“What are you doing?” She turns, her eyes wide. She grabs the side of my arm. “Stay…no…you can’t.”
“I have to go. Stay on the thornback. Don’t follow me.”
“Sebastian, no. Whatever you’re thinking—”
“Isla, please.” I cup her face with one hand. Her skin is flushed. There’s blood on her cheek that isn’t hers and ash in her hair from the fires. Her eyes burn into mine. “I need you to do as I say, just this once, please.”
“Don’t do this. Don’t you dare—”
I kiss her. Hard and fast, then I drop down from the thornback’s back, landing on my feet.
Pain shoots through my injured leg, but I ignore it. Isla screams my name, but I don’t look back.
I planned to do this anyway. I need to try, or all will be lost. We’ll be overrun and recaptured.
I run through the madness, through the blood-slick mud, dodging bodies and magic and the thrashing limbs of creatures locked in combat. An icefae soldier swings at me, and I duck without breaking stride. A hy-were snaps at me as I pass, and I twist sideways, my shoulder brushing its matted flank.
I need distance from Isla. If what I’m about to do goes wrong, I don’t want her anywhere near me when it happens.
I stop in an open stretch of ground not too far away from Snow’s carriage. She’s there, standing amid the wreckage.
I close my eyes and reach inward.
The magic is there, as always. It’s vast, a building pressure that has had little release. The last time I used it, I nearly destroyed everything around me, and I barely tapped into it.
This time, I will try to control it, but if need be, I won’t hold anything back.
The power comes more easily than before. It rises through me like a tide, filling my veins, my very bones. Shadows pour from my hands, my arms, my chest. They erupt upward in great spiraling columns of living darkness that blot out the sky above me. The ground beneath my feet splits and cracks as the magic pushes outward.
I throw everything at Snow, while still maintaining some sort of control. I would prefer not to have to die.
The shadows tear across the open ground between us, a wall of pure dark energy moving with the speed of a loosed arrow and the force of a collapsing mountain.
Yes!
It hits her hard. Only, Snow doesn’t stagger.
She doesn’t fall.
When she laughs, dread washes over me.
I refuse to give up, so I push harder, loosing an avalanche of shadows that just might destroy me, but I don’t give a damn.
She opens her arms and welcomes my onslaught.
Snow keeps laughing. It’s the laugh of someone unhinged and drunk on something she’s been craving.
My magic pours into her, and she takes it. All of it. She pulls it from me the way the mirror pulled magic from the fae.
I try to stop, but I can’t. She won’t let me.
My shadows don’t destroy her as I had hoped; they wrap around her and sink beneath her skin. The dark columns I raised from the earth bend toward her as if she’s become the center of everything, a gravity that my magic cannot resist.
I feel it leave me. Not all at once, but in a steady, merciless draw that picks up speed with every passing second. Strength drains from my arms. My legs tremble. I try harder to pull back, but I can’t. She has her hooks in me now, and she’s pulling with a hunger that is bottomless.
Snow turns her head and looks at me.
Her cold eyes find mine across the churning battlefield, and she smiles.
