She started running again, only to come to a sudden stop mid-hall. Turning to a wall, she pressed her hand into the stone.
Creation, her mind, her magic, and her heart, seemed to say in unison.
The wall blasted inward with a cloud of dust.
“My demigod prince, I’ve come to rescue you.” Jo took a shot at the dramatic, because why not?
Snow’s reaction was decidedly unenthused. “What’re you doing?”
“I’m breaking you out.”
He looked nearly frantic. “But—”
“There’s no time, Snow. We’ll get the bow. I’ll let the team in. We end this.”
“The team is here!”
His confused panic suddenly made sense.
“What?” Jo whispered. The dust settling on the bedspread they’d made love atop mere hours ago suddenly seemed loud, as though every minute speck landed with an earth-shaking rumble. “Here?That’s impossible. They’re out—”
“Pan left not long ago. She came to make sure I was . . . aware. That she has you and the team, and that she’s successfully playing you both.”
The team. Pan had the team. Well, of course she did. “We were so stupid!” Jo agonized aloud. She reached up, grabbing her hair with a colossal cry of frustration at the ready, then stopped. “No . . . this can work.”
“What?” Snow pulled one of her hands from her hair, taking it in his own, drawn as much by a need to comfort her as to assure himself that she was real.
“The team is here, in here already, we just have to find them. Pan meant to trap them—to show off how strong and in control she was. But all she did was bring us together. And ifyoudidn’t know about the—” Jo stopped herself short, not daring to say the wordarrow. His room had been compromised by the large hole in the wall, after all. “—the special thing.”
“Then she still—yes, I understand. But how will you get to them?”
Jo thought about this a moment. As they stood, speaking, she could feel ripples in the magic throughout the castle. It was as if Pan was trying to redesign things on the fly. But Jo wasn’t about to give her that chance.
“I’m going to get the bow.” Jo gripped his hand tightly, pulling him close and planting a firm kiss on his mouth. “You use the cracks in her chaos to find the team.”
“If you can destroy her magic, perhaps I could create passages through it,” Snow reasoned as she was pulling away. “When I get to them, then what?”
“Then find me! I think it’ll be easy to tell where. I’ll get the bow and then keep holding her off!” Jo started running down the hallway once more, stopping at a window. She put a foot on the ledge and the glass shattered outward. As the wind howled, whipping her hair, Jo took a long look at Snow. Who knew if it would be her last? She ignored the twinge in her chest, the sudden extra weight around her heart, and grinned. “Good luck, Creation.”
“Good luck, Destruction.”
Chapter 31
A Cheap Magic Trick
Jo jumped through the window and fell onto a lower balcony. She could’ve sworn she’d been in the basement of the castle not a moment before, but what made sense anymore? In Pan’s topsy-turvy castle, nothing did.
But that was fine. There didn’t have to be any rules, because Jo wasn’t going to play by them. She was making her own from now on.
Looking over the edge of the balcony, Jo saw the greenhouse-like rooftop of the strange room she’d seen before—the room she suspected held Pan’s treasures, and the one she had deemed her goal. She could fall right down onto it, but that was assuming Pan didn’t have any other tricks up her sleeve. Instead, Jo turned inward, turning the doors to the room beyond into splinters with a look.
She stepped into the decimated room, eerily similar to the dining room Pan had entertained her in not more than an hour ago. Jo had two missions: The first was to get to Pan’s treasure room. The second was to break as many things as she could, so Snow would find the opening he needed—if he couldn’t create it himself. Or perhaps her destruction would yield the fodder for him to craft a door. Jo was still learning how his magic worked, but either way she relished in the opportunity to wreak more havoc on Pan.
The doors across from her opened, more shadowed assassins rushing toward her. Jo didn’t even bother with them. Instead, she rushed to the table between her and the dark elves, meeting it before they did. The moment her fingers came into contact, it exploded into shards of wood for them to impale themselves upon.
Jo knew it wouldn’t work; if Takako’s bullets couldn’t penetrate their shields, then wooden spikes couldn’t either. But her aim was to slow them down—and she did, if only by a fraction of a second. By the time they even noticed she’d moved, Jo had rushed through the doors to her left. The second they closed, Jo looked at the keystone of the arch above the door and forced it to crack to the base on either side. Fissures spread outward with a surge of magic light similar to a lightning strike, bringing the whole wall crumbling down.
For the first time since entering the castle, Jo saw daylight. It streamed through the hole in the wall like a ray of hope shining on an otherwise desperate situation. Climbing over the rubble, Jo stepped outside onto one of the narrow glass-like ledges of the castle’s many spindly towers.
