“I wonder what it would take to break you enough to work for me, hmm? Watch Draewulf kill your friends? Kill your precious king?” Odion glances up. “Or maybe kill my brother?”
My eyes narrow. He laughs as if he knows his words hit home. I twist my wrist beneath him. Bend my fingers just enough to grab his hand. If I can just . . .
I let loose liquid fire straight into his veins.
He jerks back, eyes widening in shock, in horror, at the impossible realization that I can reach through his block and kill him. And he can’t let go.
Abruptly, there’s a blade in his other hand and he’s bringing it toward my chest. But I can’t release him and his body’s too heavy to push away.
The knife hesitates.
His mouth falls open.
He utters a curse followed by a gurgle, then slumps on top of me, and the blade clatters to the ground.
Eogan’s standing over us, sword in hand, stained with his own brother’s blood.
He shoves Odion aside and pulls me up. I shriek as the pain in my leg rushes in and nearly cripples me. I limp forward, but Eogan’s warm hands are sliding along my arms, my shoulders, my throat. My bruised face.
“I’m fine,” I say, trembling more from his touch than my pain. I push his hands off. I don’t want to feel him. I don’t want to pretend he cares for anything more than winning this battle. “He’s going to kill them,” I say, swerving my attention back to Colin, Draewulf, and King Sedric.
They’re still locked in a fight, and Rolf and the other knights are now working to hold off the Bron soldiers along with Princess Rasha, who’s swinging a sword more skillfully than I’ve ever seen a woman do.
Eogan nods once, grimly. “I’ll go around behind him. Distract him from the front?”
Oh, I’ll do more than distract him.
With a hitch of my leg, I step forward, refusing to allow my gaze to fall on Odion because something tells me if I look I’ll lose it, and then the backstabbing, the betrayals, Breck’s death—they’ll all become real. And right now, Colin and Faelen need me.
“Nym.” Eogan’s voice dips. “This isn’t like the airships or the wolves. Draewulf . . . he’s more dangerou—”
“I know,” I say coldly and keep walking. Let’s just get this whole sick thing finished so I can go home. To wherever home is now. I glance over and hurl an angry blast of ice at the Bron soldiers, half blinding them, before I focus my energy on Draewulf just as he backhands King Sedric into the turret wall.
Colin’s creating fissure after fissure beneath the monster’s feet at the same time he’s yanking rocks from the cliff and throwing them at the beast’s head. It’s a wonder the whole fortress is not falling down under us.
I bend low and focus on releasing another flash of ice, this time along the ground to create a slick surface on Colin’s already-uneven stones. It works, and Draewulf’s claws clack and clatter on the frozen bricks. He scuttles forward, and I bring down a lightning bolt, which he dodges before shifting his enormous body to face me.
His eyes zero in on mine over his flat, disgusting, part-man, part-animal snout.
He growls.
With one bat of his hand, he’s knocked Colin aside like a leaf and is crawling this way.
My stomach drops. He’s just been playing with them.
It’s me he wants.
Draewulf slips and claws his way toward me, with an expression wavering between hate and mockery, as I send ice picks, followed by lightning, followed by thick chunks of hail, followed by everything I think I am capable of.
It’s as if he’s a ghost walking—the way he avoids them, his movements so fluid. His glare never falters as he approaches with those thick lips and pointed teeth.
I swallow. Images of Breck fill my mind—what he did to her. What he’ll do to the rest of us.
“The prized slave who just couldn’t do what she was told,” he snarls. “All you had to do was take down the fortress and you and Colin would’ve survived.”
“While you hid like a pathetic weakling beneath the skin of a blind girl.”
His eyes flash. “Why stoop to the dirty work of taking over two kingdoms when I can have slaves do it? And as far as the blind girl—what better way to know another’s weaknesses than to serve right under her Elemental nose.”
He erupts with a roar and springs for me.
I shove forth a wall of fire between us that I’m not sure is from the sky or my hand. He leaps through just as my knees are kicked out from behind. I drop and Adora’s insane laugh fills my head along with the stench of Draewulf’s smoldering flesh. I look up in time to see his claws coming down to rip my chest into a million colorful shreds.
I lash a hand out, except suddenly Colin is standing in front of me.
Abruptly. Horrifically.
He screams as the sharp nails pierce his flesh, carving through the muscle and bone before he falls.
I slash another lightning bolt at the beast, cracking it through his arm.