And I also wasn’t fool enough to think that my men were just standing idly by and would allow this to happen, allow me to be taken for good.
I already knew Cassius was fueling me. Fuck knew what lines Lazriel and Sylas were crossing as well.
My shadows surged suddenly all around me.
A moment later, shrieks sounded, piercing and painful, making me grimace.
I felt a pull, urging me toward the mist up ahead, and then the frost around my boots and ankles started cracking.
Time was almost up.
The pull was stronger now, brutally so.
Trying to drag me over there.
Trying to take me.
The fuck I was gonna let that happen.
I wasn’t going out like this.
Especially not at the hands of my highly disturbed and disgustingly radicalized brother.
“Enough!” I roared out into the distance.
The furor of my voice echoed all around me.
I’d been holding my hands out either side of me this entire time, my shadow magic coursing, but it had also taken on some sort of sentience as well, given the extreme and dire situation at play.
As I pulled my right hand away, my shadows fought me, trying to resist, but I yanked it free.
It caused massive strain to holding them steady against the onslaught of this place, my left hand shaking with it. Hell, all my limbs trembling with it.
But I thrust out my now free right hand at the blackness behind me, turning enough where I could see that nothingness to my right, and the Valley of the Dead to my left.
My Wraith side’s relationship to death served me well, and I watched as I made a tear in the fabric of this periphery area—in the Veil.
I cried out and smashed my fist swirling with shadows into it.
Relief coursed through me as the tear widened, becoming a hole about a foot in diameter.
Bright light filtered through from beyond, albeit restrained by what existed on this side.
The voices shrieked.
Wind whipped around violently.
The ground rumbled beneath my feet.
I felt the frost protecting me completely crack then, leaving me entirely.
And my swirling shadows to the left were slowing down, their constant spinning lagging and struggling.
I pushed all my might into the magic wrapped around my fist, managing to widen the hole another foot.
It was enough to throw myself through.
I started forward.
