Page 328 of Commanding Scythe and Sky

In a moment, the watch house was united. In a breath, they remembered why the Ashbornes had rallied them in the first place. No other words were needed. As one unified front, the rebels armored up and flooded into the streets.

It didn’t take long to find the small convoy of mortals—not a celestial to be seen—corralling teenagers into a blacked-out bus.

A girl fell.

Ryker’s age, maybe younger. She was kicked so hard in the ribs that she flipped onto her back and landed with an audible crack. She didn’t move.

“Leave her alone!” one boy bellowed, but his attempt to lunge out of the bus earned a gun to the chest. He backed up, hands raised, a snarl on his face.

“I’ll go!” the girl rasped. “I fell!” She gasped for air. “I swear!”

She didn’t have time to rise. The man with the gun straddled her prone body, the barrel pointed at her chest.

“She’s complying!” the boy on the bus yelled. “She’s complying!”

“No!” Ryker didn’t think. He bellowed and sprinted forward, drawing his gun as the girl screamed and pleaded with her captor.

“By order of the king!” the man decreed. And then the world stopped.

Spun.

Because the man pulled the trigger.

The crack reverberated through Ryker’s chest.

And the girl went silent, her unseeing eyes still wide with terror.

A child. Unarmed. Untrained. Not even resisting.

Shot dead in the street.

Ryker froze as crimson spilled out beneath her, even as the last souls of Watch House Twenty flooded into the street. It was the executioner swinging his gun toward the horror-stricken onlookers that did it.

Ryker was moving before he could think better of it.

Gunshots cracked, the meaty thud of combat warring with screams as death engulfed the street.

He dropped his shoulder, just like he had on the football field a few short months ago, and drove it into the man’s back, lifting him off his feet before slamming him into the pavement. The rifle scraped across the asphalt. Ryker lunged after it, but the man caught his leg and yanked him down as he rolled onto his back.

Ryker used the opening to drive his elbow into the man’s mask until the glass shattered. It didn’t matter that the man pummeled his ribs, his sides. Didn’t matter that Ryker’s arm was split open and bleeding. He felt none of it.

Just a blistering rage.

With a snarl, he reached for the weapon and brought it down on the murderer’s face. “Filthy—” He hit him again. “Fucking—” Again. “Traitor!” Again.

Like the cracks of the whip against Ford’s back, he raged until someone tackled him off the killer’s limp form. He rolled, ready to swing, only to come face-to-face with hard sapphire eyes and hands raised in supplication.

“You got him. You got him, son.” Ford grabbed his son by the back of the neck and reeled him in close. “Breathe,” he coaxed.

He didn’t want to breathe. He wanted to burn. To punish. To find the man responsible for all this pain and make him suffer the way humanity was suffering.

Ryker took a few more traitorous norms down after his father released him.

But his hands shook. He’d never signed up for this. Never agreed to kill mortals in the face of such overwhelming evil.

And yet, confronted with this blanket of darkness, humanity’s cruelty was only magnified, slowly swallowing the good in the world. Rather than unite against their common enemy, even in the darkest hour, humans divided themselves.

When the skirmish settled and the surviving mercenaries tended to their wounds, Ryker found his way back to the girl’s body. His ears rang. Heart pounded. Sweat stung the scrapes scattered over his skin.