Page 2 of Prince of the Phantom Sky

“I said your magic won’t work!” The male’s hand circled her throat, choking her. “What have you done to your pretty face?” His finger ran down her charred skin, following her scorched cheeks before fisting her bright hair, twirling her red locks in his equally red hand.

“What did . . . you do to your . . . hands?” she choked out.

Something flashed within the slit of his helmet, and his hand squeezed with impossible strength. Her throat closed, windpipe crushing, Haizea’s blessed air torn from her lungs.

Larissa kicked out, using the solidity of his armour to propel from his grip. As she spun, she clasped her flintlock pistol and channelled her power into the runes etched into the shining metal. The gun fired, rounds of flaming bullets soaring as she directed them with a sweep of her arm.

“What was that!”

“It sounded like a cannon!”

“Run! Run now!”

She cackled as the males cowered beneath the flaming lead soaring through the sky, spearing for their hearts. The mystery hunter before her roared and charged. Larissa diverted a single bullet for his head, her heart hammering as her eyes tunnelled on a break in the dead forest.

An escape.

She twirled and leapt, but his hand closed around her ankle, dragging her down. Larissa cried as her body slammed into rocks and debris littering the ground, and the pain wiped out the light of her fire within a second. Mangled hands crawled up her legs, followed by laboured breathing. He flipped her onto her back, pinning her arms on either side. The side of his helmet was dented, the once-flaming bullet lodged into the black armour. It was impossible.

“No . . .” Larissa moaned as the stars of the night sky swirled. She had failed. Her magic had failed. Her sisters were being hunted, and she was the latest in a long line of missing names.

The male wheezed, followed by a spluttering laugh. “You’re mine now.”

His fist was the last thing she saw as the stars faded into the void.

Shackles bit Larissa’s wrists as they hauled her up the steps of some unfavourable altar. Biting numbness smothered her body. An unfamiliar sensation that caused her limbs to stiffen and her teeth to chatter.

She had never experienced the cold before.

Her legs trembled as she tried summoning her blessed gift, but was met with icy pain consuming her chest, spreading into her extremities despite the late summer wind circling the small mountain. Her head pounded, a bruise forming around her eye.

“Keep moving, little witch.”

Larissa’s knees quaked with each rising step, her boots slamming against the stone until they reached the top. She was unsure how much time had passed, or how far she was from home. Were her sisters now looking for her? Braving the barrier as she had? Her heart clenched. She had no way of warning them of the humans watching the barrier, waiting for their prey to pounce upon.

Flicking her long hair from her eyes, she absorbed her new prison. To the west, the barren cliffs ended in a sheer drop to the murky Lifeless Waters. The sea roiled, waves crashing against the land, nature screaming at what lay at the base of the mountain.

The wind tore her cry from her throat at the war camp stretching for miles, all the way to the rotted forest bordering the Shannara Territory—her home. It was too far, the forest too complex to navigate. Without the shimmering beacon of the barrier, she was lost. Larissa spun, and was met with the same fate, expanding north to the human’s tainted outpost.

Kaiah had truly abandoned this earth.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” that lisp boasted, his thick hand tightening around her arm. “We are the new world!”

“You will kill us all,” Larissa whispered, blood draining from her face.

Her power had withered within, along with her strength and fortitude. Witches had been going missing for weeks, always last seen near the barrier to Shannara. She’d planned to investigate, to find them and return them home to the Great Mother, restoring the rapidly dwindling covens. Haizea had not blessed them for decades, and witches were a dying breed.

Larissa had been their last gift, handed to them on the rays of the sun over seventy years ago. But now all she saw was cold darkness.

“Witches have had their time,” an oil-like voice slithered across her back and she stiffened. “I have seen the future, witchling. The fates are on our side.”

She knew that voice. Larissa’s charred skin calmed as the final dregs of her magic were snuffed out by whatever greater power lurked here. Her smooth skin plumped back, regaining its moisture as she felt the familiar tingle of her sisterhood mark reappearing across her brow.

“Callan,” the dark voice behind her commanded. “Turn her around.”

The hunter—Callan—blocked her view. She could tell he was grinning beneath that helmet, the outline of his soiled eyes crinkling. She gagged at his odour, permeating the air from the rivers of decay woven into his armour. A similar stench encased her wrists, the shackles not of the standard iron she’d come to recognise in the human’s world. A light glisten shone from the black and heavy metal, reminding her of sickening swamp tar.

“I knew you were a pretty lassie,” Callan crooned. “Try not to look down, we wouldn’t want you to fall.”