She bites her lip. “We all do.”
We stare at each other, trying to be strong, trying to find strength in each other. Like me, she’s soaked through. Her dark lashes clump together, and every time she blinks it looks like she’s crying. The raindrops land hard, making us both squint as they pelt down our faces. Until they don’t. Until the raindrops start rolling in the opposite direction, flowing up. Her eyes widen as mine do, watching with horror.
“Nymph strike!” I scream in warning.
Above us, the rain shimmers, dancing on the air, joining together into larger and larger droplets. And the puddles, the inches of water in the streets and alleys—they become rivers.
“Brace!” echoes again. This time the blow is freezing water instead of wind, foaming white as it breaks like a wave, curving up and over the walls and buildings of Corvium. A spray catches me hard, dashing my head against the rampart, and the world spins. A few bodies go over the wall, spinning into the storm. Their silhouettes disappear quickly, as do their screams. The gravitrons save a few, but not all.
Cameron slides away, on hands and knees, to get back to the stairs. She uses her ability to make a cocoon of safety as she sprints back to her post well inside the second wall.
Cal skids next to me, almost losing his footing. In my daze, I grab at him, pulling him close. If he goes over the wall, I know I’ll just go after him. He watches, terrified, as the water assaults our ranks like the waves of a churning sea. It makes him useless. Flame has no place here. His fire cannot burn. And my lightning is just the same. One spark and I’ll shock who knows how many of our own troops. I can’t risk it.
Akkadi and Davidson have no such restriction. While the premier throws up a glowing blue shield at the edge of the wall, protecting anyone else from going over the edge, Akkadi roars to her newblood troops, barking orders I can’t hear over the crashing waves.
The water spikes, shuddering. Suddenly at war with itself. We have nymphs too.
But no storms. No newbloods who can seize control of the hurricane around us. Its darkness closes in, so absolute it seems like midnight. We’ll be fighting blind. And it hasn’t even started yet. I still haven’t seen a single one of Maven’s soldiers, or the Lakelander army. Not one red banner or blue. But they’re coming. They’re certainly coming.
I grit my teeth. “Get up.”
The prince is heavy, slowed by his fear. Putting a hand to his neck, I give him the smallest shock. The gentle kind Tyton showed me. He rockets to his feet, alive and alert. “Right, thanks,” he mutters. With a glance, he takes stock. “The temperature’s dropping.”
“Genius,” I hiss back. Every part of me feels frozen.
Above us, the water rages, splitting and re-forming. It wants to crash down, it wants to dissipate. Some of it peels off and vaults over Davidson’s shield, racing away into the storm like a strange bird. After a moment, the rest crashes down, drenching us all anew. A cheer goes up anyway. The newblood nymphs, while outnumbered and off guard, just won their first bout.
Cal doesn’t join in the celebrations. Instead, he rakes his wrists together, igniting his hands into weak flame. They sputter in the downpour, fighting to burn. Until, suddenly, the rain turns to bitter, blizzard snow. In the utter darkness it winks red, gleaming in the weak lights of Corvium and Cal’s flame.
I feel my hair start to freeze on my head and shake my ponytail. Splinters of ice go flying in every direction.
A roar rises out of the storm, different from the wind. With many voices. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand. The blackout blizzard presses in. Briefly, Cal’s eyes flutter shut, and he sighs aloud.
“Prepare for attack,” he says hoarsely.
The first ice bridge spikes through the rampart two feet away from me and I vault back, yelping. Another splits the stone twenty feet away, spearing soldiers with its jagged edges. Arezzo and the other teleporters spring into action, collecting the wounded to jump them back to our healers. Almost instantly, Lakelander soldiers, their shadows like monsters, vault off the bridges—they ran up the ice as it grew. Ready to strike.
I’ve seen Silver battles before. They are chaos.
This is worse.
Cal lunges forward, his fires jumping hot and high. The ice is thick, not so easily melted, and he carves pieces from the nearest bridge like a lumberjack with a chainsaw. It makes him vulnerable. I slice through the first Lakelander to get near him, and my sparks send the armored man spinning into darkness. Another quickly follows, until my skin crawls with purple-white veins of hissing lightning. Gunfire drowns out whatever orders anyone might be shouting. I focus on myself, on Cal. Our survival. Farley stays close, gun tucked up. Like Cal, she puts me to her back, letting me defend her blind spot. She doesn’t flinch as she fires her gun, pummeling the nearest bridge with bullets. She centers on the ice, not the warriors bursting out of the blizzard. It cracks and splinters beneath the berserkers, crumbling into darkness.
Thunder rumbles, closer by the second. Bolts of blue-white electricity explode through the clouds, crashing down around Corvium. From the towers, Ella’s aim is deadly, striking just outside the walls. An ice bridge falls to her wrath, cracking in two—but it regrows, re-forming in midair at the will of a shiver hiding somewhere. Bombers do the same, obliterating glassy hunks of ice with bursts of explosive force. They just creep back, skittering through another rampart. Green lightning crackles somewhere to my left as Rafe arcs his whips into a stampeding horde of Lakelanders. His blow meets a shield of water, which absorbs the current as they advance. Water doesn’t stop bullets, though. Farley peppers them with gunfire, dropping a few Silvers where they stand. Their bodies slide off into darkness.
I turn my attentions to the closest bridge of soldiers. Instead of the ice, I focus on the figures charging from the darkness. Their blue armor is thick, scaled, and with their helmets they look inhuman. It makes them easier to kill. They force one another forward, pressing on to the walls. A snaking line of faceless monsters. Purple lightning explodes from my clawed hands and races through their hearts, jumping from one suit of armor to the other. The metal superheats, fading from blue to red, and many fall off the bridge in their agony. More replace them, vaulting out of the storm. It is a killing ground, a funnel of death. Tears freeze on my cheeks as I lose count of how many skeletons I rip through.
Then the city wall cracks between my feet, one side sliding from the other. A concussive blow shudders through my bones. Then another. The crack widens. Quickly, I pick an edge, jumping to Cal’s side before the crack swallows me whole. Roots worm up through the fissure, thick as my arm, and growing. They pry apart the stone like massive fingers, sending spider cracks past my feet like bolts of stone lightning. The wall bucks under the strain.
Greenwardens.
“The wall is going to break,” Cal breathes. “They’ll crack it right open and get behind us.”
I clench a fist. “Unless?” He just stares blankly, at a loss. “There has to be something we can do!”
“It’s the storm. If we can get rid of the storm, get visibility, we can use our range. . . .” As he speaks, he sets fire to the roots, now creeping closer. Flame races its length, charring the plant. It just grows back. “We need windweavers. Blow the clouds away.”
“House Laris. So we hold until they get here?”
“Hold and hope they’re enough.”
“Fine. As for this . . .” I nod at the gap widening by the second. Soon a Silver army will burst right through. “Let’s give them an explosive welcome.”