Skyla starts to head this way with a laugh caught in her throat, but she stops suddenly. The smile fades from her lips as darkness covers the sky, and the sound of a riot in the sky picks up pace.
Dudley no sooner looks my way than a flash of light ignites from behind him and knocks him to the ground—out cold.
An entire brigade of beasts descend upon us, humanoid faces, but they didn’t quite get it right, bodies far too massive to ever be believable. Monsters from our nightmares materialize, an entire army of them, their roars as loud as a jet engine.
Ladder-back chairs go flying as people race to get the hell out of here.
Skyla shouts at her mother to take the kids and leave, and I spot Demetri helping her do just that. Damn coward won’t stick around to fight a war that fully belongs to him.
Wes looks my way. “Valkyrie,” he shouts and Brody, Ellis, and Coop each pick up a chair and go on the attack.
Gage gives me a hard shove toward Skyla. “Get her the hell out of here. I’ll handle this.”
Ezrina barrels forward. “Don’t die,” she says it sternly to me. “Heathcliff and I will take the left.”
Gage nods. “They’re here to take us prisoner, just the way you took my men to Tenebrous.”
“How do we stop them?” I ask as we part ways, charging forward as an all-out war breaks out before us. It’s too late for answers, but I already knew that.
Skyla evades me, making a run for the thick of it, and I catch her by the wrist.
“Get the hell out of here,” I bark. “You’re with child!”
She yanks herself loose. “All the more rage within me to fight.” She takes off, and I lose her in the melee. Bodies are battling it out with one another everywhere I look, furniture is flying, and the beasts are dropping, but not nearly fast enough. It’s hell on earth all over again.
Out in the distance a mob sweeps this way, people—our people.
“Shit,” I pant. A thousand possibilities run through my mind on how they could have known, or how they could have gotten here, but I spot Gage shouting something to them, and it sounds like orders and then I know. It’s Levatio. No one else could have come close to appearing in a moment. Gage had them on standby.
Something akin to a tractor does its best to drive right through my stomach, and I fly back at least fifty feet.
A horrible growl rips from me.
Didn’t see it coming.
But I’ll be damned if I don’t see the next one, and I just might be.
We tackle one beast after the other, and it feels as if they’re multiplying. No sooner do we get one down than ten more appear in its place.
I can’t allow them to take Skyla.
I can’t allow them to take any of us.
Our people need us, now more than ever.
And we are fighting for their lives as much as we are our own.
Our voices thunder to the heavens.
We fight with all that we are.
We roar over the enemy.
This is it, the final battle.
We cannot take a loss.
We won’t.
