She moves in a flash.
Taking a quick step back, she launches herself at me, her feet leaving the ground. She gains air, arcing down toward me, her left hand formed into a fist that will surely break my jaw.
But she’s left her right side exposed.
My left hand sweeps across my front, and my stomach muscles bunch, allowing me to lift without losing contact with Erik.
I’m ready to ram the hammer up beneath Glass’s chin and break her face.
At the last moment, she changes direction, an impossible shift of balance that takes her toward my left side. She half-spins, like a spear turning in the air, taking her out of the path of the hammer’s head and directly toward its exposed handle.
Both of her hands close around the onyx shaft.
That’s when she spreads her wings.
They ram into my body, her feathers cutting across my chest like knives. As she wrenches my hammer upward, the impact of her wings knocks me backward.
For the first time since the Valkyries arrived, my right hand leaves Erik’s heart. My body is wrenched away from him, and my legs out from under him.
Within my mind, I’m aware of the pain and damage to my body, but all I can focus on is the way his head and torso hit the snow without me to hold him. The way he’s facing away from me.
The lost contact feels like I’m being ripped apart.
I must be screaming. I must be bleeding. My instincts are raging as I try to pour commands through the hammer.
Break! Shatter! Burn!
Destroy her wings!
But my grip on the hammer loosened the moment I gained air, and just as I tried to scream commands through it, my hand opened.
There’s air between me and my hammer. Just enough that I’m not in contact with it.
I fly backward; the wind rushing around my ears before I hit the snow with a hardthud, propelled so far from Erik that I’m now a full ten paces away.
I’ve landed on my back. General Glass drops onto me. One of her knees lands on my chest, and the other on the snow next to me.
My ribs shift under her weight. One of thempops.
For those awful seconds when my hand opened around my hammer, the air around me went dark. In the seconds before I scream at my fingers to tighten again, I may as well be human.
In that heartbeat, I catch the desperation in Glass’s eyes. She didn’t manage to wrench the hammer entirely from my grip, so this heartbeat is all she has before my strength will surge again.
Her wings are spread. Her left hand shoots toward my neck faster than I can send a command to my hand.
Her move weakens her hold on the hammer, but?—
Fuck!
My body seizes with shock the second her palm touches my throat.
Pain strikes through me from my heart, a horrible burning agony that pulls andpullsout from me.
Above me, Glass’s lips are pressed together into a hard line, and her eyes gleam as silver as her wings.
My left hand is still wrapped around my hammer and now her wings are vulnerable, but I can’t seem to draw on my power.
I can’t move.
