He slid his sword free and the shadow creature—not an animal; animals bled—disintegrated, its particles spreading free like smoke on the wind.
A grunt sounded from behind him and he turned to find Jasper crouched low, one of his knives slicing through the neck of one of the blasted creatures while his other clattered to the ground. A tendril of liquid shadows had wrapped itself around his wrist, preventing him from plunging the second blade home. Dorian moved without thought; his legs ate up the distance between them, and within seconds, the beast met the same fate as its brethren.
Jasper wasted no time picking up his fallen weapon. His feathers had tumbled from their normal artful styling, and swooped across his sweaty brow. “Thanks,” he breathed, pushing himself to his feet. He glanced around, and Dorian followed his gaze. The shadows were coalescing into other shapes, bigger and more monstrous. The things couldn’t be killed. They could be slowed. Stopped, for a time. But not killed.
“Jasper,” Dorian said, hefting his sword to meet the oncoming assault. “Do me a favor.”
Jasper brushed the feathers off his forehead with the back of his hand before sinking into a fighting stance, his back to Dorian’s. “Anything.”
“Don’t get yourself killed.”
—
Ivy let Jasper and Dorian go on ahead, clearing a path. She spared the mangled Avicen’s corpse a glance, ignoring the sickened roil of her stomach. It was, by far, the worst thing she had ever seen.
Dead, Ivy told herself, wrapping her hands around the straps of her borrowed backpack. It was Echo’s. Ivy had stuffed it full of all the healing supplies she could get her hands on at Wyvern’s Keep, before Tanith had taken her hostage, and it felt like the only thing grounding her in that moment. Nothing you can do. Move.
A soft moan drifted to where she stood.
She followed the sound to a recessed alcove tucked between two storefronts. There she found one of the human soldiers huddled, his limbs splayed and quivering, one arm wrapped around his bleeding midsection. His eyes widened as she approached, flicking between the feathers on her head and the eyes that were larger and blacker than any human’s could ever be.
He began to mumble incoherently as she knelt down beside him, trying to back away despite the fact that there was nowhere for him to go.
“It’s okay,” Ivy said, her voice as soothing as she could make it. She set the backpack down and began removing the items she’d need from it: sterile bandages, a salve that tingled in her palm with the healing magic imbued in it, a potion to help with the pain and slow the bleeding. The soldier blinked too rapidly at the brisk movements of her hands, but the trembling in his limbs seemed to abate. “I’m here to help.”
—
There are too godsdamn many of them.
Jasper had just enough time to form this thought before three of the shadow beasts fell upon him, black teeth flashing, death dripping from fangs that shouldn’t exist.
Dorian’s sword glinted in the too-bright lights mounted atop a nearby Humvee as it arced through the air, graceful and deadly as it sliced through the gathering shadows. But there were so many. So, so many.
—
Ivy pressed her hands into wounds that wouldn’t close, willing the blood to weaken to a trickle between her fingers. Magic flared between torn flesh and her sullied palms. She had never been taught this skill, this healing by touch, but in the heat of battle, it came to her as naturally as breathing. She poured her magic into the cracks and hoped it was enough to hold the wounded together.
—
The sword was not Jasper’s weapon of choice. He’d never felt the need to overcompensate. Smaller weapons, easily concealed—those he was good with. A whisper of steel in the night. Death sneaking in on little cat feet, on you before you even knew it was in the room.
But watching Dorian made Jasper reconsider everything he’d ever thought about swords. Dorian held his the way Michelangelo held a paintbrush. It was art. And with it, he painted the streets black with the remnants of shadows.
Maybe we’ll make it through this, Jasper thought. Maybe we’ll—
—
They were falling faster than Ivy could fix them.
—
A weight slammed into Dorian’s back, solid and heavy and full of malice. It disrupted his balance, made him lose the steps of the dance, faltering in his fleet-footed elegance. He brought up his sword, but the creature was too close and he was too late. He lashed out anyway, and his blade connected with something—not the monster on his back; one of its siblings, maybe. The blow shivered up his arm all the way to his shoulder, but it was wrong, all wrong. The thing on his back screeched and attacked, wrapping itself around him like a snake strangling a rabbit—
Talons, black as coal, raked across skin so deeply it took a moment for the pain to set in. Dorian’s vision went red, then black. A scream tore its way up his throat as the world went dark.
—
Blood caked in white feathers, tears tracked down soot-covered cheeks as another one slipped through Ivy’s fingers. For every one she patched up, another two were lost before she could even get to them. Cries of agony pierced the night. Ivy packed a wound, then another, and another, eyes on each patient, on their skin, their feathers, their scales. Flesh torn apart and put back together, as fast as she could and still too slow.
—
Jasper watched Dorian collapse, knees crashing to the pavement as his legs folded beneath him as if he were a marionette with its strings cut. The air rushed from Jasper’s lungs as Dorian slumped to the side, one hand cradling the right half of his face, fingers slick with blood. His sword hung limply from his other hand, tip scraping uselessly against the asphalt. A shadow beast dove toward Dorian, eager to finish what it had started, jaws open as it prepared to land a killing blow.
Jasper’s knife flew straight and true, right into that gaping maw.
He felt something inside him shatter as he ran. Something deep and vital and beautiful splintering into ugliness. A high-pitched buzz scratched at his ears. His lips were moving as he pulled Dorian into his lap, but he wasn’t aware of the words spilling from them, only of the way Dorian’s eye patch dangled from his face, the string cut by those sweeping black talons, the mass of scar tissue clustered around his left eye socket, the mess of blood and thicker things clogging his right.
Jasper’s heart hammered out a rhythmic plea as he shouted for help, for Ivy, for anyone.
No no no no no no—
—
Dorian could hear a heart beating against his ear, and he knew it to be Jasper’s, but he couldn’t see him. Darkness, more complete even than the one that had rendered him blind, threatened to engulf him. The last thought that drifted through his mind was that he was going to die without seeing that stupid beautiful face one last time.
A monstrous injustice, he thought, lucid somehow, even through the pain. But then the shadows swallowed him whole and he thought no more.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN