He’d pointed at me. “Take the grotesque. Fly to the water and find the conjurers who are causing . . . that.” He swung his sharp-clawed finger toward the window and the violent lightning filling the sky. “The Smith will be there, I’m sure. Fight with whoever is against him. Justice, go with her. Do the same. If a tsunami flattens the city . . .” He laughed again. “Go. Now.”
I knew that even if the wave did hit, Jagger, Rou, and Griff would survive. Rou was water—she couldn’t drown. Griff would fly above the wave, carrying Jagger free of the destruction. Griff might not look muscled or strong, but in his father’s form, he could probably lift a dump truck full of concrete.
But would everyone else survive? Would Winnie make it to the roof, or could she become insubstantial like Rou? Would Cora’s innate good luck keep her safe? Would Luvic have enough time to conjure himself to safety? Would the millions who lived in the city survive? Not likely.
I looked over my shoulder to make certain Justice was still near. He was behind me, to the left, a grim shadow. Even if he couldn’t see the knots of illusion like me, he knew what we faced.
The fog was conjurer-made. The clouds and the lightning too. The waves, though, were real. Maybe they’d started as illusion, but they’d taken on a life of their own.
I gripped the grotesque’s neck and dove into the thick fog coiling around the harbor. It was an electric mist that spread over me in cold, painful fingers. The lightning lit the fog in violent blue bursts, illuminating ghostly shapes and insubstantial creatures.
The fog was sticky, wet, and so thick that soon I couldn’t see Justice. I could barely see the end of the grotesque’s long snout.
Yet it wasn’t the typically eerie quiet of thick fog. Instead, I was blind in the center of a violent maelstrom. Lightning struck every second. It tore through the fog, fiery-hot. The grotesque dove around the sizzling arcs as if it could sense where the next strike would be.
The waves reached up—giant, grasping hands that vied to grab us and yank us underwater. Water slashed my legs and drenched my clothes. My hands grew slippery on the grotesque’s wet stone. Then we burst through the fog and nearly collided with a red and white lighthouse.
I ducked my head as the grotesque shot around the lighthouse and dove under another bolt of lightning.
It took all of a second to take in the scene.
My brother and Finn were locked in a conjurers’ duel. This wasn’t like the duel at the end of the games, where Primus threw illusion at Finn, and Finn swatted it aside with solange. That duel was child’s play compared to this.
Jacob was standing on top of a seething wall of water. It had to be thirty feet tall and reached to the edges of the fog wall. It was as if he were floating on top of Niagara Falls, the deadly white rapids churning beneath him.
The shock of seeing him nearly knocked me off the grotesque. He hadn’t died. A wave of relief hit me, and cresting after it, a wave of sorrow. It was Philoneas then—my dad—who’d died. I never truly knew him. I hadn’t even liked him. But still, I think I would’ve liked to know him. Or at least had a conversation where I was his daughter, and he was the dad who hid me in Hell Gate.
But Jacob—Jacob.
He’d grabbed my hand at the closing ceremony and fought to get us to safety. He’d been protecting me and hiding my secret his whole life. He’d unlocked my power. And now we were close, I felt the connection to him—that strange sensation that had made me so wary during the games. Was it because we were twins and our power was two sides of the same coin? The shadow and the light?
He must’ve felt it too, because he looked up mid-conjure, a bolt of lightning ready to fly.
He was grim, mad-eyed, and resolute. He looked like a man who’d been tortured for weeks who’d finally escaped and knew this was his last stand.
What had happened to him?
He was gaunt. Bearded. His clothes tattered and salt-soaked. His blond hair was wet and plastered against his head. He was scraped and bruised. He looked so far from the boyish innocence he’d worn before that he was almost unrecognizable.
He was fighting for his life. Constrictor knots hung about him in a massive net, a dozen illusions all working at once. The impenetrable fog was Jacob’s. It was just like the fog Philoneas had conjured at the game in the north and before the duel. The lightning was his too. But mostly, he’d built a wall of air in front of the wave and was desperately trying to keep it from washing over the city. I could see the knots of it, thousands of them, slowly unraveling.
He was strained to the point of breaking, and he was all alone.
And . . . maybe he and I were the only ones who knew it, but his dad had just died too.
Or perhaps Philoneas had died in this battle?
I didn’t know. I only knew Jacob was holding a tsunami back from the city and fighting Finn at the same time.
Yet when Jacob looked to the sky and saw me swooping down on a terrifying stone grotesque, his expression transformed. The thick fog around us cleared. He stared at me wide-eyed, and then he laughed. It was a joyful, wild laugh. He grinned, and the tug of it was so fierce that I grinned right back.
I swooped down, the wing of the grotesque slicing through the water, splashing Jacob. A lance of blue fire sped toward him. He was grinning at me, not even aware he was about to be sliced in half. He’d only taken his eyes off the battle for one second, but in a fight for your life, one second of inattention was all it took.
I didn’t need the hard yank of Jagger’s blood to do what I did. I snarled and flung my mind into the space that untied illusion. It was a Smith knot. A simple square knot. Before, it may have taken three seconds to unravel. Now, it was gone almost before I’d formed the thought to untie it.
As the fire lance disintegrated, I lifted my head and looked to the lighthouse.
I was twenty feet away. It felt like twenty inches.
