The man’s neck snapped.
He fell like a rock as Milo surged forward to take on two more at once. When he moved, I saw what he’d been standing in front of.
A body.
Linen pants, a tweed jacket over a white button-down now shredded and soaked in blood, a single suspender strap hanging limp on the ground. Cracked glasses. Tawny skin. Brown-and-gray hair covered in dirt.
Silas.
The older Alchemist lay there in a pool of his own blood, with a dagger sticking straight out of his heart. Bile crept up my stomach and stung my tongue.
He was dead. They’dkilledhim. I hadn’t believed it until now.
“Devora!” Nox exclaimed sharply. I looked back to find a man in a lion’s mask barreling toward me.
I’d never used my magic in combat, besides the training sessions with Thecae. But my shadows were ready. It was like muscle memory, the way my hands rose to form a shield thick enough to absorb the dagger thrown at my chest. I fed my shadows more energy, throwing all my grief and sorrow and anger into it. Several wisps broke away from me to form rows of spikes, solidifying and sharpening with each second.
The man lunged, and I flung the shadow spikes at him. Two flew over his shoulder and dissipated. Two more got caught in the thickness of his leathers, but three of them…
They sank into his neck. He howled and dropped his other weapons as his veins enlarged and blackened. Clutching his face, he clawed his skin, and I watched with wide eyes as my shadows traveled up his head.
I hadn’ttriedto do that. I just wanted to slow him down.
He tried to hurt you,a familiar voice echoed in my mind. It sounded almost like my shadows.He hurt your people. He deserves this.
Shadows began to leak from his eyes, his nose, his lips. His eyes bulged out of his head, and his skin stretched, blood pouring out of every orifice as if the darkness was forcing it out.
His screams rattled my brain. I frantically called the shadows back to me, but they kept swirling around him, eager to taste his blood.
Do you really want us to stop?The voice hissed at me again, a chuckle brushing against the back of my mind.
“Devora, look away,” Nox said at my side. With a whimper, I spun around, and there was a slice of steel before my victim’s cries were abruptly cut off. Only then did my shadows slink back to me, curling around my body like armor. The familiar blackness was tinged with red streaks of blood.
I didn’t have time to worry about the way my magic seemed to have a mind of its own—and a vicious one, at that. Several of our fighters were blasted back by a powerful wind spell, allowing Scarven’s men to attack with newfound ferocity at our smaller numbers. One of them leaped into the air and shifted into an enormous bear, spit flying from his large teeth as he swiped at us.
Out of nowhere, a black and tan jaguar the size of a lion came soaring toward him. Tessa bared her claws and gripped the bear’s head, both of them landing on the ground in a heap. She shredded through his fur with ease, her graceful form able to dart around him while he staggered back to look for her.
“Kieran!” Nox shouted as his second came bounding forward, a sword in each hand. “What happened?”
“They showed up without warning,” Kieran said with a grunt, slicing his sword upward to fend off an attack. “A tremor went through the entire Keep when the wards fell from the outside. Silas, he—he ran out to see what the problem was, and—” The stag Shifter swallowed hard, and the image of Silas’s bodyflashed behind my lids.
“We didn’t get to him in time. Another man vanished right as we came outside, and then we were ambushed.” Kieran and Nox stood back-to-back, each taking on one of Scarven’s men. “We held them off for a while”—Kieran grunted and feinted right—“but then we had to either take the fight outside or risk them infiltrating completely.”
Nox growled when another man in a lion’s mask appeared out of thin air, striding between him and Kieran. The masked man struck Kieran in the side with the hilt of a dagger, then strode to Nox’s left, flicking a blade at his neck.
Nox’s arm shot out faster than I thought possible. His hand shifted into a claw and caught his opponent around the neck, squeezing until his eyes rolled to the back of his head. Nox flung him to the side.
“Where’s Scarven?” Nox asked Kieran, his voice deadly low.
Kieran shook his head. “We haven’t seen him. He didn’t come with the others.”
Confusion swept over me. Scarven wasn’t here? He’d caused all of this, and he couldn’t be bothered to show himself? To fight back?
One by one, the refugees from the Keep fell, their groans ringing in my ears behind me. I didn’t know how many were simply injured or even dead. I couldn’t look. I couldn’t focus on anything except the bloodshed around me, the magic and teeth and steel that werethisclose to taking away everything I loved.
Someone ran at me with a sword sheathed in lightning, and I used my shadow shield to block. I twisted my arm in the air and commanded them to wrap around the blade. They tugged it out of his hand and I caught the handle midair.
We parried, him with his light magic and me with the sword and my own dagger. Even though I wasn’t anywherenearproficient with weapons, I was too afraid to use my magic. I’d never been frightened of it before, but the way my shadows hissed with violence scared me. How they’d torn that man apart from the inside out…I didn’t even know they were capable of something like that. And theyreveledin it. I could sense them purring inside me, still tasting his blood, craving more.
