Page 75

Sacrifice

Reven and I both whip around in time to see Tyndra’s fire catch Aryd in the chest. My goddess loses the grip she had on Eidolon as she is pushed across the room. But she doesn’t fall. Instead, she digs in sandaled feet and fires back with sand. The two forces meet in the middle, like a duel, where the sand flash-heats, melting to the ground in molten red.

Before Eidolon can attack, Reven is on his feet. Even through all the battles and all the setbacks we’ve faced together, I’ve never seen him so coldly furious. It rolls off in him waves, manifesting into shadow that swirls away from him in spinning vortexes.

With deadly calm, he makes a fist and a sledgehammer made of pure darkness slams into the king from the side. Eidolon shadows away only to reappear in the room, and the pools of darkness in the corners crawl toward us at his command.

“Stop,” Reven says the word simply. At his command, the darkness crawls back to its corners.

Eidolon’s features contort with thwarted fury, but I don’t think he’s realized yet that he’s facing something different now.

He’s facing a version of himself.

Reven disappears from beside me to reappear in front of Eidolon in a swirl of pitch-colored mist and takes him by the arms. The king jerks once, twice, then his eyes go wide with visible fear. “Impossible,” he says.

Reven’s smile is pure Shadowraith, and his emotions, open to me now, are nothing but determination. “I don’t have anything holding me back now.”

No Shadows. No ghosts. And he remembers. Everything.

Hands still gripping Eidolon by the arms, Reven starts to pull. Eidolon’s physical form stays in place while a ghostly version of him appears, stretching wider and wider as Reven seems to try to tear his soul in two. The shadow of the king starts to rend at the top, a jagged split in the dark form ripping down the length of his ghostly face.

Eidolon screams a sound that makes me clap my hands over my ears as I stare in fascinated horror at what my bondmate is doing. More Shadows rise up out of the king, as if the ones he managed to get out of me are trying to escape.

The king’s cries cut off abruptly, and he strikes Reven in the chest with his fist instead of darkness. It’s enough. The ghostly forms snap back into place, leaving only Eidolon standing there in the flesh.

Reven’s lips curl in disdain.

Don’t follow me.

Then, before I can stop him, he shadows both of them out of the room.

“Reven!” I yell.

“No,” Tabra calls out in a threadbare voice from where she’s kneeling on the ground with Achlys beside her.

Out of nowhere, Wildernyss reappears. She glances between her sisters who are locked in one-one-one battles, where none of them seems to be finding an advantage.

“The battle outside is bad,” she says. I think to us, although she doesn’t look our way. “Go deal with that. Leave us to this.”

With a flick of her hands, we’re no longer standing in the throne room. All of us—Hakan, Tabra, Achlys, and I—are at the base of the wall, the part I turned to glass, facing the fighting.

In the distance, I see a burst of ice among the chaos. Vos.

He’s fighting again.

“There!” Hakan points, then takes off to join in the battle.

That’s when I see Pella. Side by side, she and Cain are covered in dirt and blood and sweat. She yanks an arrow out of a felled soldier and fires it off before swinging her bow to bludgeon another in the head, all as Cain drowns three other Tyndran soldiers in a floating bubble of water.

The goddesses are at war but so are we.

I don’t know why I thought releasing the goddesses would end it all. More fool me. I grab Tabra and pull her up to her shaky feet, then wrap an arm around her, holding her tight as I slap my hand on the glass of my own wall and pull up the portal in Wildernyss. I shove her through to the other side. Achlys, smart and quick, jumps through, too.

“Stay safe. I love you.”

There needs to be at least one Queen of Aryd still standing when this settles.

She doesn’t have a chance to respond before I shut the portal down and start using sand as a weapon.

As fast as I can, I spray sand in the face of a Tropikan fighter, even as I skewer a shadow soldier. Then I rip the ground right out from under the feet of several more Tropikans and use it to bury them.

A massive boom ricochets all the way to where we stand. I jerk around to see onyx and obsidian chunks flying straight up into the sky. The throne room?

As they fall back down, a streak of white flares across the skies. Closer and closer it comes until I can see white flames lifting off something that glows so iridescent it hurts to look at it. It hits the city and the explosion reaches into the skies the same way the throne room’s rooftop did, followed by the distinct crackle of fire.

Then another smaller streak appears in the skies, followed by another, then another.

Is Tyndra bringing the stars themselves down on us?

Out of nowhere, angry, roiling storm clouds build over the city and winds whip at us. Wildernyss must be the one wielding something this terrifying. The winds hit us like a wall and push all the humans fighting on the ground around until we all have to drop to our stomachs to avoid being picked up or flung.

“Soldiers of my shadow army,” Eidolon’s voice booms throughout the battlefield, coming from I don’t know where. “Kill the Arydian queens!”

Oh fuck.

I spin around, searching for Reven and the king, but don’t see them. Cain, Pella, and Hakan all whip their gazes in my direction, but I only catch a glimpse of their horror-filled faces before shadow souls descend on me like sand dunes shifting to bury me alive. I pull out my knives but they’re not trying to kill me. Hands that feel both sticky and as real as flesh grab me all over to lift me and carry me away.

But where?

It feels like forever and yet only seconds before they let me go and draw back, surrounding me. Breathing hard, I scramble to my feet, and that’s when I realize that they’ve dragged me to the other side of the fighting, far away from my friends, from help.

I’m facing part of Eidolon’s army of darkness on my own.

I need Scoria to hold them while I turn them back into souls she can take to the burning lands. I can’t use Eidolon’s power on these things. Not on so many. But Scoria isn’t here.

Instead, I reach for my power over sand. I’ll have to be fast for this to work. Feeling in the ground beneath my feet, I heat the grains where they can’t see. Where they don’t know.

And I watch them. Wait.

The attack, when it comes, is fast. But I’m faster. Spears of glass burst from the ground in a circle around me, tilted just right, and the shadow soldiers impale themselves upon the spikes and disappear. But more come.

I unsheathe my knives, ready to defend myself—

A horse plows through the shadows behind me and a man jumps off, sword swinging to take out at least five shadows in one swipe.

“Horus!” I cry out.

I can tell by the blood and dirt covering him that he’s been fighting for a while. He has to know that he’s signing his death warrant, joining me in the middle of things that can only be sent away but not killed. They’ll never stop.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to find you, domina!” he yells over his shoulder as he keeps swinging with deadly accuracy. He’s so quick and lethal that the shadows seem to draw back a little, studying him even as they continue to attack.

The shadow soldiers grow more visible as the sun slowly takes back its skies from the moons, which helps. I do what I can. Sand walls. Shifting sands. Spikes and swords of sand. I’d use quicksand but I’m afraid I’d trap myself and Horus by accident.

Horus steps in front of me over and over. I don’t bother to tell him not to. I don’t have the breath or the time, and I know he’ll ignore me anyway.

We can’t keep this up forever.

I also know that no one is coming to help us—not because they don’t want to, but because they still have the Tyndran and Tropikan armies to fight. Reven is still somewhere facing Eidolon alone. Even with all his memories back to fight, can he take the king?

Desperation wells up, smothered in fear.

I have no choice. Maybe if I can be fast?

I fling out both arms. Purple lights up around us, freezing as many of the shadows near us as I can. Trying to hold onto them, I grab Horus by the arm.

Eidolon appears in front of me so suddenly I don’t even have time to register that I’m facing a different disaster before the king grabs me by the throat. Darkness swirls, not taking us away but lifting us into the air.

It’s impossible to miss the shape he’s in. This bastard has hardly had to lift a finger before to defeat us, but now his hair is disheveled, and his shirt is torn, blood seeping into the material in a crimson stain. And there is a wild look in his eyes.

Reven did that to him.

Where is Reven?

Even as my head pounds from the loss of air cut off by his grip, which I claw at with my hands, I ask myself why he didn’t just shadow me away himself.

And then I look down and I know why.

The shadow soldiers converge. Horus is overrun.