Not good.

The General leaps off the porch, sword raised above his head, and brings it down in a vicious arc towards me. He’s fast—way faster than the other Mogs I’ve been fighting—and my shield barely has time to deploy before his sword would cleave me in two. The shield rebuffs the blade with a loud clang, but the force is still enough to knock me backwards and off my feet.

“John!” Adam shouts, and the General, having landed right next to him, takes a moment to kick his son hard across the face. Adam screams, rolling away.

“You are a perpetual disappointment,” the General seethes at Adam, so low I can barely hear his words. “Stay down and I may yet show you mercy.”

I pop onto my knees quickly, channeling another fireball. The General points his sword at me and I feel something like a rush of air, almost like the blade is sucking in the energy around it. My fireball gutters and shrinks, forcing me to focus harder to build it bigger. Meanwhile, the grass around the General goes from green to brown, the blade draining the life from it. I haven’t seen one of the Mogs armed with a weapon like this since that fight in the woods outside Paradise High.

“Don’t let it hit you!” Adam warns, spitting blood.

But his warning is too late. A dagger-shaped bolt of energy tears loose from the General’s blade and screams towards me; the energy is black, or more like devoid of any color at all, and changes the very texture of the air that it passes through, sucking up life and oxygen, like a mini black hole.

I don’t have a chance to dodge it. My shield deploys, expanding in the usual umbrella-like way, but immediately turns black and brittle when the General’s blast hits. Frozen like that, my shield slowly begins to crumble, blown away like so much Mogadorian ash. Dark, rustlike veins begin to spread through the bracelet itself, and I hurriedly snap it off before they make contact with my skin. When it hits the ground, my bracelet breaks in half.

The General smiles at me again and asks, “Now will you run?”

CHAPTER

NINE

THE MOGADORIANS WHO WERE TAKING COVER inside the house start to laugh. One by one, they filter onto the porch, eager to get a closer look as their great general dispatches one of the Garde. There’s a couple dozen of them, the salvage team plus some warriors and scouts, all of them vatborn. Not exactly the high-priority targets we were hoping for, but that doesn’t matter now. There are only two trueborn Mogs in Ashwood Estates—one of them is Adam, and he’s laid out in the grass just a few yards from me, dark blood dripping from his face.

The other is charging right at me.

As the General bears down on me, sword leveled at my throat, there’s a moment where I think we might have bitten off more than we can chew, Adam and me trying to take on an entire Mogadorian town.