Chapter 9 #2
I ducked and rolled, making sure to stay away from Kason’s form so he wasn’t accidentally hit. The scent of wood burning told me Farraleigh meant to roast me alive. Wonderful. Well, I’d see to it that she burned down her cabin instead.
She aimed ball after ball of fire at me, but none connected, thank the g—no, thank me .
I was the one who was doing all this work, not the absent, uninvolved, uncaring gods.
If Rhianough truly cared about stopping Farraleigh’s abuse, she would have stepped in herself.
She was a goddess, which meant she had the authority to do as she pleased.
Apparently, what she pleased was to rest wherever she rested when she wasn’t putting in dramatic appearances at her temple and have me do her dirty work.
A fireball came far too close to my hair, which tugged my thoughts back from their meanderings about gods and their laziness.
Smoke was thick in the air now, making it difficult to breathe.
Farraleigh had risen to her impressive height and moved away from the quartz.
Slight movement in the shadows cast by the fire, unnoticeable unless you were expecting to see it, told me Herat was close to her goal.
I just had to get Farraleigh to take a few more steps toward me…
I bent at the waist, coughing, an action I didn’t have to fake.
Smoke clogged my nostrils and made my eyes water.
The heat of the fire was getting more and more intense, enough that my ears twitched, wanting to pull in closer to my head.
Staying for much longer in the cabin meant we’d both lose this fight, but I couldn’t turn my back on Farraleigh to run for the door.
And even if I could, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t leave Kason behind.
My ruse worked. Farraleigh lurched away from her chair and the crystal on the table beside her.
Her footsteps made the cabin shake, causing part of a burning timber to fall to the floor and further spread the fire.
Still bent over, I kept an eye on Farraleigh, but more importantly, on the quartz.
The moment a swift hand darted out to grab it, I rose and fired a magic bolt at Farraleigh.
It hit her square in the chest, right in the middle of her impressive bosom, and sent her stumbling back… but not down.
Herat needed to be quicker with the breaking…
I watched as she lifted it over her head and threw it down with all her might. Surely that would be enough to shatter the crystal against the wood floor and end Farraleigh’s reign of?—
It bounced. The fucking crystal bounced .
Farraleigh finally noticed my attention wasn’t on her. She turned and charged Herat with a roar that gave away her nonhuman side as that of an ogre. Made sense. She was nearly as big as one.
Herat scrambled to grab the crystal before Farraleigh reached her, but a half-ogre bearing down on her made her uncharacteristically clumsy. She kicked the crystal, sending it spinning across the room.
And the mad chase was on.
“I’ll get it!” I shouted. I raced forward, hands outstretched—but the smoke and flickering flames made me misjudge the distance. Instead of grabbing it, I kicked it too. “Godsdamn it!”
“Mo, watch out!”
I rolled to the side as another fireball came down where I’d been a second before. “You’re going to kill us all!” I shouted at Farraleigh.
“Where’s my crystal?” she thundered.
Good question. I squinted, trying to spot the damned thing.
It wasn’t easy to see in the flickering light of the flames that matched the crystal’s colors.
I stayed low on the floor, the air slightly clearer at this level, thankful that Farraleigh’s shout had earned her a lungful of smoke, which she was now hacking up.
The roar of the fire was getting louder, its temperature hotter, and our time to end this and escape with our lives was running out.
I glanced up at Kason’s frozen form. I couldn’t see Kason’s eyes from this distance, with the smoke, but I hoped Kason was still watching. Hoped that the spell kept him safe from the smoke and the fire.
Where was that godsdamned crystal?
With a triumphant cry, Farraleigh held up the bloodsun quartz in her hand, just as the window behind her shattered from the heat of the fire.
Fresh air rushed into the space, fanning the flames even more, until their roar was all I could hear.
I looked up at Farraleigh, knowing I’d failed.
Here was my second defeat at her hands—it might not have happened yet, but in a moment, after her celebration of retrieving the quartz before Herat or I could, she’d remember she had two interlopers to deal with and… and it would be done.
I would be done.
Farraleigh was in the process of lowering the hand holding the crystal when something swooped in through the broken window.
At first, I couldn’t make out the shape.
My initial thought was that a bat had gotten confused and flown into the blazing cabin, but that made no sense.
Then I registered the tail, the four-limbed body, and realized it was the dragonet I’d freed all those days ago.
It landed on Farraleigh’s shoulder, and before I could form a question in my mind about what it was doing, it unleashed a barrage of dragonflame on the crystal in Farraleigh’s hand.
Dragonflame could burn anything to ash, even crystal. I couldn’t speculate about why it had been following me—because it had to have been—or why it would swoop in and focus on the item we needed destroyed. Dragonets weren’t that smart…were they?
Fuck it. It didn’t matter. The cabin was going to start coming down any moment, and we needed to get out.
Farraleigh was screaming now, her thunderous voice rising to notes I didn’t know existed, and she was swinging around to dislodge the dragonet.
It refused to let her go, and as the intensity of her dance increased, its gout of flame rose in proportion.
“Grab the girl!” I shouted at Herat and pointed in the general direction of the maid I’d felled at the beginning of the battle with Farraleigh.
Without waiting for Herat’s response, I darted toward Kason and lifted his unmoving form.
It was awkward to carry him, his weight making it nearly impossible, but I refused to not do it.
I staggered to the door we’d entered by, where I had to put Kason down and drag him through, turning him this way and that to make his frozen limbs fit.
It felt like it took an eternity to get the witch-hunter out of the cabin.
We’d made it into the shadowed woods, dawn slightly more than a promise on the horizon, when Kason suddenly unfroze.
Yes . That could only mean one thing—Farraleigh was dead. We were successful in our quest.
I collapsed, coughing so badly I could barely breathe.
I didn’t know where Herat had gone—out the front door, probably, since that was closer to where the maid had fallen.
The noise of the blazing cabin drowned out anything else from the battlefield, but it couldn’t cover up Kason’s shallow, labored breaths.
I leaned over him, appalled at the witch-hunter’s pallor.
He looked worse than he had when we’d reached Rhianough’s temple, and that was saying something.
Dark circles around his eyes gave him an almost skeletal appearance, and the gray tinge to his skin did nothing to contradict it.
His breaths were ragged and fast, and he tried to keep his eyes open, but they didn’t seem to want to stay that way.
“You came,” Kason gasped.
“Of course.”
Kason’s lips curved into a fleeting smile. “Was the…perfect excuse to run.”
It had been, no doubt, but I had discovered something about myself in the past few days.
When it came to the big things, the things that mattered, I wanted to do what was right.
And returning for Kason was right . “Well, I didn’t.
I came for you. The courteous thing to do now would be to live.
” I frowned. “Wait, why hasn’t the drain stopped?
We succeeded! Farraleigh is dead. We dealt with the witch, just as Rhianough wanted. With a day left, I might add.”
“It’s past dawn.” Kason’s eyes closed. “That was our time limit.”
“No,” I breathed. Then louder, “No! We had until dawn tomorrow!”
“ This dawn,” Kason corrected. “I felt it happen.”
I sat back on my ass, hard, and cupped my head in my hands. I thought back to what Rhianough had said—and realized she’d never specified that the time limit would start at the next day’s dawn. I had simply assumed she wouldn’t shave most of a day off our three-day limit. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“S’okay. You did your best.” His eyes opened a slit. “I’m glad…I got…to see you again.”
I lifted my head, looking at Kason through eyes blurred with tears. “But you didn’t know if I’d come for you.”
“I hoped.” The corner of his lips twitched and his eyes slid shut again. “We…could have…found something together. Yes?”
I started to say something, but a sob escaped instead. I swallowed the next, then whispered, “Yes.”
Because Kason was right. I had changed my behavior.
I’d waited longer for Kason to catch up to me.
I’d been less canny in my dodging. Something had drawn me toward the witch-hunter from the beginning, despite the danger my brain had shouted at me.
Some intuition, some instinct, perhaps, that told me this could be the one for you .
And now, that chance to discover what we could have found was gone forever.
“Thank…” Kason exhaled.
He didn’t inhale.