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“Any ideas?” his cousin asked him.

If they ran, they would be chased. But if they fought… They were outnumbered. And they were already surrounded—backed against the pit with nowhere to go.

Like it or not, they would have to fight their way out of this.

Flecks of half-frozen water pelted their backs, dense clouds of vapor fogging the area.

“Focus on the ones on your side,” Darien instructed, his words nearly swallowed up by the crashing of the falls. He tried to rally his magic, but all he got was a cooling ember. If he ran out of power, he’d have to use the sword—not ideal, given the state of his right hand. Still, he said, “I’ll handle the ones on mine.”

“Copy.”

The air stirred with a warning, and Darien readied to meet it.

A blur to his left.

Another to Roman’s right.

And with a blink that turned his eyes black, Darien let his own monster off the leash.

3

North Financial District

YVESWICH, STATE OF KER

Maximus Reacher awoketo the sound of screaming.

He opened his eyes to a blur of darkness and firelight. He lay sprawled across the ground, his blood-soaked cheek stuck to rock. Where he was, he didn’t know. A tunnel, maybe. Or a cave. It was too smoky to tell. But if there was one thing he knew for certain, it was that he should be dead.

He should bedead.

The screams were coming from a female hellseher. She knelt close by, her body all fire, her glowing hands digging through piles of rubble.

The names she was calling out were…strange. They weren’t names, he realized—at least, notcommonones. They were colors.

“Magenta!” she wailed. “Gold! VIOLET! SAAAAAAGE! Answer me!”

The shouting continued. Magenta. Gold. Violet. Sage.

Max tried to sit up, but he couldn’t move. Couldn’t feel his body. He could hardly even twitch his fingertips. An otherworldly darkness oozed through the area, spreading like an infection. It felt…alive. Unconquerable, even by firelight.

Passed out on the ground beside him, on stone hot to the touch, was a witch with red hair. A pair of magnificent white wings were fanned out at her sides, more than half of the feathers singed to a crisp.

The witch was bleeding—drip, drip, drip. Max watched the hypnotic drip of blood from her dainty, freckled nose, his eyelids opening and closing with heavy blinks. Drip, drip, drip.

Blink, blink, blink.

Shit, that was Dallas. Dallas washurt.

He peeled his face off the stone, his pulse lurching into a sprint that sent bolts of pain shooting through his chest, as if Obitus himself still had his deathly claws in his heart. Wringing out what was left of his lifeblood.

The fiery one was still screaming. Screaming and sobbing, flames and sparks bursting from her body with each heart-wrenching cry.

That was Maya he was looking at. Maya ‘MJ’ Reacher, burning from head to toes, just like in Max’s terrible nightmares. Only now, she was alive. And those flames? They were a part of her. Controlled by her.

All of the Elementals were dead. Crushed by rubble or incinerated by the blast, no suits to save them. All except Maya, who Max had hurled himself at with a hellseher’s speed, pulling Dallas along with him. He’d shielded them both with his body, his suit taking the brunt of the explosion.

Every Elemental, except Maya—dead.