I think of fire. Of the deepest fury a male could never know. It stretches before me, around me, back generations: my mother losing her life to young motherhood, my grandmother shouldering the failure of the fields on her back. The endless experience of big hands grabbing little girls and the malice that adult males inflict on adolescents—oh, that hatred had to go somewhere, did they ever consider that? Did they think we’d just absorb it like how they want us on our backs, passively?
No, it is in me. Compacted down into my core, for there is so much of it, and now,finally,I get to draw up that ferocity from its fathomless, yawning pit.
It is either the halflings or me, like starving rats in a bucket with no food but one another. And I will not be eaten. Not today, not ever.
So when the guards grab me, I let them.
Multiple sets of hands, a male body, then another, yank at me, punch me, a boot lands into my stomach. There are at least three bruising me. Only then do I let the heat and wrath and anguish loose.
Flames explode, consuming everything in their path.
Chapter Forty-six
Screams.
The guards stumble away.
I rise, naked and bloody, radiating a furious, fiery tempest. Around me, the guards burn alive, shrieking, clutching their hands, their arms, their feet.
It should not feel good to watch them cower. Their fear and pain should not feel right.
But they do.
I flick my hand, and flames blast the nearest guard, smoke curling up through the chinks of his glowing armor, the male inside screeching. The smell of burnt flesh fills the air, but I do not stop. Discarding the charred shell, gone silent, I reach for the next.
The nearest guards wail and wail until they stop.
Briar battles with another halfling, a flow of water dancing around her like a current, slinging ice needles into his exposed neck above the chain mail. He goes down.
Next to her, the mother struggles under a halfling. I reach for his neck, singeing his skin. He cries out, stumbling back. The fae grapples for something in the growing ocean of slippery blood. She grips something between her fingers—the shard of glass—and whips it across the jugular of the guard.
I survey the scene. Six dead bodies, four remaining guards. Arrows stick out of the far wall, the ceiling. The siblings are gone.Yet we still fight like rats in that bucket. We must, for we do not know when someone will drop the entire thing in a river, all of us drowning.
A guard charges me through the flames, knife in hand. I dodge his swing too slowly and find my shoulder nicked. His weight drops down on me and I hiss, incinerating the arm bracketing my throat, and he screams, then goes limp. The weight lifts, the halfling unblinking with two of Briar’s ice picks up his nose.
A mirror cracks, crashing to the floor on the other side of the room. The siblings tumble into sight, seeming to materialize from nothing, as if they laced. As they wrestle, both of them flinging out bands of power that cut down furniture and bodies—another guard falls—I understand they are not lacing; they are rendering themselves unseen.
The remaining two guards assess their movements. I help Briar to her feet.
Someone grabs my arm. Clara, her face drained of all color. She glowers at me with hollow eyes, her entire bottom half dripping with crimson.
“We’ll call for a Healing fae,” I say.
“You,” she says. “I remember you from that day.”
“I—”
“You have condemned us all.”
Then she draws the glass across her own throat. Her blood spits, hot and metallic, in my face, and Briar cries out. I grip Clara’s elbow as she falls, lowering her next to her husband. The family of three no more.
In total, ten bodies soak in the carnage. The air is thick and wet and full of iron. I swallow back vomit. The plane roils around us, and Briar heaves next to me. Kassandra and Dominik struggle in and out of our perception. Power explodes outward, unnatural and sickening, sending the two guards to their knees.
My body rolls with nausea, and I sink to the bloody floor, aware that I have burned away all my clothes. Briar sheds hersweater, handing the dripping cotton to me, and I throw it over myself.
Dominik stands over Kassandra, her face pressed against the ground. Both of them are covered in cuts and bruises. Dominik grabs her arms, fitting both wrists in one of his hands.
“No,” I croak, but my mouth burns with that strange magic. The bizarre, unnatural power. I gag.
