by Evelyn Skye
“I, um, will have left town by then. But have a nice day!” Daemon hurried away.
Sora caught up with him and shook her head, that smirk he’d felt plastered on her face. “You don’t even have to do anything, and girls fall at your feet, don’t they?”
Daemon threw up his mental ramparts for a moment, so Sora couldn’t sense what he was feeling. “Not all the girls,” he said.
There was an awkward silence. At least, Daemon thought it was awkward. Maybe Sora wouldn’t notice.
Then suddenly, the sky exploded.
Sora dove for cover. Daemon threw himself over her. Screams engulfed the marketplace.
Green mist burst from the explosion. It billowed everywhere, filling the air and blotting out the sun.
Daemon could hardly hear over the pounding of his heartbeat.
“A bomb?” Sora asked, as she clambered back into fighting stance.
He leaped to his feet too. “Possibly—”
The mist started to move. Not innocently like a bank of fog, but with determination. The clouds of green streamed together, hissing loudly and drowning out all other sound.
“This is really not good.” Daemon drew his bo from the holster on his back. But despite standing ready to fight, he gawked at the sky, unsure of what to do next.
The fog formed into a massive serpent. Its body stretched several miles long, with scales glistening like green drops of dew.
A girl nearby shrieked. All the color drained from her face, and she fainted, knocking down her entire display of hats.
The snake circled above Kaede City, red eyes narrowed and glowing. It opened its jaws to reveal a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, icicles reflecting the cowering sun.
“Luna help us,” Daemon said. If ever there was a time he wished he was better at magic, this was it.
Sora looked over at him, sensing his doubt through their gemina bond. She punched her fists to her chest.
It reminded him that he wasn’t alone. Daemon saluted back, then spun his bo in his hands. Whatever was coming, they would handle it together.
The mist serpent snapped its teeth, and he jumped as the sound ricocheted through the air like a thunderclap. The force of it sent tremors through the city. Flowerpots careened off window ledges. Pedestrians fell to their hands and knees in the street.
The marketplace erupted in confusion and noise.
“What was that?” a woman behind Daemon shrieked.
“The gods are punishing us!” someone else yelled. “I told the mayor he needed to be more generous with his gifts to the sea!”
Rumbling came from down the road that led into the marketplace. The sound grew louder and louder, until it rattled the stalls, shaking wares off tables and drowning out all the shouting.
A large black orb shot toward the far edge of the marketplace. A collective, high-pitched, insect whine filled the air.
Holy heavens. Daemon nearly dropped his bo. The bug boy had seemed so much less threatening on the road, when he was far away.
“Run!” Panicked shoppers and vendors screamed and fled, shoving each other, abandoning baskets, and tripping over fallen wares. Hundreds of thousands of cockroaches rushed at them, like a black-brown tsunami of antennae and legs. Then a second surge of them came, this time carrying a boy on the crest of the wave.
“Nines,” Sora cursed.
“I guess we won’t have time to warn the taigas,” Daemon said, tightening his grip on his bo. “It looks like the ryuu are already here.”
The cockroaches scurried over Daemon’s feet and up his trousers. He tried to bat them away. They crawled in spirals around his entire body and skittered across his shoulders and up his neck, and he gagged as their aggressive little antennae waved in his face. Around him, people screamed and moved in frenzied jerks as they tried to shake off the roaches. Tables crashed, and stalls collapsed into one another.
Daemon swiped at them with his bo, sending cockroaches flying into the air.
“Try to get everyone out of the market safely!” Sora shouted to Daemon. “I’ll focus on the bug boy.”
Daemon nodded. He wanted to fight too, but part of being a taiga was knowing what was more important for the people they were protecting.
Sora ran off in the direction of the ryuu.
A cloud of wasps swarmed toward the screaming people, who were shoving each other and falling down in their hysteria. “Daggers,” Daemon cursed. If he didn’t do something soon, the stampede would kill someone.
I need to make a path for evacuation, he thought. Until there was a space clear of insects, the vendors and shoppers wouldn’t know how to exit. They’d trample each other to death.
Daemon stashed away his bo and shut out the feeling of tiny legs crawling all over him. He grabbed at the silk scarves on the racks near him and flung them like nets, taking swathes of wasps with them. Then he snatched a tarp from the top of a fallen stall and threw that at the wasps too. Finally, he hurled a pot full of simmering miso soup, dousing the insects’ wings so they could no longer fly.
“This way,” he yelled to the terrified marketplace. He waved his arms, directing them toward the space temporarily free of wasps.
The people closest heard him and began to run. The rest followed. The girl from the comb stall paused for a second before him, her face streaked with tears. She pecked him on the cheek, then fled out of the market.
Daemon stood a little taller. But he couldn’t bask in the pride of doing his job, not when Sora was fighting something as formidable and unknown as a ryuu.
He glanced over his shoulder to find her. He couldn’t see her. But there was no fear in their gemina bond, just intense focus as pointed as a hunter’s arrow, searching for her prey.
The stalls in the marketplace were in disarray. Tables broken down the middle. Scarves and dumplings and signs all trampled together in the mud. But the people were gone, and miraculously, no one lay dead on the ground. Daemon heaved a sigh of relief.
It was short-lived, however, because Sora was still out there. He had to find her to help against the insect ryuu.
Daemon crept as quietly as possible over broken bowls and smashed cockroach carcasses, weaving in and out of the collapsed stalls.
But there was no sign of the ryuu. Or of Sora.
His heart pounded and he quickened his pace through the market. “Sora!” he whispered loudly. He knew he shouldn’t. If she were hiding from the ryuu, it could give her away. But fear for her overrode Daemon’s intuition.
She burst through the eastern exit of the marketplace.
“Sora!” He leaped over the destruction around him and ran to her. “You’re all right!”
“I chased him,” she said, eyes darting back in the direction from which she’d come. Her words were ragged as she tried to catch her breath while talking. “I think the ryuu were tearing through the city, looking for taigas.” She gulped for more air. “But bug boy didn’t notice us, because we were dressed like ordinary shoppers. After he wreaked havoc here, he headed toward the harbor.”
“The Society command post,” Daemon said, understanding sinking in his stomach like an anchor.
“We have to help,” Sora said.
Daemon began to run. Sora matched him stride for stride.
Now he would get the chance to fight.
Chapter Twenty-One
The air at the port hung heavy with the tang of iron, snarled together with the brine of the sea. The ships creaked and pulled at their lines. Usually, there would be men all over the docks, cleaning ships, unloading whales for blubber, bringing sails down to patch their tears. But the harbor was empty now, except for the fifty-some taigas who stood on the black-tiled roof of the Society building, guarded by at least two dozen ryuu.
Sora lunged in the direction of the taigas’ building, but Daemon grabbed her arm and pulled her into the shadow of the harbormaster’s shanty.
“They’re prisoners. We have to do something,” Sora said, trying to step toward the outpo
st again.
He held her fast. “No. If we get caught, we’re no good to the Society or to Kichona.”
“So we just stand here and let the ryuu execute our own warriors?”
“I know you want to be the best taiga you can be, but do you think running in and getting yourself killed is the way to achieve that? Because that’s what will happen if we try to storm the roof, Sora.” He forced her to look him in the eyes. “There are close to thirty ryuu up there, and the rest are swarming around here somewhere. You saw what happened in the marketplace. The magic of one ryuu can take out at least twenty of us, probably a lot more.”
Sora didn’t like it, but Daemon had a point. Taigas were trained to give their lives for the greater good, and sometimes that meant allowing others to die. Yet Sora couldn’t stomach just watching the execution of the taigas on the roof.
“I won’t believe there’s nothing we can do,” she said. “We have to at least try to help.”
A grim smile caught the corner of Daemon’s mouth. “Stubbornness really does run through your veins. All right, then, what’s the plan?”
Sora heaved a sigh of relief that he was willing to do this with her. Of course, she’d known, mostly, that he would—Daemon would be loyal to the end.
I just hope this isn’t the end, she thought.
She pointed at the alley next to the taiga command building. “We dart in there and use gecko spells to scale the wall. We’ll coordinate our timing to spring onto the roof. If we surprise the ryuu, it will buy us a little time to take more of them out and allow the taiga warriors to also join the fight.”
Daemon looked from where they stood against the harbormaster’s shanty to the alley. They’d be exposed while they ran across the docks to the alley. A moment later, he said, “All right.”
She nodded. They checked their weapons, making sure they were where they were supposed to be and easily accessible, and cast moth spells to dampen their whispers. Then they prepared to cross the pier to the alley.
Daemon watched the ryuu on the roof. Most were turned toward the taigas in the center, but a few patrolled the edges of the building. Sora waited impatiently, itching to sprint.
Suddenly, the wind began to shriek. Dust and rocks and leaves kicked up from the ground. Sora and Daemon shielded their eyes as the wind blew harder.
“All hail Prince Gin,” a voice like a frigid breeze said. Goose bumps prickled on Sora’s skin.
A moment later, a violent tornado tore down the length of the pier, ripping up boards and tearing out posts. A ryuu spun in the center, powering the storm.
But at the top, Prince Gin sat as calmly as if riding in a palanquin.
The tornado paused right in front of the Society building, then shot upward to the roof.
“Now!” Daemon said, lunging out toward the alley, using the noise and chaos of the dust storm for cover.
Sora didn’t wait to follow. She darted out behind him, and a few seconds later, she plastered herself against the black-walled side of the alley, along the taigas’ building.
“What in Luna’s name was that tornado?” Daemon whispered.
“Another ryuu. Come on, we need to climb.”
Sora splayed her fingers into a gecko mudra, with precisely five-eighths of an inch between each finger. She quietly chanted the spell that would allow her to stick to the wall as she climbed.
Next to her, Daemon did the same thing, although it took him several attempts at spreading his fingers, whispering the spell, shaking out his hands when he’d failed, and starting again. He got it on the fourth attempt. His embarrassment at his magical shortcomings again manifested itself like a cringe through their gemina bond, their connection actually contracting.
“We can do this,” Sora whispered. “I believe in you. In us.”
He sighed in frustration but nodded.
They began to scale the wall, the tips of their fingers like suction cups.
Before they reached the top, the noise and wind from the tornado disappeared as violently as it had come, its fury replaced by a sudden vacuum of movement and sound.
The taiga warriors above gasped.
“It can’t be,” a woman said. “You died during the Blood Rift.”
Prince Gin laughed, but it was joyful, not condescending at all. “I’m alive and well, and grateful for it,” he said. “My taiga brothers and sisters, how I have missed you and Kichona. Not a day has passed in ten years when I didn’t think of you. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be home.”
“I’m not sure we are as happy as you,” the same woman who’d spoken up before said. “What is the meaning of terrorizing the city and rounding us up like cattle?”
Prince Gin sighed. “I apologize that it was a bit . . . rough. But I needed to show you how things are different from a decade ago. I still believe that Kichona is destined for greatness, and that you—the taigas—are destined for greatness as well. We didn’t have the means to achieve that in the past, but we do now.”
Daemon glanced over at Sora. “Because of the new magic?” he whispered.
“I think so.”
They began climbing upward again.
Another taiga warrior spoke up. “How have things changed since the Blood Rift? Because other than some flashy circus tricks with firework snakes and rings of fire, it seems that your warriors’ tactics are the same as ever—destructive to the point of disregard for the very citizens we are meant to protect. Your Highness,” he added hastily, as if remembering to whom he spoke.
Sora frowned. Despite Prince Gin being a known traitor, he nevertheless commanded respect.
There was a contemplative moment of silence, and then Prince Gin said, “I appreciate your opinion, and again, I apologize for our unruly arrival. I love every citizen of this kingdom. I’ve come back because of them.”
“And what about us?” the first woman asked. “Will you murder us like you did our fellow warriors during the Rift?”
“Your Highness,” a raspy girl’s voice said. “I think it may be wise if you used your—”
The prince let out another sigh, but this one was colored with a hint of impatience. The ryuu who’d spoken up stopped talking.
The wind around the Society command building kicked up again. But though it should have been cold here, the breeze kissed Sora’s cheek like a woolen blanket, warm and soft from years of loving use. She closed her eyes for a moment, basking in the sensation of being fireside with her friends, telling each other stories and filling their bellies with butter cookies and rose-apple wine. She felt a lingering trace of tension, but she couldn’t remember why she’d been stressed a moment ago. All her worries melted with the warmth and trickled away.
“As I was saying,” Prince Gin said, “it is for the taigas and the people of Kichona that I’ve returned. I know you thought me dead, but I’ve only been in exile. Let me tell you about the past decade.”
“Yes, I want to know,” the previously confrontational woman said, her tone now the complete opposite, brimming with curiosity and subservience.
I want to know too, Sora thought. A pleasant buzz saturated her every cell, like she’d drunk a cup of spiked coffee.
Then she frowned. Why had she thought that?
Something was off. But she wasn’t quite sure what.
No, a feeling inside of her countered. Nothing is wrong. Prince Gin has only the best for Kichona in mind.
“It’s true,” Prince Gin said to the woman who’d spoken up earlier, “I was near death at the end of the Blood Rift. We fled across the ocean and lived in exile in the mountains of Shinowana. It took over a year to nurse me back to health. But one day, I woke up, and it was as if the gods had given me new eyes. Some people see light when they’re dying. I saw light when I began living again. It turned out to be a greater form of magic, and I believe the gods showed it to me for a reason.
“Now, I’ve come back to Kichona to bless all of the taigas with the ability to perform this ryuu magic. To unlock each of
your potentials. To make this kingdom as great as Zomuri—and Sola and Luna, of course—deserve it to be.”
“You would teach us your magic?” one of the taigas asked.
“Yes,” Prince Gin said. “Do you want it? Do you want to become a ryuu and bring glory and paradise to Kichona?”
“Yes, Your Highness,” the taiga shouted.
“Yes, Your Highness,” Sora said.
The moth spell had kept her answer muted so the ryuu couldn’t hear, but Daemon crawled sideways over to her. His eyes were wide with alarm. “What do you think you’re doing?” he hissed into her ear.
“The prince is wonderful,” she said. “I like what he’s offering.”
“Gods, no.” Daemon stared at her for a second, as if not understanding the momentousness of Prince Gin’s return. Then he clamped one of his sticky hands over Sora’s mouth. “He’s got you under some kind of spell. You have to fight it.”
His panic was as sharp as a pike through their gemina bond. But Sora didn’t understand why. Everything was lovely.
She released one of her hands from the wall and pried his fingers off her face. “Prince Gin suffered exile for a decade but then had the generosity to come back to Kichona to share his new gift with us. He wants what is best for the kingdom. Just like we do.” She felt even happier now, explaining it to him. Her insides were all warm and mushy, like a vat of pudding just off the stove.
Daemon grabbed her and wrapped his left arm around Sora’s throat.
“What are you—?”
He jabbed his right thumb into a spot at the top of her head, a place that was soft in newborns but grew hard when the skull solidified. Hard, that is, unless you were trained in hidden pressure points.
Sora let out a strangled cry and writhed against Daemon’s grasp.
He tightened his hold against her windpipe.
She gasped.
And then she went slack.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sora was limp against Daemon. The dead weight of her body almost made him fall backward onto the ground.
He hastily smacked his right arm back toward the wall, adhering his fingers to the wood, then untangled his left arm from around Sora’s neck.
