Because shecannotwin, not now.
I am too strong for her.
Still, I do not want to fight her. I do not want to hurt her. I just want her to let me go.
“You want to cause us pain!” she yells, her voice layered with echoes, one angry, one desperate, one heartbreakingly human. “You want us to wait forever!”
“I’m trying to save you!” I shout back. “You don’t even know what you’re asking for!”
Her eyes flare silver. “Don’t tell me what I know!”
She lunges again and catches my wrist this time. Her fingers are ice and iron as she drags me downward. The crows dive in after her, black streaks tearing through the air like meteors, slamming into my aura and into her. The air thickens until it feels like I am trying to breathe through velvet. My grip on the bone falters.
“No. No, no…”
Anything but this.
A crow slams into my face and disintegrates on contact. Another rakes across my back. Somewhere below, my guys are screaming from the ground, but they cannot even reach us. Weare too far up in the air, and for the briefest moment, I feel like I overestimated my abilities.
What am I compared to multiple Grim Reapers?
But the truth is, I am a lot. I understand the source of Grim Reaper power, and they don’t.
I can do pretty much anything compared to them.
I am trulyfree.
I close my eyes and tap into my core. It lasts only a moment, but when I open them the change is already there. Out of the pale sky, a flock of my own crows floods the air, so black and so big that this time it’s Rhea’s turn to gasp in fear.
I take advantage of the moment, and I’m already falling. The world blinks in and out, reality, void, reality again. One heartbeat I’m midair, the next I’m over the gate, the next I’m above the cracked parking lot.
The last bone burns hot in my palm as I crash to my knees in the tall grass. The world still stutters around me, and through the blur I catch Cassian’s silhouette, his mouth moving as he shouts something I cannot hear.
I tighten my grip until the heat bites.
“Almost done,” I manage, and then I press the bone to the ground.
Magic erupts in a violent flare, threads of silver and black snapping through the field like lashes. My crows dive, colliding with the Grim Reapers’ flock in a maelstrom of feathers and screams, and I close my eyes as I let go.
The instant I release it, I feel everything answer. Every bone I scattered ignites at once, linked through the pulse of my soul. The hospital grounds blaze into a vast circle of black light, and the surge rips through me, through flesh and the memory of flesh, anchoring it all to me with ruthless certainty.
Then the shockwave hits. The air folds inward and drags the girls and their crows with it, tearing them from the field andripping them out of my space. The force shoves them all the way back to the far end, right where the forest begins.
My hand trembles as I reach down to the grass. The bone beside me is nothing but ash now.
Footsteps pound behind me. Cassian first, fast and hard. Talon right after him, breathless. Nathaniel comes slower, his gaze sweeping the horizon like he expects the next attack to rise out of the dark.
It will not. I know it for a fact.
Cassian drops to his knees beside me and grips my shoulders. “Skye. Jesus. You’re bleeding.”
I glance down. Thin streaks of blood run from my wrists, tracing along my fingers. I did not even notice.
“It’s fine,” I murmur. “It’s already healing.” Before my eyes, the wounds stitch themselves shut, like they were never there at all.
For the first time in what feels like forever, the hospital grounds are quiet. I look at my boys, all three of them, and something in my chest loosens.
“It feels really fucking awesome to be this strong,” I say. It is the only comment I have in me.
