We stumble to the tunnel, and I’m throwing small bolts of electricity at anything with red eyes that gets too close. I keep them contained and precise, nothing that would give me away.
Finally, we burst from the cave mouth into the night air. People are scattered across the hillside, more of them than last time, but the hellhounds followed us again.
“Form up!” Logan shouts. “Everyone together! Fire barriers,now!”
Everyone scrambles to obey, fire erupting in defensive walls.
It might actually work. We might be able to hold them off with fire, without me having to?—
“Nina!” Vera screams from my right.
I spin just as a hellhound barrels through a fire barrier like it’s nothing.
And then, just like that, Nina Aldridge goes down.
I throw a bolt of electricity, but I’m too late. She’s already gone, her body chomped nearly in two, blood pooling around her as her dark eyes stare at nothing.
No. Not Nina. I was starting to see her as a friend. Now she’s gone, and she’ll never finish whatever she was working on in that notebook or figure out who she wanted to be instead of the cold-hearted information broker her parents were forcing her to become.
Vera releases a war cry, vaults herself forward, and slams her dagger into a hellhound’s head, driving the blade between the creature’s eyes as she’s flying through the air.
The hellhound collapses next to the pieces of Nina’s body.
“Hold the lines!” Logan calls out, desperate now. “Don’t let them through!”
But they’re breaking through everywhere. People are falling and dying, and the hellhounds keep coming?—
A scream cuts through the chaos from forty feet to my right.
“Everyone get behind me!” Deidre’s on the hillside, her hands raised, her fire gathering around a cluster of people retreating. “I’ll create a barrier! I’ve studied advanced defensive formations!”
A hellhound leaps, clearing her barrier in a single bound.
Its jaws close around her throat.
“Deidre!” Lauren screams across the hillside, shoving against the flow of people, fighting toward her sister’s body.
“Lauren, no! She’s already?—”
A hellhound cuts me off. I kill it with a bolt of electricity, but there’s another behind it. By the time I look up, Lauren’s down, a hellhound standing over her shredded body.
Logan appears beside me. Blood’s dripping from a cut on his bicep, and his hands are shaking between throws, but his fire hits clean when he lets it fly.
“The fire isn’t enough,” he says, way too calm for someone who’s standing in the middle of a giant slaughter.
I’m throwing a contained bolt at a hellhound closing in on Tyler Brennan when a scream cuts through the air.
Alessandra Sterling’s pressed against the cliff face, her expression twisted with horror as three hellhounds circle her.
“Alessandra!” Callie screams, desperate and breaking.
I run to her, throwing electricity as I go. One hellhound down. Two.
The third one lunges.
I throw everything I have, but I’m too far away, and the angle is wrong.
Alessandra falls.
