Chapter 31
Thirty-One
So fast Lory couldn’t even think, a fistful of rocks lifted from the ground, zooming for their heads. She barely managed to shield her face as they battered down on them in a rain of stones, pain blooming on the back of her head and her shoulder where they hit.
Beside her, Aiden cursed. “So, the dick with the sword is the one with matter manipulation.”
Tabi grunted humorlessly, still pitting her power against the air magic of the nameless student. He wasn’t an ashling, or she’d have seen him in training before. A thornling, perhaps?
“If I can break through the wall, I can take him out first.”
“Or the lightning wielder,” Thal suggested, gesturing at Solen, the only one left in the group who could hold the power to summon the electricity in the sky.
As if on a command, Solen raised a palm, and from the remaining wisps of clouds, streaks of bright light burst toward the ground. Lory ducked, bumping into Tabi, whose power seemed to snap like an elastic band, and together, they tumbled out of harm’s way.
“You all right?” Lory asked Tabi, rubbing her hip with a sword-clutching fist.
Tabi rolled to her feet, her power collecting in a dense ball of shadow at her fingertips and her eyes burning with revenge. “I will be, as soon as I’m not hit by lightning.”
Why anyone was afraid of a Flame-born in the face of people who could command the sky, the sound, who could freeze the world over or make rocks rain upon their enemies, was beyond Lory, but the magic in her veins whispered an ancient melody as it snaked from her fingertips, ready to spill across the ground and devour everything in its path—friend or foe.
“What’s wrong, Vednis?” Ricca mocked across the shortening distance. “Aren’t you going to attack?”
How the fire burned to leap at the ashling, but Lory wasn’t ready to kill.
“Are you going to run like the coward you are?” Nyla joined the conversation. “Too weak to kill. Too slow to save anyone. Running seems like the only real option for you, doesn’t it?” A root slithered closer, licking the ground like the tongue of a snake on the hunt.
“Focus on Nyla first,” Aiden hissed at Tabi, twirling his sword in an awkward curve in front of him.
A crooked bend defined the length of the blade, and the deep V etched between his brows gave away how much that impacted the precision of the weapon.
“Her magic is the only tangible one. Lory, burn the roots; Tabi, go for the wielder.”
Tabi didn’t hesitate, her power already unwinding, and Lory swallowed the guilt as she willed her fire to meet the tip of the root closest to her.
It didn’t move an inch, as if her reluctance spilled over into the personality of her power.
“It’s not working.” Perhaps the lamest excuse in history, so Lory grasped her weapon harder, taking a few quick steps toward the root, and when it stretched to coil around her ankles, Lory grabbed it with a quick hand, holding it in an iron grasp as her flames ate into the living wood.
A shriek tore the air, and Lory couldn’t tell if it was Nyla or the roots; the only thing she knew was that the fire kept spreading down the length of the plant, leaping from one wooden limb to the other as more shot from the ground to attack Lory until, at the end of them, the expression of horror on Nyla’s face became evident in the glow of the flames.
Somewhere in the background, lightning brightened the sky, and a spray of rocks rained down on them, while Thal drew up water from the air or the ground or a running source nearby; Lory didn’t know and didn’t care.
In a thin mesh, it hovered above them, catching the lightning and directing it into the ground like a harmless magic trick, and when Lory dared look away from Nyla, Thal had emptied his canteen, and the splash he sent into the air formed a sharp shape.
It turned into ice halfway across the field, and when it hit the wall of air, it sliced through it like a knife into butter—and through the nameless student’s neck.
Nausea grasped Lory’s stomach at the sight of the blood spilling from the man’s throat, splattering the grass at his feet as he collapsed, hand uselessly grappling at his broken flesh.
“Splash and freeze,” Thal murmured behind Lory, and when she glanced at Aiden, he gave a curt nod.
“Better him than us,” he said with the conviction of someone who had calculated the outcome of this battle and come to the conclusion that the ends justified the means.
Before Lory could truly bemoan the life lost, Nyla’s gasping breaths caught her attention, and for a heartbeat, the impulse to help her enemy ran through her, but a fresh set of roots was already shooting for Tabi, whose hand was raised high above her head, fingers curling like she was squeezing the life out of a lemon.
“Burn them,” Tabi shouted as the roots came close enough to touch, and Lory lunged for them, dropping her sword to let her fire spread into her other hand, and grabbed the flexible wood as it raised before them like a serpent poised to strike.
They hissed and retracted so fast Lory could barely let go before being dragged along.
Stumbling a few feet forward, she got close to the place where the wall of air had held off Tabi’s magic a few moments ago, and she quietly thanked Thal and Aiden for their thorough eradication of that obstacle, or she might have been shredded by magic.
Another strike of lightning rained down on them, but the roof of safety woven from Thal’s power no longer covered Lory, and as a finger of electricity soared through the night, it caught on her sleeve, singeing the black fabric and the skin beneath.
“Ouch!”
Slapping her hand over her biceps on instinct, she forgot to extinguish her fire, and the side of her shirt caught flames, the heat spreading past her elbow.
“Move your hand,” Aiden shouted, giving Lory a heartbeat to react as his ice magic wrapped around her body like a glacial embrace.
The flames on both her shirt and in her hands died down, suffocated by the cold touch, but the pain of the kiss of lightning eased as well, so she didn’t complain, staggering back toward her sword abandoned on the ground and picking it up.
Nyla’s choking faded in a gurgle, and the nature wielder dropped to the ground the same as Tabi’s arms dropped to her side.
“Two down,” the ashling confirmed, drawing her own sword, which she’d sheathed while working on Nyla’s demise. The roots lay abandoned and simmering, a light orange glow eating through them before they turned to ash.
“Nice little trick, Bellmont.” Of course, Ricca would find a way to mock them for surviving an attack. “Does your ice still work if it meets its worst enemy?”
“And what should that be?” A thick lance of ice appeared in Aiden’s hand as Thal directed some of the water he’d pulled from the protective mesh toward the ice wielder.
Ricca’s laugh was the only response, and as it multiplied, its pitch increasing and the echo assaulting Lory’s hearing, she understood.
She understood before the others did, her shout of warning dying in the mayhem of sound, and when the lance in Aiden’s fist splintered into a million pieces, one was enough.
One single piece flying directly for Aiden’s throat, cutting through the sensitive skin, and when his blood emerged from his neck, it wasn’t frozen.
Hot and liquid, it dripped, the angry stream proof that they were far from safe, even when they stood four against two.
Lightning cracked the sky, and before Tabi could make it to Aiden, her hand already reaching for his throat, the white light hit her in the chest, and she tumbled to the ground, eyes rolling as she coiled in pain.
“Tabitha!” Thal called her name, but another lightning strike aimed for them, finding a hole in Thal’s protective web and reaching for the water wielder’s arm, mingling with the water.
Lory couldn’t decide who to run for first, or if she should have abandoned them all and saved herself—a thought that made her insides churn. They’d come to stand by her, to save her if they could—now, it was her turn to protect them.
With a scream, Lory charged, fire bursting up her blade as she aimed it at Solen, whose face—to his credit—turned pale at the sight of the Flame-born unleashed.
Lory didn’t care that he was murmuring at the sky to send another finger of white power—she blindly stabbed at the ashling, the muscles in her thighs burning as she lunged for him. Her whole body was burning, for the Guardians’ sake.
The next strike of lightning met an inferno of golden-orange fingers reaching for Solen’s wrist, gobbling up the power that had been supposed to find its mark in Lory’s heart, and as the fire spread over the ashling, a deep, rumbling voice at the back of Lory’s mind murmured, Set us free, Elory the Flame. Set us free.
Lory barely heard it, the wrath inside of her consuming her as the images of the splinter of ice in Aiden’s neck, the streak of lightning hitting Tabi, and then Thal, kept repeating themselves.
Solen would never hurt one of her friends again—ever.
“Stop, Lory.” Like in a trance, Aiden’s voice drifted into her consciousness a heartbeat before his ice-cold hand wrapped around hers, pulling her back from the ashling she’d wrestled to the ground.
A pair of cold arms wrapped around her as she stumbled back against Aiden’s chest.
Alive—he was still alive, and the wound on his neck wasn’t soaking her palm as she reached behind her.
“You got him, Lory. You’re all right.”
Lory barely dared glance at the scorched space at her feet, where Solen lay motionless in a circle of ash. Burn marks shimmered on their forearm and on their shoulder, where Lory had touched them, and a gash at their side oozed blood.
She had done that. She had killed them.
As if on a silent cue, Solen rolled his head with a whimper.
The darkness threatening to choke Lory retreated, but panic gripped her with fierce fingers as she scanned the area for Tabi and Thal and found neither.