magic cracking the earth around me in a pattern, and I scream until my voice is raw, feeling my tears spill into Black’s cloak as he holds me to him.

Black whispers into my ear. “I’m so sorry, Juniper. She loved you.” He pulls my face up to look at him as I sob. “I’m sorry, but we have to finish this, or so many more will die. We all need you.”

I can only nod, staring back at the place I lost the last of my family. She is gone; they are gone. Black picks me up and runs in the opposite direction, taking down anyone who tries to stop us. A dragon swoops down and lands with a crash nearby, and Vale shifts back only to grab the neck of a witch about to attack him and snap it. Vale runs to us. “What happened?”

“Lyra is dead.” I try to say it calmly, but it doesn’t work.

Vale takes me off Black. “I’m sorry, Hex. I’m really fucking sorry, but we need you to do a spell now. It can’t all be for nothing. Look around you. There are a lot of families that need saving right now.”