She launched a vicious flurry of blows, managing to land a hard open-handed strike to his nose. Bone crunched against the heel of her palm and there was a sudden rush of hot blood against her hand while their Shadows churned around them in a whirlwind of destruction.
James roared in outraged pain, and he leaped closer, smashing into her stomach with his fists. For the first time in their lives, he aimed to hurt. Kay fell to one knee, gasping for air, before forcing herself back up, surging forward, pulling her Shadows into her twin fighting blades.
He didn’t give her a chance to attack. He simply reached out and closed his hand around her throat, cutting off her air, before swinging her around and using his momentum to throw her hard against the wall behind her.
Her head crashed against the bricks, and she blinked against the sudden agony piercing through her, fighting to focus her dazed thoughts.
No one else seemed to notice that the Shadow gunman had dissolved into an oily puddle. Patients and staff ran screaming through the destroyed waiting room, pushing and fighting to get out the hospital doors through the darkness and the howling of the sirens. Fear and panic were their own weapons now.
Kay pulled herself up, leaning heavily against the wall, forcing herself back into a fighting stance and gripping her blades, ready to fling herself against James once more. And that was when she saw them. Ethan and Zach were urgently pushing to get into the hospital, fighting against the mass of hysterical people pouring the other way.
James saw them too, and they both watched as the last of the patients and staff fled out through the door and Ethan and Zach stepped inside.
They all froze, locked in a standoff and surrounded by devastation. Dust swirled around them in the eerie half-light as the sirens blared. Ethan focused on her, no doubt seeing bruises forming on her face and throat, her hair matted with sweat, and blood all over her arms. The evidence of the blows she’d taken and the weight of that long, terrible day.
Ethan and Zach stepped forward, skirting the blood Shadow puddled on the floor, and the movement unlocked James. He pulled his hands up, Shadows roiling and spilling over them as he glared across the room. James’s voice was rough and angry, his face pale and streaked with sweat. “Take one more step and I will end you.”
“And as for you—” James flicked ice-cold eyes toward Kay. “You will fucking learn to do as you’re told.”
Kay pushed off the wall, dropping her blades and desperately willing Ethan to stand still while she figured out what to do, but he took another slow step toward her with Zach right behind him.
“Are you okay?” Ethan shouted over the sirens.
She almost laughed. No. She was not, in any way, okay, but her priority was to make sure that James didn’t follow through on his threat.
She took a step closer to Ethan, only to be stopped by James’s hard hand on her chest. “If either of you takes one more step, I will stop the norm’s heart,” he promised.
They all froze once more.
But then James flung out his free hand, launching the Shadows he’d been holding straight into the dark puddle still slicking the front entrance. The Shadow puppet reared back up, his rifle pointed unerringly at Ethan and Zach.
Zach reacted instantly, launching a massive shield of swirling ocean-blue Shadow, but Ethan… God. Ethan was still exposed.
Ethan looked from Kay to James and back again. And then he took another step forward.
Everything in the world tunneled down. All she could see was the blood Shadow puppet that would at any second start firing real, tangible bullets, and Ethan in its path.
Kay pulled up her hands and flung a dozen stinging Shadow wasps at James as she frantically spun out a thick rope of Shadow. She flung it to coil around James’s pointing arm and pulled hard, her fear for Ethan giving her furious strength as she hauled James’s controlling arm to the side, forcing the puppet to stumble disjointedly.
James roared as he threw all his weight against the rope, just as Zach, his face dark with outrage, pulled a Shadow sword from the air and attacked the lurching puppet.
Kay released the rope to pull her blades into her hands, preparing to attack, but James leaped back, howling in rage and frustration as he danced away and let the gunman collapse into oily wisps beneath Zach’s sword.
James growled, his face contorted with fury, and then he turned. His hands still bore traces of the blood Shadow pulsing menacingly between them. He brought them together, swiftly rolled a rough ball of Shadows, and then shot the rotten mass—hot and evil, darker than a fireball from hell—straight at Ethan.
If it exploded on Ethan, it would kill him. Kay was moving before James released the Shadow. She launched herself forward, directly into the Shadow fireball’s path, wildly flinging her own Shadows up into a rough shield.
The fireball exploded over her, eating through her shield like acid, and James immediately followed with another vast wave of writhing Shadows.
The two Shadows, hers and James’s, clashed violently in the air and locked together in a wild eruption of blues and grays and black.
She was too tired, too emotionally exhausted, and the impact brought her to her knees. She couldn’t hold it. She knew she couldn’t, but she still tried. She still scrabbled for control, pouring herself into the battle, as the two Shadows wrestled violently for supremacy. Midnight-blue clashed with sky-blue, shooting through every shade of gray and black from charcoal to obsidian.
Their Shadows pulsed angrily and then, just as she thought she might have a slim chance, James gave another push. Another final flood of dark power poured from him, and the writhing Shadows shattered in a hot cascade.
It was like being caught in a bomb blast. Kay’s Shadows detonated across the room, flinging outward in a thousand splintered pieces—too far, too fast for her to control—her consciousness shattering into tiny shards like the pieces of a broken mirror.
She tried, with everything in her, to hold it all together. But she had nothing left to give. Her Shadows disintegrated around her and flew outward, spreading like mist as darkness rushed in, and she collapsed, sinking into oblivion.
