No way at all.
“Do it,” she whispers more forcefully than before. “Use your hammer. Fill this ash with power. Bring the dead to life. Wake…everything.”
Her smile grows, and her eyes gleam. “All will bow to you. Every creature, living and dead, will revere?—”
She stops speaking abruptly, her focus on something behind me. A snarl rises to her lips, the smile drops from her face, her beauty slips, and dark cracks suddenly appear across her skin.
I don’t dare take my eyes off her, but at the corner of my vision, there’s a light, and it’s getting brighter. Fast.
A high-pitched hum comes with it, the kind that’s made by something moving so quickly through the air that it’s defying the laws of nature.
It happens so fast that I have no time to prepare.
A bright orb shoots across the space between me and the shadow-woman before it crashes into the ground.
The moment it hits, it explodes.
Heat and light and fire ripple out from the impact point, a wildfire raging toward me and there’s nothing I can do to get out of its path.
For a heartbeat, I’m surrounded by an impossible silence, and then the explosion reaches me.
The impact knocks me backward so hard that I gain air, my arms closing ever more tightly around Galeia, whose screams have suddenly stopped.
For two more heartbeats, I’m suspended in the air, caught in the force rippling out from the impact point.
There’s a crater in the ground, filled with a raging fire so bright, my own light pales in comparison. I could be looking at a thousand stars all exploding at once.
Within the circle of light is a girl.
She can’t be more than ten years old, dressed in white, her hair as pale as the moon, and her skin paler. So pale, she’s almost translucent. Luminous. Nothing but light.
Opposite her, the shadow-woman was thrown into the air, just as I was.
The girl punches her right hand forward, light spearing from her palm, slicing right through the shadow-woman’s screaming, splintering form.
And then she’s nothing more than splashes of dark light shrieking across the air.
The girl turns, racing toward me.
Her feet are bare. Of all the things I could notice at that moment, it seems the least important, but my head is buzzing, and my thoughts are wooly.
She’s screaming something at me.
I don’t have a hope of understanding her because now I’m falling.
The ground rears up at me, but the girl is leaping toward me, her hand outstretched, her body flying through the air, and right before her hand brushes mine, I’m certain of the command on her lips.
Jump!
My feet barely touch the ground before I reach deep for control and compel every muscle in my body to obey, throwing myself upward.
A split second later, a feathery body appears beneath me, flying low to the ground. At the exact same moment, the girl’s hand closes around mine. She flips herself around behind me, and we both land safely on the bird’s back, and then we’re rising into the air.
I can’t process it all at once.
My mind is only now catching up with my body as I register Blackbird’s frantic wing beats. The lightning sizzling through his body. The panic in his flight. The way the girl leans out to the side, punching her hand out again, spearing light across our path head, separating the shadows even as they try to close in around us, and then?—
We soar into clear air.
