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My vigate.
He flashed in and out of existence like a dark, winking star, his blade twirling and flashing with utter ease. Elite after elite fell at his feet until slain bodies littered the floor—none of them ours.
“Any of you Wild Whisperers want to say hello to your friends?”
Terrin appeared before me with a grin, eyes shifting to Dazmine. Both she and Emelle had stayed pinned to either side of me like bodyguards, Mitzi and Norman and all the others from my sector lingering behind me. In this prison, there weren’t any plants or animals besides the ones Agathea had brought with her and Rodhi’s spiders. No way for us to use that magic unless…
“Yes,” Dazmine practically hissed.
Terrin thrust a molten jet of fire, not toward any of the elites, but toward the walls surrounding us. Where it hit, metal sizzled and liquefied like the ore in Fabian and Don’s forge, melting away to reveal huge chunks of the night sky.
“Top of the world!” screeched the spiders.
It might as well have been. Stars cleaved through a soft haze of clouds, the moon hanging like a sickle ready to fall at any moment.
The best part was the silhouette of resurrected trees beneath it all. Trees that had been just as stifled and trapped as all the other prisoners here.
They sang out a cry of freedom. Of vengeance.
And when we Wild Whisperers sang back, humming and clicking in intervals, they bowed toward us. While their branches weren’t long enough to reach anyone in here, the ground cracked beneath our feet.
And like a hundred hungry whips, roots shot up and out, curling around the remaining elites and squeezing until ribs cracked.
What was left when all of them toppled over made my blood boil anew.
At the far end of the room, Dyonisia Reeve sat atop Jagaros’s rightful throne in her last bubble of antipower, surrounded by piles and piles of keys that did indeed look like bones. They winked and glimmered, one for each of her own citizens she’d ever locked up over the last five centuries.
But it wasn’t even the keys that drew my attention. It was Jagaros himself, trapped in his tiger form with a knife that Dyonisia held against his throat.
My crescent knife.
My mother’s knife.
His lover’s knife.
“Come any closer,” Dyonisia called in a voice that cut through every other sound in the room, “and he dies.”
Coen stilled, though he wasn’t even looking at either of them. Through our new bond, I felt his focus needle onto someone else instead: the last elite standing by Dyonisia’s side, Gregor Bilderas, whose gaze found me. Who analyzed me, sitting in my chair, like a sculptor with a lot of work to go.
When Coen disappeared, I felt his rage billow even during the split-second he was in his space between worlds. I felt the lethal edge of his anger as sharp as Old Veracious itself when he reappeared right before Bilderas.
I felt his bloodlust when he began to slice without mercy.
Bilderas gave a pitiful screech like a drowning rat as Coen made slice after slice, one for every time the elite had cut into me. Before long, those screeches had morphed into gurgling begging that Coen appeared not to hear.
At the same time, Kanuk roared out his brother’s name, nocked an arrow, drew his bow, and…
I didn’t think he’d have time to release it as Dyonisia’s gaze flung toward him. But he was faster than the snap of a tiger’s jaw, faster than the whistle of an eagle diving down a canyon, faster than anything Dyonisia could have anticipated.
His arrow shot right through her antipower, over Jagaros’s head, and buried itself in her chest.
Mouth opening in a bloodcurdling scream, Dyonisia seemed to forget all about her earlier threat to kill Jagaros. Seemed to forget about keeping herself wrapped in a bubble of her antipower that would protect her from magic.
Eyes frothing with mindless revenge, she gathered her antipower and honed it into an arrow that shot straight toward Kanuk himself.
I cried out in warning. Jagaros roared. His warriors shouted.
But the antipower found its target.
