“You’re a single archer.”
“I don’t miss.” Cocky goddess.
I look at the room. Really look. Not at the people I love but at what they are.
Tiana pulling on boots with the calm efficiency of a woman who’s killed before and didn’t lose sleep over it.
Kestra checking the bone-handled blade at her hip, Unseelie steel that’s already tasted her own blood tonight and is thirsty for someone else’s. Kieran beside his sister, shadows pooling at their feet and mingling, and I realize I’m looking at the two most dangerous people in the Unseelie Court about to walk into it together and I almost feel sorry for Moros.
Almost.
Orion at my left shoulder radiates enough heat to forge steel.
Pepper behind the bar, purple sparks dripping off her fingers onto the wood, and the wood humming back.
Sabina with an arrow nocked and the calmest expression of anyone in the room.
Vanessa partially shifted, scales crawling up her neck, teeth too sharp, looking at the door like the door said something about her mother.
Dagda leaning on the bar looking proud. Badb and Macha flanking Morrigan, who sits in the corner smiling the smile of awoman who started this fire a thousand years ago and has been waiting to watch it burn.
And the gold bond at my wrist. Muffled. Afraid. But there.
I’m coming, Finnian.
“Pepper.” I turn to my cousin. The one who showed up. The one who didn’t leave the light on but came anyway. The one with five mates and a body count.
“I know.” She meets my eyes and what I see there isn’t the careful distance from the clover. It’s the twelve-year-old who burned down a building because someone looked at Sabina wrong, and she’s been in there the whole time.
“Let’s go get your boy back.”
“All right!” Vanessa grins. “Who wants a dragon ride?”
53
Ash
Vanessa bankshard enough to rearrange my internal organs.
“Left!” Sabina shouts from somewhere below us, and the twang of a bowstring cracks the air, followed by something shattering mid-flight. The arrow she’s shot out of the sky in the last thirty seconds.
I don’t know how she is doing it but the magic in them shatters the protections around the Academy.
Somewhere below us Dagda and the goddesses are taking back the wilds, and easing the survivors.
I flatten against Vanessa’s spine, one hand fisted in the leather harness Dagda rigged, the other gripping Pepper’s wrist because my cousin decided straddling a dragon in a combat zone was the appropriate time to stand up.
“Sit the fuck down!”
“I can’t aim sitting!” Purple sparks trail from her free hand, whipping behind us in a chaotic ribbon. She’s grinning. Of course she’s grinning. Pepper has always been the one who grins when things are about to go sideways. “This is why I chopped my hair.”
She’s also a chaos witch currently in her element. “I bet you accidently singed it.”
“Shush.”
Below us, in Vanessa’s right claw, Orion hangs like a man who has accepted his situation and is simply waiting for it to end. And is for some reason loving it. Seriously, he’s as bad as Vanessa, shooting fireballs from her talons. I am pretty sure they have some kind of unspoken competition rolling.
In her left claw, Sabina nocks another arrow without looking, tracking something past my line of sight.
