“Darlings!” she calls to her students. “Continue your creations. Show me how far your imaginations can reach.”
She’s smiling, but her focus suddenly turns to me and a crease forms in her forehead.
I’ve paused here for too long.
I have no choice but to keep moving away from Asha.
I’m reluctant to leave her back exposed, especially now that I’m stepping away from her and not toward her like I was before. I no longer have an easy line of sight to Landon and his friends.
I work as quickly as I can so that I can approach from the other side and see her again, but I’m not fast enough.
I’m at the end of the row when metal glints in the distance.
Landon’s medallion has taken on the form of a web of fine copper strings, each edge appearing razor-sharp as it unfurls and spins toward Asha’s back.
My hand dips to the coal, my fingers closing around it, ready to pitch it as hard as I can across the distance to knock the web off course, but the web reaches Asha within the blink of an eye.
It slices through her hair where it hangs down her back.
Silver strands fall to the ground.
For a moment, I think that’s the only damage, but then the material at the back of her shirt opens.
Blood blooms across her skin.
She gasps and jolts forward.
I’m gripping the burning coal and I don’t care that my palm is burning.
Landon is a dead man.
I’ll fucking kill him.
My jaw clenches so hard that my teeth clack together.
In that instant, I plot a path to Landon’s anvil and calculate the strength it will take to throw myself across it and knock him onto his back, anticipating the blade he’ll no doubt swing at me before I can ram the coal down his throat.
I will make him scream as he burns from the inside out.
But I’m also aware of something else in that moment: Asha’s brother and sister at the head of the room.
Tamra’s eyes have filled with tears. She gives her brother a nod.
Gallium darts toward his mother, snatches her hammer right off her waist, and runs toward the first row of students.
Ayla Silverspun has barely turned and doesn’t even seem to realize that her hammer’s missing before Gallium throws it with a strength that defies his age.
The hammer spins through the air, its metal shrieking and humming, before it crashes into a bowl of coal—the one at the anvil on Asha’s right that I already filled.
Clang!
The sound bites the air, but it’s the explosion as the bowl flies right off its pedestal that takes my breath away.
Chapter 34
Three pieces of coal knock into each other as they shoot out of the bowl.
One hits an anvil and the second strikes the white stone ground. Both explode, sending flames in all directions, blowing several students backward.
