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Trying.
Her torso couldn’t bend properly in the dress. Her legs could barely move. She smashed face-first into the nearest pew, her nose crunching. Warm blood filled her mouth with a coppery tang.
Bryaxis laughed again, the sound sending the remaining flowers shriveling into rot and dust.
“We helped you,” Nesta panted, the words thick with blood as she heaved herself to her feet again, forced her shaking legs to steady. Forced her hand to pivot Ataraxia before her.
The creature tilted its serpentine head to the side, revealing a crest of great, spiked horns. “And yet you called for me today.” Its voice was nothing short of a nightmare.
Nesta spat blood onto the stones, showering the wilted flowers littered there. “I did no such thing.”
Another low laugh that raked along her bones. “I have come home to where sisters wait for me.”
In answer, Elain screamed. Then Mor. Magic pulsed past Nesta, spiraling toward Bryaxis’s squatting form. The shadow grew, engorging in answer. It was feeding on their terror.
Nesta glanced to Cassian. He remained hunched over himself, head in his hands, shaking and shouting, his Siphons guttering like candles in a gale under the cover of his wings. Lost to her.
Emerie was down, too, her damaged wings splayed out on the floor. Even Amren was shuddering against a pew, hands over her eyes. Whispering over and over to herself, “You survived it; you got through it.” Her red lips shook with each word. “Monster, monster, monster.”
Nesta was alone in this, then.
Nyx wailed again, burying his face in his unseeing mother’s neck.
Bryaxis turned its mighty head toward the babe, toward Nesta’s sister and her mate. That great, spiked tail whipped back and forth, back and forth. “The suckling’s fear is sweet as honey.”
Something sharp as glass shot through Nesta. “Yours will be, too,” she said, and didn’t give Bryaxis time to react before she attacked.
Ataraxia met what might have been a clawed foot the size of her entire body. But the shadows blasted apart, and Bryaxis howled, debris again raining, tiles scattering on the floor, stones threatening to crush all these people she loved. Endangering Nyx, even within his parents’ arms.
She had to get it outside. But to unleash Bryaxis upon the city, upon all the innocents of Velaris—
Rhys roared toward her, once again battling through his own nightmares just enough, “KILL IT!”
Bryaxis recoiled like a striking asp, and shot for where Mor knelt on the other side of the temple.
Nesta winnowed as that talon of blackness plunged for where Mor lay, presumably to blast her soul apart with its horror. Nesta slammed headfirst into it. She dug Ataraxia into the closest thing she could find to a limb.
Light flared, and a force like an avalanche sent her tumbling.
No—it wasn’t real. It was all imagined, that force. It couldn’t touch her; it just made her think she’d been touched so she would reel back. She found her feet; her legs; her strength. Mind-Stilled in a single moment, settling into her body fully.
Nesta launched herself at the serpentine creature once more rearing up.
Bryaxis dove for her, those huge jaws yawning open. Nesta winnowed again, right to where its massive, crested head met its spine. She plunged Ataraxia down—
Nothing but air met the sword, and she plummeted with stomach-churning speed before colliding with a pew.
A crack radiated through her arm and shoulder, but she didn’t feel it, not as she got to her feet, not as she whirled to find Bryaxis sweeping from the temple in a roiling cloud of darkness.
She gritted her teeth, blood tickling along her chin, and was only vaguely aware of how her left arm hung at her side as she vaulted over the pew—clumsily, thanks to her dress—smashing through all those flowers and ribbons Elain had so lovingly arranged. Now little more than withered obstacles in her way.
Behind her, in the temple, the screaming stopped. Not one of her friends made a sound.
But then the screaming in the streets began.
Nesta burst into the sunlight in time to see that dark cloud soar into the startlingly blue sky.
She didn’t hesitate. She winnowed, right onto the roof of the building next door. Below, swarming through the streets, people were fleeing. It wouldn’t do them any good. Not against Fear.
