They were blurs of motion, shards of light dancing around a coil of darkness.

And they were winning.

III

Lila was running out of knives.

Osaron had turned three of them to ash, two to sand, and a sixth—the one she’d won from Lenos—had vanished entirely. She had only one left—the knife she’d nicked from Fletcher’s shop her first day in Red London—and she wasn’t keen on losing it.

Blood ran into her good eye, but she didn’t care. Smoke was seeping from Ojka’s body in a dozen places as Kell and Holland and the demon clashed. They’d made their mark.

But it wasn’t enough.

Osaron was still on his feet.

Lila swiped a thumb along her bloody cheek and knelt, pressing her hand against the stone, but when she tried to summon it, the rock resisted. The surface hummed with magic, yet rang hollow.

Because, of course, it wasn’t real.

A dream thing, dead inside, just like—

The floor began to soften, and she leapt back an instant before it turned to tar. Another one of Osaron’s traps.

She was sick of playing by the shadow king’s rules.

Surrounded by a palace only he could will.

Lila’s gaze swept the chamber, and then went up—up past the walls to the place where the sky shone through. She had an idea.

Lila reached out with all her strength—and part of Holland’s, part of Kell’s—and pulled, not on the air, but on the Isle.

“You cannot will the ocean,” Alucard had told her once.

But he never said anything about a river.

* * *

Blood trickled down Lila’s throat as she pressed the kerchief to her nose.

Alucard was sitting across from her, chin in one hand. “I’m honestly not sure how you’ve lived this long.”

Lila shrugged, her voice muffled by the cloth. “I’m hard to kill.”

The captain shoved to his feet. “Stubborn’s not the same thing as infallible,” he said, pouring himself a drink, “and I’ve told you three times you cannot move the fucking ocean, no matter how hard you try.”

“Maybe you’re not trying hard enough,” she muttered.

Alucard shook his head. “Everything has a scale, Bard. You cannot will the sky, you cannot move the sea, you cannot shift the whole continent beneath your feet. Currents of wind, basins of water, patches of earth, that is the breadth of a magician’s reach. That is the circumference of their power.”

And then, without warning, he lobbed the wine bottle at her head.

She was quick enough to catch it, but just barely, fumbling the cloth from her bloody nose. “What the hell, Emery?” she snapped.

“Can you fit your hand around it?”

She looked down at the bottle, her fingers wrapped around the glass, their tips a breath away from touching.

“Your hand is your hand,” said Alucard simply. “It has limits. So does your power. It can only hold so much, and no matter how hard you stretch your fingers around that glass, they will never touch.”

She shrugged, spun the bottle in her hand, and shattered it against the table.

“And now?” she said.

Alucard Emery groaned. He pinched the bridge of his nose the way he did when she was being particularly maddening. She’d taken to counting the number of times a day she could make him do it.

Her current record was seven.

Lila sat forward in her seat. Her nose had stopped bleeding, though she could still taste the copper on her tongue. She willed the broken shards up into the air between them, where they formed a cloud in the vague shape of a bottle.

“You’re a brilliant magician,” she said, “but there’s something you just don’t get.”

He slumped back into his chair. “What’s that?”

Lila smiled. “The trick to winning a fight isn’t strength, but strategy.”

Alucard raised his brows. “Who said anything about fighting?”

She ignored him. “And strategy is just a fancy word for a special kind of common sense, the ability to see options, to make them where there were none. It’s not about knowing the rules.”

Her hand fell away, and the bottle crumbled again, falling in a rain of glass.

“It’s about knowing how to break them.”

IV

It wasn’t enough, thought Holland.

For every blow they landed, Osaron avoided three, and for every one they dodged, Osaron landed three in turn. Blood began to dot the floor.

It spilled down Kell’s cheek. Dripped from Lila’s fingers. Slicked the cloth at Holland’s side.

His head spun as the other two Antari drew on his power.

Kell was busy summoning a force of wind while Lila had gone very still, her head tipped back toward the place where the bones of the ceiling met the sky.

Osaron saw the opening and moved toward her, but Kell’s wind whipped through the throne room, trapping the shadow king within a tunnel of air.

“We have to do something,” he called over the wind as Osaron slashed at the column. Holland knew it wouldn’t hold, and sure enough, moments later, the cyclone shattered, slamming Kell and Holland both backward in the blast. Lila staggered, but stayed on her feet, a trickle of red running from her nose as the pressure in the palace rose and darkness blacked the windows to either side.

Kell was just finding his feet when Osaron sprang toward her again, too fast for Kell to catch. Holland touched the gash across his ribs.

“As Narahi,” he said, the words thundering through him.