As the Zolom lunged again, Benin did the only thing that had a chance of saving her. He threw himself in front of the dazed emberfox.
Sheltering his familiar with his own body, he tensed, waiting for the fangs to puncture his skin at any moment, soon to be followed no doubt with deadly constriction. When no attack landed, he dared a glance over his shoulder.
The Zolom’s fanged face was bare inches away from his, muzzled by vines. Coll was looking between Lila and Benin, hefting his hammer. “We have to finish it.” His tone implied, “But how?”
Vines creaked as the serpent strained against them. Lila grunted, conjuring more; they burst from the ground to wrap around the Zolom’s coils, also stopping its tail, which had been creeping once more in her direction.
“You know what you need to do.”
It was Bekkit who spoke up. Benin had forgotten he was even here.
“Are you mad?” Fear shot through him as he registered what the sprite had meant.
“It’s the only option if we’re to stand a chance of surviving against that beast.” The sprite’s voice was weakening by the minute, his glow so dim as to almost be invisible as he alighted on Benin’s shoulder.
“You saw what happened last time. I don’t have the control to maintain them!”
“No. Not yet.” Bekkit took a deep breath, as though about to ask him a huge favor. “But I do.”
“Ready?”
Lila nodded tersely. She was beginning to tremble with the effort of maintaining so many vines, but he trusted her to hold a little longer.
Ajax stood guard further up the trail, watching over Pyra, who still seemed dazed. Coll stood nearby, hammer at the ready as ever, though if he ended up having to use it for anything other than this one task, that meant they’d have failed.
We won’t fail.
Benin tried to believe that as he reached out a hand and began persuading the elements to mingle. He drew carefully on Pyra’s source to power and maintain it.
The second presence in his mind made sure of it.
With Pyra as the fuel and Bekkit as the manipulator, Benin was little more than a conduit for this task. Though he was the caster, it was Bekkit who guided his magic, drawing on and refining the emberfox’s raw power to form a much more stable pair of portals than Benin would ever have managed on his own.
That didn’t mean he hadn’t contributed to the plan, however. He’d double-checked Arcane Sight’s description and confirmed that even though the Zolom couldn’t see, it could taste scents and feel vibrations. The lightning had left its tongue dangling uselessly from its bloody mouth, but there was one thing he knew of that even this snake wouldn’t be able to ignore.
The air beside Coll shimmered. The warrior raised his hammer.
“Now!”
Lila released the vines. They slithered from the giant snake and back into the earth. At the same time, Coll lifted his hammer with both hands and slammed it into the ground just behind the portal. “Hammer Smash!” he cried.
As it lunged toward the sound, the Zolom’s tail whipped. It was a reactive movement, a casual slap, but it knocked Lila to the ground, hard. Her head hit the rock with a sickening crack that made Benin wince to hear.
The serpent’s head disappeared through the portal. In the same instant, it reappeared, emerging from the paired portal. Benin had to crane his neck to see it; he’d placed the second portal—angled to face downward—as high up in the air and as far away from the mountainside as he could. Anything that emerged from it would go plunging straight to the ground hundreds of feet below. He was sure not even the legendary Zolom could survive something like that.
That was the theory, anyway.
But it really was a long snake. Its momentum did carry several feet of its body through the shimmering silver circle, but although its head hung confused from the distant portal, enough of its bulk remained on solid ground to stop it falling completely through. To Benin’s horror, it started to wriggle backward.
This wasn’t part of the plan.
He met Coll’s stare, expecting the warrior to look as horrified as he felt. But the big man just waggled his eyebrows at him.
What the hell is he—
Then he recalled a conversation they’d had after the river crossing. Coll had been full of inane questions about how the portals worked, because of course he had. One of those questions had been regarding what would happen if Coll stuck his arm through the portal—and what would happen if the portal then suddenly closed.
“Close it!” he yelled. “Close the portal!”
“It does not need to scream,” grumbled Bekkit. “Has it forgotten that I am right here?”
“Just do it!”
There was no dramatic flash this time, no spinning fire and furious water. The portals just… disappeared.
The Zolom’s upper body seemed to hang suspended in the air for a moment. Then it gave one final hiss and dropped beyond sight to smash apart on the ground below.
On the trail, the rest of its body writhed in the throes of death, as though refusing to come to terms with its end after all its decades of existence. Where the portal had closed, a perfect cross-section of the serpent’s body glistened in the starlight. It was like the Zolom had been sliced cleanly in half by a paper-thin guillotine blade.
We did it. We actually did it!
He tried not to imagine Tiri’s reaction when she learned they were probably responsible for the extinction of a lost species. He had bigger things to worry about right now.
“Lila, you need to—damn it!”
He sprinted over to where she lay, still unconscious. He cursed himself for not asking her to do it sooner. Her switch in alliance to helping them had
