Svena’s lips curled in a frigid sneer. “If you think I am soft like my sister, you are fatally mistaken. I have no problem going through you if that’s what it takes.” She lifted her hand again, and the magic above them sharpened to a deadly point. “Last warning, little Heartstriker. Move.”
Julius had been threatened by enough dragons to know that wasn’t a bluff, but he still didn’t let go. He just sat there, kneeling on the ice with his arms around his brother’s neck and his eyes on Svena. It was a pointless resistance. His body wouldn’t even slow the ice before it crushed them, but that didn’t matter, because this wasn’t about winning. It was about Julius and the fact that no matter what Bob had done, he couldn’t stand by and watch his brother die.
When it was clear he wasn’t going to move, Svena shrugged and started to bring her hand down. But then, just as the glacier’s worth of frozen magic she’d gathered was about to release on top of them, another body appeared in front of Julius’s.
“Svena!” Katya cried, grabbing her sister’s hand with both of hers. “Stop this!”
Svena was so surprised, she actually took a step back. “What are you doing, Last Born?” she roared when she’d recovered. “Move!”
“No!” Katya roared back, planting her feet firmly on the bloody ice in front of the two Heartstrikers. “I don’t care what you do to the seer, but I will not let you harm Julius! He’s the one who saved us from Estella!”
“That debt was paid,” Svena snarled. “This is diff—”
“This is greater than debts!” Katya said angrily. “Julius is my friend and yours. Since we met him, he has done nothing but stand by our clan. Even after you broke the pacts, he was reasonable and fair. He could have branded you an oath breaker and thrown our whole clan down in shame, but he didn’t. He understood and accepted our weaknesses. Now he’s fighting for his brother as you once fought for me, and you’re too snow blind to see it!”
“Brohomir stole our seer!” Svena yelled, her voice echoing to the crumbling Skyways. “He killed my enemy and stole our legacy!”
“So what?” Katya snapped. “We all know you were never really going to kill Amelia, and you were the only one who wanted another seer in the clan anyway. The rest of us were looking forward to making our own decisions for once.”
Svena stared at her in horror. “So you’re just going to let him get away with this? Let him take what is ours?”
“It’s only stealing if we care,” Katya said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Way I see it, we dodged a bullet. You remember how crazy Estella was at the end. Brohomir’s not even half her age, and he has a complex emotional relationship with a pigeon. Why would we want to invite that lunacy back into our clan? Your daughter might not see the future, but she’ll still be every bit as clever, strong, magical, and ruthless as you are. Let that be enough, Svena! Take that blessing and go, because if you’re going to stand here and obsess over the Seer of the Heartstrikers, then you’re as bad as Estella. Especially when we’ve got such bigger problems.”
Katya lifted her arm to point at the hole Bob’s crash had left in the spiral of on-ramps that formed the ceiling of the hidden house’s urban cavern. Julius hadn’t had time to even glance at it during the chaos. Now, though, he followed Katya’s motion out of habit, lifting his eyes to the sky. Or at least, where the sky should have been.
Julius sucked in a breath. Being stuck in the house since yesterday, he’d heard a lot about the crisis they were facing, but he hadn’t actually laid eyes on it until this moment. Now, doom was all he could see. An endless expanse of it, complete with a black shell, beady black eyes the size of blimps, and writhing tentacles that filled the sky from horizon to horizon.
“Is that…?” He swallowed. “Are we seeing…?”
“We are,” Bob whispered, his body as still as the ground beneath them. “That is the Nameless End.”
There was no laughter in his words now. No jokes, no smugness, nothing that made him sound like Bob. The voice whispering in his ear might as well have belonged to a stranger, but Julius just shivered and clutched his brother closer. “You have a plan, right? You can beat it.”
“I have a plan,” Bob assured him. “But first…” His voice dissolved with a quiver as he nodded in front of them. “This is it.”
Julius had no idea what Bob was talking about. All he saw in front of them were Katya and Svena, but while Katya was exactly where she’d started—standing in front of Julius with her finger stabbed up at the monster who’d taken over the sky—Svena looked like a different dragon. Maybe Katya’s words had gotten through, or maybe she’d had the same reaction to the Leviathan’s new form as Julius had, because she no longer looked ready to kill. She looked terrified, her fair skin even paler than the frost on her fingers as she stared at the death floating over their heads. She was still gawking when Katya grabbed her arm and pulled her to the side, away from Bob and Julius. This should have been their chance to escape, but when Julius tried to get up, Bob pulled him back down.
“What is your problem?” Julius whispered frantically. “We need to go!”
“There’s nowhere to go,” Bob replied, clutching his brother. “Look.”
He nodded again at the space in front of them. This time, though, when Julius turned around, Katya and Svena were gone, leaving nothing between them and the Black Reach.
The oldest seer hadn’t moved an inch since the fight began. He was still standing on the steps on the ruined porch, watching silently. Julius was trying to figure out what had changed to make Bob so spooked when the shattered light above their front door miraculously flickered back to life. It was very bright—security grade at Marci’s request—but due to the damage, the bulb was hanging down by a wire, dangling from its fixture directly behind the Black Reach.
With the bright-orange light behind him, the Black Reach was now little more than a dark silhouette. The glare did funny things to his shadow too, throwing it out like a dagger across the white frosted ground, down the frozen driveway, and over the bloody, cratered ice to touch the tips of Bob’s shoes. A simple shadow, that’s all it was, but between the ice, the dark, and the Black Reach’s height, it looked as though someone had painted a line on the ground. A long, black arrow, pointed directly at Bob.
“Julius,” the seer said, his voice little more than air. “Do you remember when I told you that a seer’s first vision is always their own death?”
Julius nodded, scooting away from the shadow’s edge.