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Flinching at an echoing faraway cry from Wren, Thea unsheathed her sword and Malik’s dagger, before placing one foot on the creaking stretch of ice before her and addressing her sister once more.
‘How? How can this be?’ she asked, unable to keep the tremor from her voice.
The maze of mirrors had frayed her mind with its illusions webbed together with truth. The Glacier’s Embrace had battered her body. But what of the people she loved in the clutches of the reapers? It couldn’t be real… Could it? Wilder was waiting for her at the foot of this gods-forsaken mountain of terrors. The others were back at the Singing Hare. Weren’t they?
But Anya smiled, the expression far too old, far too knowing for her young features. ‘After everything you have seen, did you think the Furies wouldn’t test you to the full extent of their abilities?’ She eyed the wound clotting at Thea’s shoulder, the slight lean in her gait as she favoured her injured ankle. ‘Do you doubt the danger of the Great Rite? Those reapers have been summoned through the portals of darkness to test your mettle, your sacrifice. They are as real as the blood you taste on your tongue, as real as the frostbite you can no longer feel at your blackened fingertips…’
Another shiver scraped down Thea’s spine like the tip of a reaper’s talon. She swallowed the lump in her throat.
‘So be it,’ she said, and stepped out onto the ice.
The surface of the lake creaked beneath her weight, and the thin layer of frost across it seemed to shiver in anticipation. She focused on placing one foot in front of the other, mindful of any fractures, any hidden crevices… She had learnt that lesson from the glacier. In the distance, she could see Kipp, Cal, Malik, Wren and Wilder… Each bound in chains and struggling in the clutches of a reaper whose razor-sharp talons teased the flesh above their heart, whose shadows wrapped tighter around them with each passing moment.
‘I’m coming,’ Thea murmured.
Kipp’s shout was cut off by a whip of shadow across his mouth. His eyes bulged in terror.
‘I’m coming,’ Thea vowed, her heart seizing for him, for all of them.
The ice groaned as she approached the first chasm, but instead of water, she found a moving form of darkness – the strange glimmering crater that young Anya had called a portal. If she ran, she might be able to leap over it, depending on the slip factor, but…
But Thea didn’t need to come up with an alternative, because from the eerie portal, a wraith emerged, hissing and spitting, the scent of burnt hair suddenly overwhelming her senses.
She turned her sword and palmed her dagger. The wraith was every bit as hideous and grotesque as the countless others she had slain. She’d carve out the heart of this one as she had all the rest. The screams and shouts from the other side of the lake spurred her on.
Thea lunged, not accounting for the slip of melting ice beneath her boots. Her arms flailed as she fought to remain upright and away from the edge of the rippling chasm.
Heart pounding, she steadied herself and eyed the monster.
I’ll have to make this fast, then, she told herself.
A blur of silver followed as Thea flung her throwing stars with needlepoint precision, hitting the wraith in its clouded blue eyes, sending it staggering along the ice, on the precipice of the portal.
With a slice of her sword, she opened its throat, black gore oozing from its wound, a screech filling the air loud enough to shake the surrounding mountains.
She leapt upon its body, setting her dagger to its chest and sawing into the rotten flesh, sinew and bone, until she reached its heart. A final scream left the monster’s mouth as she carved out the organ in a matter of expert slices, sending the still-pulsing mass flying back into the shadow from which it came.
It was only after she’d discarded its heart that she realised the corpse was sliding back into the strange substance, intothe portal of unknown fates – and that its dead hand was still clamped around her ankle in a vice-like grip.
With a shout, Thea slid across the ice, dragged along with the wraith body as its lower half slowly disappeared into the shadow chasm. In a single, powerful slice, she cleaved through the monster’s arm, severing it entirely from its body, just as the rest of it vanished into the darkness.
Panting, Thea scrambled back from the portal, prising the dead talon-tipped hand off her ankle and pitching it back into the shimmering substance with a ragged gasp.
‘Fuck,’ she muttered, her heart nearly leaping out of her chest in the aftermath of the close call. Blood trickled from her ankle where the wraith had clawed her, but she wiped it away and got to her feet at once, eyeing up the breadth of the shadow fissure she would have to leap across —
‘Thea!’ Cal screamed.
She looked up in time to see a cord of shadow forcing its way into Malik’s mouth, his huge figure thrashing against the onyx bonds wrapped around him, the reaper hissing at her in invitation.
Thea tasted bile. She looked around desperately for a way to cross the chasm of darkness. For the briefest of seconds, she was brought back to her shieldbearer initiation test, where she, Cal and Kipp had made it to the Chained Islands from the mainland using nothing but sticks to launch themselves across… But there were no sticks to be found here, and time was running out.
‘Hold on, Malik,’ she called. Though from his fitting body, her words were lost to him. Panic tried to latch onto her; she could feel it in the air around her, fuelled by the malice of the reapers at the other end. They would take her family one by one, in the most agonising way.
She wasn’t going to let that happen. She would save them all. And Furies help those reapers when she got there, because shewas going to tear them apart with her bare fucking hands for all the pain they’d inflicted.
Thea took a deep breath and sheathed her weapons for the run-up. She didn’t need them throwing her off balance. Taking several steps back, she measured the distance as best she could… and then she threw herself into a sprint.
Thea charged towards the pit at full pelt, ignoring the slip of her boots across the ice, allowing it to add to her momentum.
