“Caius!”
Echo’s shout reached Caius at the same moment the shadow beasts slammed into him. They moved fast. Faster than any living creature should be able to.
The impact stole the breath from his lungs. Jaws lined with coal-black teeth snapped at his face, and he brought up his arm to block the onslaught. The leather of his gauntlets might as well have been butter. One of the creatures sliced through his armor with ease. Sharp stabs of pain lanced through him as the thing’s teeth scraped against his flesh, raining down drops of Caius’s blood onto his own face. The wounds burned, bright and immediate, as if acid had been splashed into them.
The dragon tumbled from the roof, brought down by several of the shadow beasts, clinging to its hide like lampreys. Caius could hear it roaring as it fell, its wings beating powerful gusts of wind as it struggled to keep itself aloft. He felt a momentary surge of fear for the dragon. But it could take care of itself. It would have to.
He kicked with all his might, dislodging the beast enough for him to roll away. A second creature was on him before he’d risen past his knees. It was like being struck by a boulder. They went down together, rolling across the roof in a tangle of limbs and gnashing teeth. An arm across the thing’s throat kept its jaw away from Caius’s face, but only barely. Black drops of something the vague consistency of saliva dripped onto Caius’s cheek, scalding everywhere they touched. The beast braced its legs on Caius’s, as if it had seen what he’d done to its brethren and was determined not to allow him to pull the same trick twice. The scabbard on Caius’s back dug into his skin; the other knife was in his hand, but there was no way he could get the leverage to wield it with any sort of finesse.
It wasn’t a fair fight, but the parade of instructors that had bestowed their knowledge upon Caius had not wasted time preparing him for fair fights. The trick to besting a bigger, stronger opponent was finding a way to use their own size and momentum against them. The creature had Caius’s knife arm pinned, but he’d be a poor warrior indeed if that was enough to stop him. Caius angled the knife in his fist upward. The bloodweed-stained tip of the blade was inches away from the beast’s flank.
If Caius couldn’t bring the knife to the beast, then he would have to bring the beast to the knife.
He turned his head to the side and dropped his arm. Without it braced against its throat, the creature fell forward, teeth ripping at the air beside Caius’s face. He felt the knife slide into the thing’s soft belly until the guard stopped it from sinking any deeper.
It didn’t bleed.
It went limp and then it went weightless.
The beast fractured into a writhing mass of black smoke.
Without its weight on him, Caius was free to draw his second long knife. Another creature leaped toward him, heedless of the naked blade in Caius’s hand. He drove it straight into the thing’s throat. Wisps of black swirled around the blade as the beast lost its corporeal form.
Already, the undulating dark masses were joining together, perhaps to create an even larger, deadlier mirror of themselves.
A crash drew his attention from the amorphous entity. He turned to see Echo crumpled at the base of an air-conditioning unit. The metal casing bore a dent the size of her body. Sparks showered wildly where she fell, as if she were no more in control of her fire than she was of her own breathing at that moment.
Tanith approached Echo, her scarlet cloak dragging against the gravel.
“Tanith!” His shout was nearly lost in the riot of noise surging up from the street. More and more of Tanith’s shadow beasts were forming in the darkened corners between buildings. Some took the shapes of dragons, others of nameless creatures shifting from one form to another, with wicked teeth and lashing tails. The bloodweed seemed to slow them down, but only for a short while. They were an endless army. One that could not be killed. Only, with luck, stopped.
Tanith did not respond to the call of her name. She advanced on Echo, who stared up at her with defiant eyes. Caius slashed at the shadow beast that was now surging toward him. It flinched from the touch of his blade, hesitant, as if it remembered the pain it had inflicted.
I hope they’re not sentient, Caius thought. He ran toward Tanith. The monsters had driven him to the far edge of the roof during their tussle, and the space that separated them now seemed infinite.
Tanith’s back was to him, but she must have heard the slap of his boots on the rooftop. She threw up a hand, keeping her predatory gaze fixed on Echo. Flames shivered to life around her hand in a tangle of orange, yellow, and deepest black. The blaze shot toward him, reaching with hungry tendrils of searing light. Caius ducked and rolled, sliding beneath the arc of fire. He righted himself just in time to see Echo push herself up and lunge – with the full weight of her body – against Tanith.
Together, they hit the rooftop. Echo’s fist snapped into Tanith’s face. She was yelling something at Tanith, but Caius didn’t catch all the words. “You – won’t let – hurt them – I swear to —”
Tanith’s fire circled around Caius, correcting its course. A ring of flames erupted around him, trapping him. He had never seen it do that before. She shouldn’t have been able to do that, not when she was so thoroughly distracted by Echo’s artless but effective blows. Even magic, at least the kind he and Tanith and all his people wielded, had to obey the laws of the universe. Humanity had found explanations for certain aspects of the magical world and called it physics, but even that which they had not been able to explain away with modern science had an order to it. Magic was controlled. It was not a wild power. It obeyed the will of the person who cast it, but these flames seemed to have a mind of their own. Like the shadow beasts, the fire seemed to operate independently of Tanith’s instruction.
His skin tingled with the memory of the fire against it. During those long weeks, lost to the darkness and the ceaseless fear that had dominated every waking moment, Tanith had found new and inventive ways to cause him pain.
Pain was her weapon of choice. It had made him tractable, weak. Vulnerable. She had used her fists. Cold, sharp steel. Lashing whips of corded leather. And fire.
She had held her hands against his as she’d summoned flames to her palms, holding him to prevent him from pulling away from the heat and the mind-shattering pain. The memory was so clear, so vivid, that now, staring into the blinding brightness of the blaze circling him, he thought he could smell his own flesh burning.
It’s not real, he reminded himself. Just a memory. And you are stronger than that. He watched as his sister dislodged Echo and sent her flying halfway toward the roof’s ledge with a single kick. She was stronger than she had been before the kuçedra had twisted her into something monstrous. Echo couldn’t triumph against her if it came to trading blows. Not alone.
Caius tightened his grip on his knives and rushed forward through the flames.
A tendril of black nothingness struck out and wound itself around Caius’s ankle. It lurched back, bringing him crashing to the ground, half his body still submerged in the flames.
It burned.
He flailed blindly at the circle of fire with his knife. The blackness receded, though the orange and gold flames remained unaffected. It was enough. Caius dragged himself forward, trying desperately to block out the agony of his burned legs. He had suffered worse attacks in battle, he reminded himself. Get up, godsdammit.
Echo needed him. He wouldn’t fail her like he had Rose. He would not let Echo become another of his sister’s victims. The cycle ended here.
He pushed himself to his feet. Tanith was standing yards away, staring down Echo, who was only now struggling to control the fire at her call. It blossomed around her balled fists like white and black petals of flame. It was lovely, but nothing compared to the strength of Tanith’s blaze. He’d been right in his prediction; Tanith wasn’t trying to kill Echo. If she had been, Echo would not have lived long enough to throw that first punch. Tanith was baiting her, goading her into expending her energy, like a cat playing with a mouse.
“Tanith!”
This time, she did turn to him. “What?” She sounded irritated, as if he had just disturbed her at her studies.
“This ends now.” Caius willed himself to think past the burns, the new wounds freshly opened, the old ones crying in protest. He approached the edge of the roof, where his sister stood on steady feet.
Tanith stared at him for a beat. Then a wicked smile stretched across her lips. “Yes,” she said. “It most certainly does.”
She raised her arm high above her head. Echo chose that moment to unleash a burst of flame toward Tanith, but it was too small, too weak. Tanith brought her hand down in a slicing gesture, and the ground beneath Caius’s feet split. The sound of rending cement cut through the air with a resounding crack. He had one last glimpse of Echo’s screaming face before the rooftop collapsed in a cascade of stone and steel.
He was falling,
falling,
falling.
This is it, he thought. This is how I die.
And then he landed. On something soft. He thought splattering across the pavement of Fifth Avenue would have been more unpleasant. But there were sounds all around him: someone calling his name, someone else shouting in agony. Echoing explosions of gunfire and grenades. The roar of a waterfall of stone crashing to the ground.
He wasn’t dead. He was, in fact, very much alive.
He rolled his head to the side to see what had saved him. There was a patch of grass beneath him, perhaps five feet from where he hovered.
“Hey!” The pink-haired Avicen mage who had accompanied them to Iceland stood not ten feet away, her hands extended and quivering with exertion. “You good?”
Violet. Her name was Violet. Her hands were streaked with blood and a cut had opened up just above her left eyebrow. Blood and dirt caked that side of her face, surely obscuring her vision. Caius nodded. “I can’t move, but other than that, I’m good.”
Suddenly, he fell, landing on the grass with an undignified oof.
Violet offered him a hand, which he gratefully accepted. She hauled him to his feet and he bent immediately to scoop up his knives, glad they hadn’t fallen too far from him.
“Where’s Echo?” he asked Violet. Pieces of masonry littered the ground around them. It looked like Tanith’s strike – whatever it was and however she’d done it – had demolished half the building. Echo was nowhere in sight.
Violet shook her head. “I was hoping you could tell me.” Her chest fell and rose in rapid, shallow breaths. “We’re losing. There’s too many of them.”
An endless army, Caius thought. And all it had to do to win was outlast them.