Siren's Song (38 page)

At Draewulf's magic. At the mist. At the mass amounts of dead souls housed inside those hideous, empty shells.

A crack—like one of the fissures Colin used to create—appears in my mind's eye, or perhaps in my Elemental blood, which is at one with the atmosphere enough to sense I've caused a disturbance in Draewulf's layer of power.

And it's all I need.

I slice lightning through the fissure and onto the wraith army underneath.

There it is. A smile forms on my face. This is how we might win.

“Nym, wait!” Sedric's voice comes more urgent this time.

I open my eyes and frown. He's pointing down again, and when I follow his gaze I realize I can see through the misty haze to the army below. Their black mass is interrupted by large patches of moving color.
Wait, what the—?
I peer harder.

It takes less than half a second to register what the colored patches are—and then for my lungs to dry up inside my chest. They are people.

Live people.

Wearing Cashlin and Tulla clothing.

Oh hulls. The wraiths have brought over innocent hostages from those kingdoms and sectioned themselves around them.

And surrounding them? Giant wraiths.

The Uathúils who've been turned.

“Eogan.”

He tosses aside his used-up metal weapon and pulls out his broadsword from the sheath across his back.

“Eogan.”

He looks up, then over, following my gaze to the beasts who're moving the earth and calling out magical chants and traipsing toward us as if all the world's elements are at their wicked disposal.

Litch.

And in that moment I sense it.

I let my fists fall and stare at the hostages and powerful wraiths. If I continue to fight with the elements, I will kill the people too. But it's not just that—it's something different about the atmosphere, about the scent of blood in the air and the smell of fear.

“Draewulf's using more of his magic.” Eogan gasps and rips his sword up through the chin of a wraith's head before yanking it out and taking off another's.

“Yes, but for what exactly?” I yell back.

Eogan glances over long enough to bestow me with a sly wink. “To win the war.”

“I'm not sure your attempt at humor is well timed, Your Highness.” I yank two ice picks out of the air to shove into the heads of the wraiths about to lunge at us. And besides, this feels different.

When I turn back to Eogan, an enormous Uathúil wraith is moving in—from the looks of the way she's holding her hands, she used to be Mortisfaire.

This feels like the monster's done toying with us.

Eogan nods just as a splash of black blood lands on his cloak from the beast he's gutted, and I duck the Uathúil claw coming toward me.

But the claw wasn't for me.

It was for Eogan.

Hulls.
I lunge at the beast to touch my hand to her head—to scald it with my bare skin and Elemental blood—and just as I do, Kenan steps in front of his king.

The claw comes down even as the wraith crumples beneath the ice from my hand.

Too late, though.

Kenan's cry is cut off by the spurt of blood tearing from his throat.

“Nooo!”

Eogan's yell is broken and more furious than I've ever heard him. He grabs Kenan as the soldier falls and presses his hands to the man's neck, trying to stanch the blood.

I lean over him and use the ice still on my hands to try to help seal up the wound, but with the amount of blood leaving his body and the way his eyes have already rolled back, it's all too clear.

Eogan's face is flushed in fury. In pain. And in the distance I swear I hear Kel screaming. And running.

I don't have time to respond to it, though, as a sudden, visible shuddering of the atmosphere ripples across my sight, my skin, my spine.

Lord Myles's ability has just been activated.

Bracken.

I release the cloud cover and turn to the cart where Myles is being held. Rasha is standing beside him with her hand on his arm. I can sense the fog parting above us and the shafts of sunlight filtering through. I wave a hand and press the storm back farther farther farther until it's out over the ocean and the daylight is reflecting off the thick, black mist now spread up almost to where we're standing.

With it appears a mirage of a giant dungeon—one that looks startlingly like the inside glass walls of the Cashlin Castle.
What the—?

Luminescents are suddenly walking around, giant size, and I swear even the wraiths stop in their tracks and stare at the beings in confusion.

I squint enough to clear the mirage from my sight, and then
Eogan rises and shoves me aside to take another wraith's head off with his sword.

I flip around to him, but rather than speak he simply points across the way toward the caged carts.

Bleeding hulls.

Draewulf is standing there with Lord Myles, Lady Isobel, and Princess Rasha. And at Rasha's feet lie her dead Luminescents.

CHAPTER 38

B
LEEDING LITCHES,” EOGAN MUTTERS, AND HIS
tone is full of more malice than I've heard from him. “I'm going to rip his—” He grabs my hand and we start running—shoving through the wraiths and people alike toward Draewulf, who's leering down at Rasha from his over seven feet of height. Whomever he disguised himself as in order to make it up to the cage area doesn't matter—he's in full-gloried wolf form now. And seeing Rasha beside him, facing him . . . My chest squeezes.

She's wielding her sword—at first at him, I think, which he dodges adeptly and, I swear, appears to laugh. Except next thing I know the blade's hit the door of Myles's cage, then Isobel's.

I frown. She's freeing them.

For what?

I glance back at King Sedric and am relieved to see him still unaware of the monster's presence as he fights alongside Rolf and the guardsmen right in the thick of it. Good. Let us take care of this before he gets himself killed too.

“Nym, look out!”

I peer back just in time to see Eogan flip his blade around and stab at a wraith who's appeared from nowhere behind me, before turning to decapitate the disgusting thing. “Focus,” he says to me.

I tear a strip of lightning down to eliminate the five monsters to the right side of us. “What about Kel?”

“I lost sight of him right after Kenan fell. But I know he saw it. His face . . . I'm sorry.”

Bleeding hulls, please let Kel survive.
My stomach clenches as the glimpse I get of Eogan's face before he's launching another attack says he's thinking the same.

I rip through another four with a hail of ice picks. They were headed for Draewulf too, to assist him by the looks of their size and rags. How I know this, I'm not sure, but they remind me of the higher-up general wraiths who entered the War Room first in Bron.

When we near the place where Draewulf is standing, the black mist is already curling its way along the ground and our feet.
As if drawing us in.

I shake it away from my ankles even as the spider in my veins reacts in hunger.
Quiet
, I tell her, and will more freedom to my Elemental blood.

“Eogan, I'll go to the right, you—”

My voice cuts off with a guttural inhale as Draewulf shoves a claw around Rasha's neck and snarls. Then he stops and his gaze swerves to me, ten paces away. He grins.

“Ah, there you are, pet. I've been waiting.” His eyes drop the briefest second to the body that lies at his feet.

Tannin. Or what's left of him.

I stumble back. How did he—? When did—?

It doesn't matter. At some point this morning he consumed the sweet guard and that is enough to know.

I let loose five shafts of ice so fast the first two pierce his arm before the mist surrounding him lifts into a shield. “You bleeding—”

He twitches a finger and Rasha cries out as if he's snapped
something inside her, and instantly Myles's mirage lessens. “You know she'll go just like her mother. Easier, in fact, now that I've got her mum's ability.”

He licks his lips, but the next moment Lady Isobel's stepped between me and her father and grins at me. Then slowly turns her gaze to Eogan, who has just taken out two of her wraiths.

The lightning I yank down bounces off that curling, growing mist as Isobel holds her palm, face out, to me before turning to set it against Rasha's heart.

“No!” I lunge forward, but it's too late. Rasha's already screaming and writhing beneath Isobel's hand and Draewulf's grip. The atmosphere around us wavers, as if the magic veil Draewulf's wrapped most of the Valley in just expanded.

Except . . .

With an expression of indecisiveness, Lady Isobel yanks her hand back even as the air continues rippling. Growing. Rasha's head is thrown back, her shoulders stiffen, and her eyes turn a deep hue of red I've only ever seen on her mother. The air around her shimmers and bulges.

It takes another moment to realize Lady Isobel hasn't yet done anything.

She's waiting. Watching her father with an expression of displeasure.

And it's clear this is different magic.

This is Luminescent.

Oh. Oh hulls. This is what Rasha is capable of.

The expression on Draewulf's face says it's what he's been waiting for—to pit his newly acquired Luminescent ability against hers in a game of play.

Eogan's broadsword comes down on the beast just as he lifts
a claw to Rasha's neck. It's met by the blade of one of Draewulf's Uathúil-wraiths.

I fling ice stones at him and land two against his chest, but he doesn't even flinch. Just thrusts his weight against Eogan to push him backward into an earthen crevice he's just created as Princess Rasha screams.

I thrust more ice picks and then jump for her, but Isobel is abruptly in my face, smirking, holding her hand out—the indecision gone from her face. “Ready for your turn, dearie?”

I meet her palm with my own and a spark of friction explodes between them. My ability against hers. Reacting to hers. Her hunger reacting to the spider's thirst in my blood. They both reach out for each other and in that moment are well matched.

I yank out the blade from my bootie and shove it into her shoulder.

Isobel's scream is followed by a second change in atmosphere and a flickering of the mirage around us. Abruptly the dungeon image Myles has been exuding dissolves, and when I glance over he's frowning and blinking and staring first at Lady Isobel, then me. Until his gaze lands on Princess Rasha.

His face darkens and his mouth opens. I duck Isobel's swipe at my chest with my blade she just pulled from her shoulder and see Draewulf's body turn ethereal, as if he's beginning to dissolve.

And Rasha has stopped writhing.

Bracken.

I yank out the blade from my other bootie and slice out at Lady Isobel's knee. Miss. Swipe again. This time I catch her in the thigh and make her scream again.

Suddenly the mirage flickers back on around us. But this one's different. This one's of Princess Rasha in one of the hallways in
Bron. Then in the Throne Room. Then on the airship. Draewulf pauses and looks around at it just as Lord Myles steps forward.

His expression is so clear, so settled, I almost miss it. The affection.

What the—?

He's showing every image of every interaction he's ever had with Rasha. And in the moment of distraction—of confusion—Draewulf's grip loosens the slightest bit. Apparently the queen's ability to see through mirages didn't quite transfer all the way.

Myles steps in, pulls Rasha away, and shoves her behind him.

Good mother of— Does he—?

“He stands on the edge of a precipice. One choice will bring destruction; the other will help the Hidden Lands survive.”
The essence of Queen Laiha's words rings in my head.

Clearly he chose our survival.

Except there's no time to think about it because the next second Draewulf roars and Lady Isobel screams again. I look down to see that when I sliced at her leg, I cut deep enough to hit an artery. Draewulf jerks his head toward her, and before I can react or back away, he's grabbed his daughter and yanked her away from me.

“Father,” she whimpers.

I allow the sky to crash above us as I bring down one, two, three strikes on them both—only to have the magical mist defuse each one before it reaches them.

Draewulf reaches out for Isobel and she folds into him.

Then he's slicing her open at the neck and his body is fading fading fading in front of me as he slips like a black plague into the wound and beneath her skin and takes over the Mortisfaire power of his daughter.

I think I'm going to be sick.

“Nym, look out!”

I turn at Eogan's words just in time to duck from the two wraiths coming at me. I shred ice from my hand into the ground and erupt it beneath them, causing both to slip and fall. I shove it forward to cover and crawl over them until the ice reaches into their mouths and noses and throats and hardens inside their heads.

I stand to turn toward Draewulf—to attack him with that same ice, to infuse it into Isobel's dead bones—when the sight below us gives me pause.

The war below . . . the war around us . . . the wraiths, the archers, the farmers, the mothers, the Cashlins and Terrenes . . .

Bodies of our people lie everywhere.

So thick and widespread and being run over by the black magic and wraiths that I can hardly see anyone who's still alive. Still standing.

My gut clenches.
Oh litches, what have we done?

I open my lungs in horror at their lives spent on a futile struggle. Their last breath they've given for a nation that oppressed most of them. And I swear the moment I choke and gasp on my own grief for them, their voices are drawn into me. Their hearts, their beliefs, their courage. It permeates my lungs and mixes into my blood until it's churning churning churning and then it's abruptly coming up and, oh hulls, I don't know how to stop it, but when I open my mouth, it comes out as a song.