evening sky and dissipated.
When I was sure that she was dead, I crawled over to where Owen lay on his back on the grass. Deep, dark, ugly red burns and blisters covered every part of him that I could see—his chest, hands, arms, and face. His eyebrows had been singed off, and his scalp gleamed a baby pink in places where his black hair had been burned way.
Bile rose in my throat at his devastating injuries.
“Gin . . .” he rasped.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, trying not to let him see how worried I was. “You’re going to be okay—”
A shadow fell over me, blotting out the evening sun.
I looked up. Harley Grimes had shaken off his daze and now stood over me, more Fire pooling in the palm of his hand. He reared back his arm, ready to throw it at me, ready to end me. I reached for what little magic I had and hovered over Owen, determined to protect him as much as I could— A dark figure dressed all in black slammed into Grimes from behind. Sophia.
Sophia? What the hell was she doing there?
I blinked and blinked, wondering if my eyes and the clouds of smoke that filled the yard were playing tricks on me, but it was her. Sophia was there, and she was fighting Grimes.
With one hand, Sophia ground Grimes’s face into the dirt. With the other, she unleashed a series of sharp, brutal blows to his kidneys.
Grimes managed to raise his head and let out a delighted laugh. “Oh, Sophia,” he purred. “Still trying to kill me after all these years. When will you ever learn?”
Grimes reached around with one hand and blasted
Sophia with his Fire magic. She grunted with pain and rolled away from him, smothering the flames scorching her clothes and skin. A moment later, they were both back on their feet, fists clenched, staring each other down.
My gaze flicked past them. Sophia’s classic convertible sat in the driveway behind the vehicles that Grimes’s men had driven up here. I hadn’t heard the car pull up in all the commotion. But she wasn’t the only one who’d come.
Jo-Jo was leaning against the side of the car, holding on to cooper’s arm to steady herself. I hadn’t told them what was going down tonight, but they must have figured it out for themselves. That, or Finn had told them.
Finn, Bria, and Phillip came running up, having finally dispatched the last of Grimes’s men. Finn took aim at Grimes. He looked at me, but I shook my head. Finn nodded and lowered his gun.
Grimes stared at Finn, Bria, and Phillip, then at Owen and me, and finally, at cooper, Jo-Jo, and Sophia. For the first time, he seemed to realize that he was all alone and that Hazel and the rest of his men were dead.
But it didn’t faze or worry him in the slightest. Instead, he reached for his Fire magic once again, more of it than ever before, until his eyes burned like dark liquid gold with his own power, and flames sparked and crackled like fireworks exploding on his fingers.
“come with me now, Sophia,” he ordered. “And I won’t kill your friends.”
Another damn lie, and we all knew it.
Sophia shook her head. “No. You’re not killing anyone.”
Grimes threw back his head and laughed—a wild, loud, crazy laugh that told us all just how far off his rocker he was. His plan to hunt me down, find Sophia, and drag us both back to his mountain had completely unraveled, and Grimes was coming undone at the seams right along with it.
“Really? And who’s going to stop me, you?” He sneered. “Please. You’re not strong enough to stop me.
You
Sophia shrugged. “Maybe not then. But strong enough now.”
Jo-Jo hobbled forward, helped along by cooper, and went to stand beside her sister.
“We both are,” Jo-Jo said in a clear, sharp voice. “My only regret is that we didn’t do this years ago.”
Grimes threw back his head and laughed again. Finally, when he realized that he was the only one who found it funny, he glared at Jo-Jo with pure hate in his eyes. “You won’t kill me. You don’t have enough magic to kill me.
None of you does. None of you is
Jo-Jo gave him a sweet smile. “That’s the funny thing about Fire,” she said. “No matter how strong it is, it simply can’t survive without Air—and neither can you.”
She reached for her Air magic, her eyes glowing a milky white. But instead of blasting Grimes with it, Jo-Jo did something even more clever and devious. She sucked all of the oxygen away from him.
The flames burning on his hand were immediately snuffed out. Grimes stared down at his hand in disbelief, then started snapping his fingers together, as though they were a cigarette lighter that he was trying to coax to life.
He reached and reached for his magic, but without all that precious oxygen, he couldn’t get so much as a single spark to flare to life.
Jo-Jo looked at Sophia, and the sisters nodded to each other. Sophia slowly approached him.
“Fine,” Grimes muttered, finally giving up on his power. “I don’t need magic to put you in your place, Sophia. I never did.”
He let out a loud roar and charged at her.
And then they danced.
Despite all the years that I’d known her, I hadn’t seen Sophia fight all that often. But she was as efficient and brutal with her blows as I was. More than that, she was motivated by all of the things that she’d suffered at Grimes’s hands.
For a while, Grimes was able to block her blows, and all they did was exchange punch after punch after punch.
But Sophia slowly wore him down. He missed a block, and she socked him square in the jaw. He missed the next block, and she slammed her hand into his sternum, cracking a rib, judging by the way he suddenly started gasping for air.
Grimes went on the attack, swinging, swinging, swinging, but Sophia swatted away his blows one after another after another. He overextended himself, and she slammed her boot into one of his knees. He howled with pain, but before he could stumble out of range, she clamped her hands on his arms and rammed her boot into his other knee. The cracking of his bones rattled through the entire yard.
Sophia let go, and Grimes dropped to the ground like a cement block. That’s when we all knew that it was over.
Sophia positioned herself on top of Grimes and started hitting him, over and over again, as though she were working a heavy bag at the gym.
She pounded away at his chest, focusing on his ribs and driving all of the air out of his lungs, so that he couldn’t even scream at what was being done to him—just like she hadn’t been able to scream after he’d destroyed her vocal cords by making her breathe in elemental Fire.
Jo-Jo. cooper. Finn. Bria. Phillip. They all stood there and watched Sophia beat Grimes to death, while I huddled on the ground next to Owen. Nobody said a word, although Bria winced at the brutality that Sophia unleashed. But she hadn’t been up at the camp. She hadn’t seen the pit, so she didn’t fully understand his depravity.
But I did. More important, I understood Sophia’s response to it and why she had to do this herself.
I’d wanted to spare her and Jo-Jo from facing Grimes again, but they’d come anyway because they needed clo— sure. They needed to help defeat him. And most of all, they needed to know that the nightmare was truly, finally over.
And Sophia was making sure that happened with every single blow she landed.
Eventually, cooper helped Jo-Jo over to Owen. The
two dwarves settled themselves on the scorched earth, took Owen’s hands in theirs, and reached for their
