“The broom closet!” he says, slapping me again to jog my memory. “We couldn’t pay—I’d lost my coin purse. The owner locked us in. To get out, we?—”
My eyebrows shoot up. “The hinges.”
He grins. “Exactly.”
We dash to the gate’s massive hinges—great iron brackets as thick as my fist. Samaur didn’t bother to weld them shut. Which means they could be removed.
Rian grabs the broken flagpole and jams the end beneath the first hinge pin, then starts battering it loose. It’s slow work, metal groaning with every strike, but one by one—two on each side—we work the pins free.
“Stand back!” Rian shouts.
We race toward the safety of The First Stop’s entryway.
The gate, still barricaded through the center, groans—then crashes forward in a roar of splintered wood and dust.
A thick cloud billows out. We both stumble back, coughing, eyes stinging.
But when it clears, the path ahead is wide open.
“Quick.” I shove his shoulder, urging him toward the central district. “Back to Sabine.”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out Sabine’s location. I barely need to use my godkissed senses. All we need to do isfollow the explosions of light that rock outward like lit powder kegs.
All around us, the resurrected army lurches down alleyways, weaseling into any open door or window they can squeeze through. Every once in a while, I catch sight of a fishline tangled around a cadaver’s leg. A child in rubber clamming boots. A locket dangling around a mangled neck.
These things werepeopleonce.
Peaceful, just trying to eke out a living before Thracia poisoned their lands.
And then, we skid out into the Glassmarket. Or rather, what’s left of it.
Once, it was a large, open square paved with stone, where glassblowers set up their workshops, smoke pumping out of fires all day, the repetitive clink of hammers on anvils.
Now, shattered glass litters the earth. Half the surrounding buildings are razed, and the other half is on fire. Walking corpses lurch through the wreckage after the wounded victims who can’t get to their feet in time to get away.
“The dead didn’t dothat,” Rian mutters under his breath, nodding at a toppled municipal building.
As though on cue, Tòrr suddenly tears into the center of the square, letting out an ear-splitting shriek as his hooves paw through glass shards.
Sabine rides him, strong and true. She’s a sight in her fae appearance, her fey lines blazing silver at her temples, almost blindingly so.
“Sabine!” I climb onto the wreckage of a glassblower’s forge and wave my hands to get her attention. “The southern gate—it’s open!”
She looks my way, but there’s something off about her eyes. It’s like she’s both here and not here. And then, I see the silverblood pouring down her hands. She’s clenching Tòrr’s razorwire mane so hard it’s shredding her palms.
“I can barely control him!” she shouts. The monoceros dances sideways beneath her, steam blasting out of his nostrils, his eyes wide and wild. “He’s gone mad from the violence. The more he destroys, the more he wants to tear apart!”
I feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut.Fuck, when are we going to get a break?
“I know a thing or two about monoceroses,” Rian says, wiping soot from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Especiallythatone.”
“You kept him locked in an iron cell for a year without a glimpse of sunlight,” I point out.
“Exactly,” he says. “At their heart, they’re the wildest thing in the world. Sabine controls nature, but fae creatures are a different set. They’re as untamed as the gods themselves. It doesn’t matter how fond he is of Sabine. That she gave him his power, his name. She can’t control him—not like before.”
“So, what?” I bark. “He’s just a loose cannon with pure violent delight?”
Rian looks grim. “Yes.”
