Wild ― Piper McLean

―xix. the song of the false eight

"There's too many," Lawrence whispered.

A hush fell over them all, broken only by their own ragged breaths.

"Then we fight until we can't anymore," Jordan managed.

She didn't say For Rome, or For the Legion, or anything like that. They knew this wasn't for the good of the empire—it was for the selfish wants of a liar with too much power.

And there was no choice left but to charge into the battle.

Into the slaughter.

They thought they had trained for this; that any simulated fight in a controlled environment could ever live up to the real thing. This wasn't a fight between demigods, a clash of wills between rivals—this was a one-sided massacre.

Jordan shouted out orders, rallying the remnants of their cohort—less than half, though it couldn't have been more than five minutes since the massacre began. How could these shadows, these ghosts made of nothing slaughter them so easily?

Michael had brought them here, but now he was nowhere in sight. He'd led them to their deaths and then hid behind them like human shields.

Screams rang in Verona's ears like white noise.

Stacy was the first to go.

She didn't even see it coming, the shadow that took hold of her. The probatio had warned them, Don't let the shadows touch you, but how could they follow that warning when the shadows were everywhere?

A pitch-black hand wrapped around Stacy's wrist, and like poison the darkness spread, encompassing every inch of her arm. It crawled up her shoulder like ink blotting fabric, snaking up her neck, darkening her eyes.

Verona had never heard a scream so horrified until Stacy Abbott opened her mouth, the black seeping into and past her lips, infecting her.

Verona watched in horror as a girl she'd known since she was ten, a girl she'd been half in love with since she was fourteen, turned into a shadow right before her eyes.

And she was far from the last to go.

Verona lost Lawrence in the chaos, but she found him seconds before he fell. She found him as he threw himself between Auggie and a trio of spear-wielding shadows, his sword slicing them seconds before their spears sliced through him.

Verona had never heard herself scream like that, for a boy she'd known before she'd even gotten her first stripe, who'd made her a sword and taught her the word friend in English when all she knew how to say was hello.

And then Logan, a born warrior, a grandson of the god of war himself—fallen to seven shades, because that was what it took to bring him down. Because he was too strong, too capable to fall to anything less.

But he fell all the same.

Verona was bleeding when Jordan collapsed, her fingers inches from the eagle. The standard bearer, Aileen, must have dropped it—she must have been dead. She would do anything to protect the eagle, so she had to be dead. And Jordan was reaching for it, trying to salvage it—to salvage the legion, because she was a leader, she should have been praetor—

She should have lived.

Verona stumbled, staggering as a cut on her leg bled fiercely. Or was it a cut on her waist, dripping so far? Maybe it was both. She couldn't tell anymore.

It was so cold.

A few steps away, blood tripping from a slice on his face, Auggie prayed fiercely. He prayed to the gods for salvation, for forgiveness, for a chance to survive this. For a chance to live to see another sunrise, as impossible as that seemed.