“No—”
The word tears out of me. I shove to my feet. My legs don’t want to hold me but I make them, staggering forward two steps before a hand catches my arm.
Stellan.
He’s worse than I am—blood at his lip, one arm clutched against his ribs, face pale as bone. But his eyes are fixed on Bree with the same horror I feel clawing up my throat.
“She can’t.” His voice is harsh, cracking. “If she pushes everything—”
“I know.”
“She’ll be killed.”
“Iknow.”
I wrench free. Start moving. The ground pulses beneath my boots, Ether humming so loud I can feel it in my teeth. Every step closer to her, the pressure builds—not against me, butthroughme, like she’s pulling from everywhere at once.
“Bree!”
She doesn’t hear me. Doesn’t look up. The silver in her mist is blinding now, too bright to look at directly.
I’m ten feet away when the veins ignite.
Light erupts from the ground in a column of white fire. The air splits. Sound dies. For one suspended heartbeat I see everything—Bree’s face lifted toward the sky, Riley’s hands locked in the dirt, their magic fused into something that screams through dimensions I can’t name.
Riley’s scream cuts through the light at the same moment mine does.
Then the blast hits.
White.
Everywhere.
I don’t feel myself fly.
Sound returns first.
Screaming.
Not battle-screaming. Not pain. Something older. Somethingwrong.
Phil’s voice—but not Phil’s voice. The thing underneath, the presence that wore him like a mask, shrieking as if the light burned through layers of it.
Ethos.
Ethos is screaming.
I have never hated anything more than I hate him in this moment.
I force my eyes open.
The courtyard is scorched. Silver ash drifts through the air like the aftermath of a star dying. The veins in the ground have gone dark—not dead, but quiet. Waiting.
I’m on my back. Twenty feet from where I was standing.
Move.
I roll onto my side. Push up. My arms shake. My vision doubles, then corrects. The ringing in my ears drowns out everything except that horrible keening—Ethos still screaming, still too close to Bree, the sound getting weaker, fractured.
