She wasn’t a soldier anymore. She wasn’t a monster.
Lu slackened in Vex’s hands. She shifted across the wood, toward the edge of the platform.
Tom tracked the movement. His lip curled. “No! Don’t make me hurt you—”
A gunshot echoed.
Tom frowned, a crease dragging through his brow. His focus went around, searching for the source of the noise.
Jakes stood at the rear of the platform, his smoking pistol still raised. His eyes shifted to Teo and a look of awe passed over him, as though he had awoken from a long-held dream.
A thud yanked Lu back to herself.
Tom had fallen to his knees, hands to his chest. Jakes’s aim had been true, straight through his heart, and Tom collapsed to his side before Lu.
She sucked in a breath, the air rank with sweat and iron.
He was dead. Like Milo. Two horrors in her life snuffed out.
This one brought a wave of emotions. Grief tried to drag her down, screaming sobs one breath from destroying her until Kari slid onto the wood and bundled Lu and Teo into her arms. Around them, the remaining defensors were either dead or gone, joining Elazar in his last stand against the raiders in the courtyard.
Lu clung to her mother.Together.They would deal with Tom together. She wasn’t alone, kneeling by her father’s corpse in agonizing solitude. She had her mother—and she had Teo.
“Lu!” Teo shrieked. “What’s he doing? Stop him!”
Elazar? Yes, they would—but Lu needed this, a small moment of her mother taking her weight and Teo breathing, steady and sure, against her.
Teo. Her... brother. The thought felt disjointed, but Lu held it anyway—
Until Teo bucked against her. “Stop him!Don’t go, Vex!”
Ben wasn’t sure what had pushed Jakes to act. The drawing out of the battle, the appearance of Elazar, the endlessscreams of people dying—it had a way of throwing the smallest of details into stark clarity.
For Jakes, that seemed to be Teo. He hadn’t said a word to Ben or Gunnar before he’d dived past them, onto the platform, and shot Tomás Andreu.
Some settling in Ben’s mind told him that the actions on the platform would be resolved, a calmness that centered him on the only detail, in this courtyard, that mattered to him: Elazar.
The vial of permanent magic sat in his breast pocket. Jacket tattered, shirt drenched in sweat, Ben removed the vial and stared at the liquid within the glass, the shifting rainbow of colors that caught the torchlight from around the yard.
“Benat,” Gunnar said insistently. “Are you certain?”
No.Ben looked up. Elazar was in the center of the yard, a handful of defensors at his back, weapons bloodstained. A dozen or more raiders still fought, coming at the tight knot of resistance from all angles. Ben spotted Rosalia. Pierce, just there.
But Elazar was, as they had feared, unstoppable. His limbs and weapons swung in constant arcs, a flurry of redemption that would drown this island in death.
“Sinners!” Elazar bellowed. “You are defenseless against the Pious God!”
Perhaps Elazar was the Pious God now. Perhaps that permanent magic had given him and Lu and Nate and Rosaliaall an unearthly level of power.
Ben stared down at the vial in his palm, hearing a dozen voices telling him that he needed this weapon. He couldn’t fight his father without equaling him.
“This is—” Ben started, ground his teeth together. He uncorked the vial and held it ready. “This is Argrid’s war.”
His arm tensed to dump the potion into his mouth before he could reconsider—but a hand covered his.
“You aren’t the only Argridian here,” a voice said.
Ben blinked. Paxben was holding the vial now, his ash-covered face cocked in a sad attempt at a smile.
