still found us easily, snapping at our ankles and trying to separate the three of us.
We held our ground—that is, until the queen who didn’t have the same problem with the light as her demons did performed some magic of her own. I caught sight of her standing just behind her Minotaur slave. His arms were folded and he wore a smug expression on his face, like he was enjoying the spectacle before him.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the queen’s arms raised in the air. I got a very bad feeling and shuffled back a few steps.
“She’s up to something! Watch out!” I warned.
The demons we’d killed had disappeared in a cloud of dust, but the jackals, being natural-born creatures of the netherworld and only dying their first death, lay piled up on the ground around our feet. Her spell was bringing them back to life.
Like zombie dogs, the jackal’s limbs quivered and they slowly rose to their feet. Soon we were surrounded, fighting legions of undead jackals, and it wasn’t until several agonizing moments later that we remembered the only way to bring them to a second death was to stab them in the heart.
Unfortunately, their hearts were not in the place one would expect. Through Ahmose’s lucky strike, we quickly found out that the heart of a hellhound lay just beneath the thick ruff of their necks, a bony plate the only thing protecting it. He quickly shouted what we were to do after his undead jackal disappeared in a cloud of dust. The weapon had to be driven in at just the right place.
Ahmose was bitten savagely on his dominant arm, making it useless. I lost one of my spear-knives in the body of a jackal that went off to die his first death too far from my reach. Then, just as we thought things couldn’t get worse, my wind power failed altogether, and newly arrived ghosts began to attack as well.
They rushed us in a crazed fury. Evidently our doggedness in battle warranted pulling in the second-stringers. They weren’t as strong as their compatriots, but they still managed to yank my hair, scratch at my ankles, and bite my ears. Desperate to live, they did anything and everything they could to distract us. My determination was faltering. There was no possible way we could overcome them.
Then a glorious, ominous hum filled the air.
The reapers had arrived.
We still stood a chance.
As they descended by the dozens, their mandibles clacking, short scythes gleamed as they carved ghosts and jackals in two. But the jackals were quicker. They leapt into the air, taking down the reapers before they could swing.
When the reapers died their first deaths, they disappeared in a burst of light. I hoped that meant they’d be taken back to Isis, the goddess they still served. They deserved peace after all the suffering they’d endured in the netherworld. When the queen saw we were at a stalemate, she changed tactics and commanded all who remained in her army to target Amon. Though we’d tried to keep him at the center, in the course of battle we’d moved away from him. I cried out and made my way back in a desperate attempt to save his life. A demon with a face full of piercings lifted a wicked-looking cleaver, attempting to remove Amon’s head from his body.
I knew there was no way for me to get to Amon in time. Asten was fighting off three jackals at once, and Ahmose was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a thick-fisted demon three times his size.
I ran, leaping over jackals and ducking under swinging weapons. A fire blazed in my core. And then time slowed. The cleaver continued its downward arc, but it only moved a fraction of an inch at a time.
One moment I was running, and the next I’d come to a complete stop.
A cacophony of voices filled my mind. They screamed. Roared. Begged. Then, like gears fitting into place, I felt a snap.
One…two…three.
My body lifted into the air as if I weighed less than a cloud. Light shot across my vision and overhead I saw three shooting stars rocketing toward each other, their tails arcing across the sky in a symbol I’d seen before—the impossible triangle.
When the stars reached their destinations, the light burst in a showering display, raining down upon the entire theater. No one below appeared to notice the phenomena and as I regarded them, they looked so tiny and powerless. The bright