Crush the King (Crown of Shards #3)(99)
“Evie?” Paloma asked. “What are you muttering about?”
I started to answer her when a flash of bright purple lightning caught my eye. I whirled to the right, and I finally realized where the Mortans were—and where they had been hiding all along.
The seemingly empty ship, the one I’d noticed when we’d walked across the bridge before, wasn’t empty anymore. Now more than a dozen people stood on the deck, all facing this direction. And the ship itself had been sailed closer to the Bellonan bridge, although it was anchored off to the side of the span and was still several hundred feet away from our current position.
I squinted into the sun, desperately hoping I had just imagined that flash of lightning—but I hadn’t.
Every single person on the ship’s deck had their arms lifted out to their sides, and powerful purple lightning was streaking up out of their hands and gathering in the sky above like a bright electrified spiderweb.
And that was just the beginning.
In seconds, storm clouds had rushed in all around the lightning, and the dark, ominous mass cloaked the island and cast everything in an eerie, purplish shadow. The wind picked up, howling around us like a pack of greywolves, and more and more lightning blasted up out of the magiers’ hands and sizzled in the sky. The eerie purple streaks matched the power glowing in the magiers’ eyes.
The members of the Bastard Brigade had finally shown themselves.
But those weren’t just magiers on the ship—they were weather magiers, and they were all working together to create one massive, deadly storm.
The water in the harbor started to pitch, buck, and heave in time to the howling wind. One particularly large wave arced over the bridge railing and crashed down on the flagstones, soaking me to the bone. I gasped at the shock of the cold water and swiped my wet hair out of my eyes. When I could focus again, I realized just how much worse things had gotten in the space of those few seconds.
The weather magiers had quit sending their power up into the sky and were now moving their hands in unison. An instant later, a single enormous bolt of purple lightning streaked down and slammed into the harbor off to my right, in between their ship and where my friends and I were standing on the bridge. The resulting concussive boom was so loud that I couldn’t hear myself think for several seconds.
But I could clearly see the water rising in the distance.
As soon as the lightning hit the water, the magiers began to move their hands in rapid unison, as though they were knitters stitching together an elaborate blanket. Except this blanket wasn’t made of soft wool—it was comprised of cold, crushing water.
One wave lifted off the surface of the harbor, then another, then another. In an instant they had all gelled into a single wave, a solid line of water that just kept growing higher and higher and higher. Ten feet, twenty, fifty, a hundred. The wave just kept climbing and climbing and climbing, like it was somehow sliding up a staircase. The water also crackled with that eerie purple lightning, sucking up all the magiers’ power and seemingly hungry for more, as though it were a living thing, a cold, wet kraken eager to gobble up everything in its path.
Including me.
I always have contingency plans in place, in case things go wrong, Maximus’s snide voice whispered in my mind.
This had to be one of those plans. I’d taken away his pets, and he’d unleashed these weather magiers on me in return. Except the Bastard Brigade wasn’t just trying to assassinate me.
No, this time Maximus was determined to kill us all.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Perhaps it was the cold water that had crashed over me, or the sheer size, scope, and audacity of Maximus’s plan, but I stood there, frozen in place, eyes wide, completely dumbfounded, staring up at the wall of water that kept getting higher and higher and closer and closer to the bridge.
The other people on the bridge saw the wave too, and they started screaming and stampeding back to the closest end. But that wouldn’t save them. The wave was almost as wide as the length of the bridge now, and the resulting crash would crush and drown everyone in the immediate vicinity, whether they were actually on the span or over on the Bellonan shore.
Unless I stopped it.
“Evie!” Sullivan yelled. “We have to get off the bridge!”
The howling wind drowned out his voice and swept his words away. He held out his hand, but I shook my head.
“No! Get behind me!” I shouted back. “Tell everyone to get behind me and hang on to the bridge railing! I’m going to try to stop the wave with my immunity! It’s the only chance we have!”
Sullivan turned around, yelling out my instructions. Paloma started toward me, but I shook my head and stabbed my finger at the railing behind me. She didn’t like my order, but she reluctantly grabbed hold of the railing, right alongside Xenia. Serilda and Cho were hunkered down next to them, along with Auster and Leonidas.
The boy was clutching the railing so tightly that his knuckles stood out like white bruises against his skin, but his features were more resigned than frightened. He must have seen this sort of attack before, and he thought we were doomed. Maybe we were, but I was still going to fight until the wave hit me and the water pulled me under and drowned me for good.
Everyone else was looking at the wave, watching it come with a mixture of growing fear and dread, but to my surprise, Serilda was staring at me, instead of the rising water.