Jasper was good in a fight. Better than most people expected. He had spent years carefully cultivating an air of languid indolence, projecting an ease that said to all who looked his way that he was more of a lover, not a fighter. That he preferred to keep his hands clean no matter how dirty his task. It was a ruse. A shadow of a lie that had served him well. Being underestimated was a weapon all its own, and one Jasper knew how to wield with skill.
But this was no fight.
This was chaos. This was the slam of one body into another, the sound of cloth and metal and flesh tearing, the fever pitch of shouts and wails and pleas. Smoke clogged the air, battling for dominance with the electric ozone scent of the in-between hovering above it all. Somewhere, gas was leaking, painting the atmosphere with its thick, sickly stench. Jasper thought that if he struck a match, the air itself would catch fire, burning them all in an orgiastic frenzy of violence and blood and death.
Metal screeched as a body landed atop the car behind which Jasper crouched. Shattered glass rained down from the ruined windows, scattering to the ground like chunks of hail. Dorian knelt to one side of Jasper, sword drawn, while Ivy huddled by the wheel on his other side, her already-pale skin even paler, her black eyes wide. Jasper had spotted her white feathers as she’d come running out of the library. Luck had drawn her eyes to them, and Jasper hoped that luck held on a little longer.
He peeked over the now-concave roof of the car. It was the body of an Avicen warrior – the bloodstained feathers protruding from its head confirmed that much – but whoever it was had parted with their face and what looked like half of their internal organs. Bile rose, quick and sour, in Jasper’s throat as he ducked back down. Something dark and sinuous weaved between the nearby vehicles before disappearing from view.
“This is bad.” Jasper usually tried to avoid stating the obvious, but the situation was so very bad it seemed worth mentioning. “They’re being slaughtered, if our new friend here is anything to go by.”
“Stay here,” Dorian said, already leaning around the trunk of the van to gauge his next move. The sword sat so naturally in his hand that it might as well have been an extension of his arm. “Take care of Ivy.”
Jasper seized hold of Dorian’s sleeve before the other man could escape to throw himself boldly into the fray.
Dorian glanced down at Jasper’s hand, then darted his gaze up, his expression more than a little forlorn, dusted with a hint of desperation. “Jasper, I —”
Jasper stole the rest of Dorian’s sentence with a kiss. There was no grace to it. Just a hard press of lips and teeth. It was over far too quickly. “I love you,” Jasper said.
Dorian blinked, startled. “I love you, too.” He said it reflexively, as if it wasn’t something he needed to think about. Something deep inside Jasper lurched with glee.
“And if you think,” Jasper continued, “that I’m going to let you die in a blaze of glory, you are sorely mistaken.”
Jasper unsheathed the twin set of knives he’d strapped to his forearms before they’d left the keep in a whirlwind of steel and magic; then he reached into Dorian’s pocket for the small vial of bloodweed elixir he’d seen Caius toss to Dorian before running after Echo toward the library. He slicked a coating of it over the two blades before Dorian had a chance to protest. Oh, the protest was coming. Jasper could see it forming on those perfectly plump, kiss-bruised lips. But Ivy – patron saint of perfect timing – swooped in with the save.
“I’m not staying here,” she said. Her eyes were a hair too wide and her skin a touch too pale, but there was a determination in the set of her jaw that Jasper knew was reflected in his own expression. “I’m a healer, and there are people out there who need my help.” Dorian frowned, and Jasper saw another protest trying to break free before Ivy cut him off. “I can help. And I will.”
A scream cut through the air, accompanied by what sounded like bones cracking. Another screech – this one distinctly monstrous – rose above the cacophony. Jasper fought an involuntary shiver. Dorian’s head twitched toward the source of the noise.
He closed his eye briefly. “There’s nothing I can say to convince the two of you to find a nice, safe place to hide, is there?”
“No,” said Jasper and Ivy at the same time.
“Fine,” Dorian said through gritted teeth. He pulled Jasper in for another kiss, this one as vicious as the last.
Behind him, Jasper heard Ivy mumble, “Time and a place, guys.” He flipped his middle finger at her, then immediately regretted it, as there was a very real possibility it would be the last thing he ever communicated to her.
Dorian pulled away just far enough to rest his forehead against Jasper’s. “No unnecessary risks.”
“Like getting run through by a sword meant for you?”
“Just like that, yes.”
Jasper afforded Dorian a small smile and nodded. They both knew it was bullshit, but Dorian needed that promise, no matter how flimsy, and there was nothing Jasper would deny him. Besides, being impaled once was more than enough. No one needed a repeat of that. Especially Jasper.
“Stay close,” Dorian said to them both.
The next instant, he was on his feet, rounding the corner and delving into the chaos, Jasper and Ivy one step behind.
Dorian’s penchant for heroics might have been one of the things Jasper loved about him, but if Dorian got himself killed, Jasper was going to follow him to the afterlife and smack the pretty right out of him.
Jasper gripped his knives tighter and plunged into the fight, praying to gods he wasn’t sure he’d ever believed in that they would all make it out of this mess alive.
Dorian’s sword sank into the beast’s hide with startling ease. The dark flesh moved and bunched as if there were muscles flexing beneath the skin, but there was little resistance as it parted beneath Dorian’s blade. No catch of bone or gristle, no spill of blood across naked steel. A piercing cry sliced through the air, loud enough to make Dorian want to drop the sword and clap his hands over his ears. He didn’t. But gods, it was loud.
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.