While all eyes are turned away from us and the world is deafened, we run for the mausoleum. I take the lead, popping smoke grenades as we sweep through the cemetery. Resistance meets us head-on, shouting and gunfire lost in the cacophony of the chaos. We slay every Leviathan guard trying to stand in our way. Every last one.
In minutes, we reach the Aurelius crypt, but someone beats us to the entrance—Nikolai.
“Dead.” He scoffs, his mask drenched in gore. “Your lack of faith in me is truly offensive.”
I’ll never admit it aloud, but I’m more than relieved.
We barge into the crypt, making quick work of the guards inside. I slam the pommel of my knife into the inverted ruby cross upon the empty sarcophagus. The passageway opens, and smoke billows out in thick clouds of gray. Distant screams send shivers down my spine.
I know that voice like I know my own name.
Poppy.
Poppy is screaming.
My world falls into absolute silence.
Jezebel bolts down the stairs. We follow, graceless but swift. Emi’s drone whizzes over our heads, but her voice crackles in our ears as the signal drops.
Halfway down, an impossible wind shoves the smoke past us, funneling toward the opening at our backs. It’s so strong, it pushes Emi’s drone up, up, up the same path we’re taking down. Stumbling over each other at the bottom, we brace ourselves against the wind and absorb the scene: the last living Morgensterns chained to a burning pyre, Quinn—fuckingQuinn—lying dead in Leviathan garb while a blond woman chants an incantation on her knees outside the pentagram.
Theglowingpentagram.
A trick of the light. That’s all it is. Because anything else isn’t fucking possible.
Poppy sees us and cries, “Brontë!”
The woman whips her glare to us.
My blood freezes.
“Margot?” Dantë breathes.
Jezebel roars and launches forward at full throttle.
Then Margot pulls a pistol from her robes and shoots her down.
FIRESTORM
Poppy
Jezebel falls in a heap of black fur. She doesn’t get up.
My heart stops.Not my baby.
My scream scrapes out my throat like the last screech of a dying beast. I snarl at Margot, whose grin grows eerily wide.
Dantë pumps his shotgun, taking aim at his runaway fiancée. But the slippery bitch is already climbing onto the pyre, banking the flames with a flick of her wrist and wedging herself behind me, where he won’t be able to shoot without peppering me and my parents with buckshot.
As soon as Nikolai and Brontë train their pistols on her, Margot clicks her tongue and presses her gun to my temple.
The unnatural wind stops.
Chills spiderwalk down every vertebrae in my spine.
My eyes find Brontë’s through the rippling flames. A firestorm rages in his hazel stare.You will not die,he seems to convey with that subtle dip of his chin.I will not allow it.
I nearly sob. He seems to forget that he’s no death-defying god.