Crack! Crack! Crack!
The surface of the marble immediately shattered, and I slammed a wave of my Ice magic down into all the jagged zigzags. The stone shrieked at the sudden, brutal assault, but I ignored its cries and hammered at it with the brutal one-two punch of my Ice and Stone magic, pouring all my power into the growing cracks and widening them even more, shattering every single bit of stone, then all the metal underneath.
The seconds ticked by, and I reached for even more of my power, gathering up every single scrap of it and forcing it down, down, down—
CRACK!
With one giant, crashing roar, the floor beneath my feet split wide open.
*
For a moment, there was just noise.
A rushing roar filled my head with a dizzying symphony of sound. I had the sense of free-falling, and I reached for what little was left of my Stone magic to harden my skin, so that I wouldn’t impale myself on a piece of shrapnel and bleed out before I got the chance to kill Deirdre.
I hit the ground hard, bouncing off the rocky rubble that covered the vault floor from my blasting through the one above it. Dust clouded the air, making it hard to breathe, and I coughed and coughed, trying to clear the pulverized marble from my lungs.
I dug my hands into the loose rocks under my body and managed to push myself up and then onto my feet. I squinted, trying to see through the billowing clouds of dust, but I couldn’t so much as see the walls around me, much less peer out the vault door and tell if Bria, Owen, and Silvio had managed to rescue Finn yet.
As I stumbled around the vault, trying to figure out where the door was, I palmed one of my knives, searching for someone to kill.
“You bitch!” a voice roared behind me. “You just don’t know when to quit, do you?”
I whipped around just in time for a fist to zoom out of the dust and slam into my face. Thanks to my jarring landing, I’d lost my grip on my Stone magic, so the punch socked me square in the jaw, making pain explode all the way up my cheekbone.
The force of the punch threw me back through the dust and up against a bank of safety-deposit boxes, some of which had been opened. I slammed the metal drawers shut with my body, each one punching into my back like a hammer and making me groan with pain. So that was where one of the walls was. Good to know.
Santos loomed up in front of me, his black hair now gray with marble dust. Even more of it coated his face, including that jagged scar on his cheek, making him look like he’d upended a sack of flour over his head. He growled and came at me. I raised my knife to stab him, but he knocked the weapon out of my hand. He tried to punch me again, but I blocked the blow and slammed my fist into his throat, hitting the giant where he was vulnerable.
Santos coughed, wheezed, and sputtered, but he surged forward again and wrapped his hands around my throat. He lifted me off the ground and wrenched me left and right, slamming my body into more open safety-deposit boxes, like I was the silver piece in a pinball machine and he was trying to get a high score.
I punched him, slamming my fists into his face over and over again, but he just snarled and took the blows, even though I managed to break his nose with one of them. The blood mixed with the marble dust on his face and made him look even more angry and vengeful.
I palmed a second knife, but Santos realized what I was up to, and he grabbed my arm, pulled it forward, and then rammed my hand back against the wall. The bones in my left wrist shattered on impact, and I screamed, my knife slipping from my numb, nerveless fingers. The weapon clattered to the floor and dropped into a hole in the piles of rubble.
White spots began winking on and off in my field of vision, and it was only a matter of time before I ran out of air. I’d already used up most of my magic breaking into the vault, and an Ice dagger wouldn’t do me any good against the giant. My eyes flicked left and right, looking for something that I could use to at least get him to let go of me. Once I had air back in my lungs, I could figure out the rest.
Santos drew me away from the wall and then slammed me right back up against it, hard enough to make some of the loose safety-deposit boxes rattle beside my shoulder. My eyes latched onto the one closest to me, and I quit hitting Santos. Instead, I reached down with my right hand and grabbed the handle on the end of the box. At least, I tried to, but the dust and sweat coating my hand made my fingers slip off the handle. I growled with frustration, although it sounded more like a whimper.
Santos must have thought that I was flailing around for no reason because he laughed. “Not so tough now, are you, Blanco? I’m going to enjoy squeezing the life out of you for all the trouble you’ve caused me.”