AllFreeNovel
Share Us
32
Countdown to the End
Ilooked down at my round belly. I rubbed it slowly. “What have you done to me?”
“Nothing crazy,” replied Indira. “Just channeled some extra life magic into speeding up your pregnancy. You’re welcome.”
I opened my mouth to say something, then realized I didn’t even know what to say to that.
“It’s an easy phoenix spell,” Indira said to Gin with a smile. “I can teach it to you.”
Gin was speechless. She could only gape at her mother. This clearly wasn’t how she’d envisioned meeting her real parents.
“You shouldn’t mess with nature,” I told Indira.
The phoenix looked at me, perplexed. “The gods and demons ask for the quick-fix treatment all the time.”
“Quick-fix,” I repeated, shaking my head in disbelief.
“Why are you complaining?” Indira looked honestly confused. “I spared you the long, grueling months of pregnancy. I hear the final stretch is especially bad.”
Tessa found her voice. “You’ve heard? You’re a mother. Shouldn’t you know?”
Indira looked at her, then at her sister Rosette. “No. Rosette and I…well, we were never actually pregnant.”
“Like Thea?” Bella asked.
“Oh, no,” Rosette said. “Not quite like Thea. There were no immortal artifacts involved in your creation, girls. We—”
“Careful,” Indira said. “We can’t say too much.”
“Why the hell not?” Gin demanded. My sister seemed to have found her voice too, and she was fuming mad. “You just pop up here and declare that you’re our mothers. And that’s that, no explanation of why you abandoned us, no apology for doing it. Nothing.”
“We didn’t abandon you,” Indira told her.
“Then what happened?” Gin planted her hands on her hips. “Explain.”
Indira shook her head. “We can’t.”
“How convenient,” Gin said drily.
Indira looked like she didn’t know what to say. Her happy, comfortable manner had evaporated. She’d talked us through all the people she’d killed without even batting an eye, but Gin’s reaction had frozen her.
“We don’t have time for this.” Gretchen looked at me. “You don’t have time for this, Leda. In a few hours, your babies will be here. Now you have a choice. You can either use that powerful moment of birth to channel the life magic into destroying the barrier that keeps the Guardians hidden inside their Sanctuary. Or you can stew over how very horrible we are and do nothing. In the latter case, you will have doomed all the people in the Sanctuary to death, including Arina’s children.”
Arina’s hands tightened into fists.
“And if you allow those people to die, the Guardians will gain magic that rivals the Immortals,” Gretchen said. “That will put everyone in danger, including your babies.”
I scowled at her. Nero looked like he wanted to rip her head off with his bare hands.
“You still have a chance to make the deaths of your angels and soldiers mean something,” Gretchen told us. “They can mean the end of the Guardians. Or you can sit here and argue morality while the Guardians move ever closer to their ultimate goal. The choice is yours.”
We didn’t have a choice. Not really. Gretchen and her sisters had manipulated us into a corner, and they knew it.
Another pegasus shot through the air at the airship, full speed. When it got close, it did a long somersault to slow down, then landed on the deck. An armored woman slid off the saddle. She took off her helmet to unveil herself as yet another octuplet.
“Are you all right?” Indira asked her.
