“They’re anchored to the void,” Dreven shouts, slicing a shadow-blade through a torso. “Magic slips off them.”
I push my power out again, a cold, hard command intended to snap their knees and force them to the dirt. It hits resistance like a granite wall. The Devourer’s hold is absolute, an ancient frequency drowning out my broadcast. It pisses me off.
“Physical violence it is,” I mutter. I manifest a warhammer of pure ice—simple, brutal, effective. I swing it into the ribcage of a cadaver lunging for Nyssa’s back. The bones shatter with a satisfying crunch, and the thing stays down.
“Nice of you to join the party,” Nyssa pants, sweat slicking her brow despite the chill.
“I enjoy the cardio,” I drawl, smashing another skull. “But we can’t keep this up all night. There are centuries of dead under this soil, and Dreven’s dad seems intent on introducing you to all of them.”
Nyssa decapitates a rotted soldier with a vicious backhand slice. She looks fierce, lit by the pale moonlight and the dying sparks of Dastian’s magic, but she’s growing tired.
“I can’t override him!” she shouts, breathless, kicking a torso away before it can grab her knees. “They aren’t listening!”
“You aren’t trying to override,” I yell back, swinging my hammer in a wide arc that turns three skeletons into bone meal. “You’re trying to outshout him. Don’t shout. Command.”
She pauses, which is a terrible idea in a mosh pit of the undead. A skeleton wearing the remnants of a rusted breastplate lunges for her exposed throat. I move to intercept, but Dreven is faster, a shadow-spike driving up through the thing’s groin and out its skull.
“Use the Crown, Nyssa!” I roar, frustrated by her hesitation. “You have it,itdoesn’t.”
“I don’t know how!” she screams, parrying a rusted dagger.
“Find the silence,” I order, my voice carrying over the crunch of bone. “Drop the noise and make them look at you.”
She freezes in the middle of the melee, which is practically suicidal, but I see the exact moment she stops fighting the current and decides to become the river. Her amber eyes glaze over, the gold bleeding into the white until she looks less human and more like an idol carved from judgment.
“Cover her!” I bark, abandoning my icy warhammer to grab a skeletal warrior by the spine and snap it like a dry twig.
Dreven moves, a wall of living darkness shielding her left flank, while Dastian turns three attacking corpses into a pile of confused, snapping badgers.
Nyssa doesn’t blink. She drops her hands to her sides, leaving her chest wide open. The bravado is terrifying. The air around her drops ten degrees. It’s the chill of the grave before the stone is rolled shut.
“Kneel,” she whispers.
It’s not a shout. It’s barely a sound. It cuts through the clash of steel and the rattle of bone like a guillotine blade.
The skeleton in front of her, a hulking thing with a dented helmet, falters, with a sound like grinding stones, it drops to one knee.
Then another. Then all of them. The silence that follows is heavier than the fight. Nyssa stands amidst the bowed dead, chest heaving, looking absolutely horrified by her own authority.
But, of course, it doesn’t last.
“Vampires incoming, and they don’t look like they want a chat,” Dastian says.
I spin around and heave a sigh. This night is nowhere near over.
Chapter 21
Nyssa
“Of course,” I mutter, tightening my grip on my blade. “Because skeletons were just the appetiser.”
I glance past the kneeling bone-brigade. Shadows detach themselves from the tree line, moving with that fluid, predatory grace that makes my slayer instincts scream. Vampires. Fast, hungry, and definitely not interested in bowing to the new management.
“They will be harder to control under the bloodlust. Move your army, slayer.”
I frown at him, and then at the skeletons behind me.
“My army,” I repeat flatly.
