Before the final word even left his lips, Oak’s control snapped completely.
He launched himself at Mordren with a feral roar, his blade slicing through the air.
I sprang forward, too, my dagger twisting through the night fast as lightning.
Mordren was quick—but not quite quick enough. In a flicker of shadow, he and his cat disappeared, but not before my dagger caught him on the shoulder. Oak got there a split second later, his sword catching the hem of Mordren’s robe before taking a massive chunk out of the wood where the sorcerer had been standing.
Alastor hadn’t attacked. But he spun sharply now, as if he could sense the bastard slipping past him in the shadows. His sword was swift, but his blade met nothing but air.
“Remember my offer.” Mordren’s voice was everywhere and nowhere, as insubstantial as the wind. “Bring her to me, and your power is yours.”
43
A Slow Breaking
MARIGOLD
Somuchdeath.
I was sick with it. Haunted by the broken bodies, the bloodied, lifeless forms all across the hilltop. People bent at wrong angles. Men and women and children with the life crushed out of them. And so much blood…
I’d never seen a dead body before. Even the handful of funerals I’d attended in my life had been closed casket. And anyway, this was…different. Horrific in a way I’d never even fathomed before. And so viscerally real, a nightmare made flesh before my eyes—
I was nauseated. I would have been sick if there’d been anything left in my stomach. I tried to help—tried to shift debris out of the way, pull people from the wreckage, but for the most part, I wasn’t strong enough to lift much.
My uselessness just made everything worse.
Eventually, Ring-Around-the-Hill’s healers set up a tent on a cleared area of the hilltop as a sort of triage station. I made myself busy by helping the injured—those who didn’t need to be carried, anyway—to the tent. It was a small thing, and less than I wanted to do, but it kept me busy. Kept me from looking too closely at all the carnage around me. Or listening too closely to the screams and wails that continued even now.
Or thinking about Octavian, Radven, and Alastor, facing down the person responsible for all of this. If they didn’t have access to their full abilities, then how could they ever hope to stop someone so powerful?
I jumped at every sudden noise, bracing myself for yet another attack. But none came.
But the brothers didn’t return, either.
The little boy I’d rescued stuck to my side through it all, refusing to let go of my skirts. He hadn’t spoken at all, except to tell me his name—Jex—when I asked, in a whisper so small I wasn’t even sure I’d heard him correctly. He refused to answer any questions about his family—his mother, or anyone else who might be looking for him.
I didn’t mention his father at all. And I kept him far away from the side of the Hill where he’d fallen.
I’d just passed a woman with a broken arm over to one of the healers when someone appeared at my elbow.
“Hey. Goldie.” Even Ary was rundown, her cheerfulness lost behind a layer of exhaustion and grief. I couldn’t decide whether the streaks on her cheeks were grime or dried tears, and I didn’t ask. “Talon sent me to take you back to the nest.”
I didn’t have to look past her shoulder to know how little progress we’d made. How many bodies still lay buried, how many injured still cried out for help. There was still destruction everywhere, still people sobbing in pain and fear, still so many families looking for their loved ones—
“Talon has organized several teams of people,” Ary said, as if she understood my resistance. “He has most of them hunting for remaining survivors. He wants us to rest up so we can help with the other cleanup in the morning.”
I nodded, nauseated and exhausted and—a little numb.
“Come on,” she said. “You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“But I’ve hardly done anythi—aargh!” I recoiled in pain as she grabbed my arm.
On my other side, the boy whimpered and buried his face in my skirt.
“What’s going on? I hardly touched you.” Ary frowned, her eyebrows drawing together. “Were you hurt, too? Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“No, no, I wasn’t hurt,” I assured her. I didn’t tell her that her sudden touch had triggered a violentshiverthrough my skin, that since the attack thatshiverhad been trembling inside me, rising and falling in waves, as if I were absorbing the remains of whatever essence Mordren—or whoever was responsible for this—had blasted at us. The pearls around my wrist probably saved me from the worst of it—for the most part, theshiverwas just an incessant buzz in my body, distracting and uncomfortable but not painful—but every once in a while, a little surge would hit me, or someone would touch me suddenly, and that buzz turned into a jolt. Like I’d stuck a fork into a light socket.
