Chapter 34
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
EMBER
The Last Breath: the last spell a dying witch casts before death, and focus is not a requirement for it.
— Ydris Ledoux, Echelon to the
School of Healing
The dark and windowless underground chamber was a swamp of mildewy air.
Dashell’s fingertips sparked quantum blue, and the scent of his magic, breeding with the staleness, surrounded me in sickly sweet, disorienting fumes.
Since I knew how easily he could Teleport me to the temple’s exit, undoing every battle I’d fought to get here, I summoned the strength to run.
It was more of an uncoordinated stumble, my ankle weak and unstable on the slippery floor.
But that ended up being a blessing. Due to my slowness, when Dashell tried to Teleport to me, his timing was off.
He landed a few feet ahead of me, giving me just enough time to spin and run the other direction.
Sharp, throbbing pain coursed through me as I zagged at random intervals, alternating inconsistent bursts of speed and moments of slowing down.
In the course of this, Dashell wasted spells.
My unpredictable movements were not mathematically sound enough for him to calculate exactly where he needed to Teleport in order to apprehend me and remove me from the temple.
Time stopped as a loud splash sounded from fifty feet across the room, and everyone turned toward the well.
Pepper emerged from the water. My shoulder’s sagged with relief at the sight of her hopping to the ledge. The first thing I noticed was she was dry. Then I noticed something else.
Something wasn’t right about her.
Pepper wasn’t like Sutter. She was an innocent, small, white bunny rabbit.
Sweet. Curious. When she’d needed my attention, she’d scratched my satchel, when she could’ve chosen to bite my hand.
She listened, helping me for the entirety of our miserable journey through the temple.
I barely recognized who she was now, rising from the well as if some kind of horrible transformation had happened to her.
Her teeth were fangs, and she sported the attitude of a rabid hell creature. Perched on the ledge, she bared her teeth at Helen and Dashell, then me. Dashell and Helen dropped their pursuit of me to dive for the well, clearly concerned about Pepper jumping back into it.
Pepper reared up on her hind legs and spread her jaw wide, displaying rows of sharp, pointed teeth. Then a dark spray shot out from the back of her throat.
An ejection of pepper spray that was so forceful, it was like a fire hydrant had busted, blasting straight at Helen and Dashell.
They slammed their eyes shut and backed away, coughing as streams of tears rolled down their cheeks.
Their eyes had been wide open when she released it, taking the full brunt of the blinding irritant.
Rapidly, the intense smell of black pepper filled the room.
I blinked a few times, my eyes burning and watering, but I had been far enough from the well when it had happened that I was able to keep going with only the slight discomfort of a burn in my nose and a scratch in my throat.
Helen outstretched her arms, hastily feeling around for Pepper, who evaded her by plunging back into the well. Helen and Dashell coughed and spat, and I was momentarily forgotten as they desperately splashed their eyes in the stream from the waterfall.
“Where are you hiding them?” I asked while I had the advantage, my voice coming out stronger than I’d expected. “Pepper knows Belinda’s here. And I know you’re responsible. Where are they? Where is Leland?”
They splashed their eyes a few moments more. I don’t know why I’d thought she might answer.
“Sub . . . due her,” Helen instructed Dashell around a fit of painful coughs. “Take her out . . . unconscious.”
“Can’t . . . focus,” Dashell coughed.
Helen backhanded her eyelids. “Shoot, then!”
Dashell’s eyes peeled opened to narrow slits, a ghastly red and irritated ring twisting around his pale turquoise irises.
He removed a small metal pistol from his coat pocket and aimed, then fired.
It wasn’t a bullet. Those weren’t permitted in Everden.
But in the split second it flew through the air, I caught enough of a glimpse to understand that, under no circumstances, should I let myself be hit.
It was a tranquilizer dart, and I hadn’t come this far to be forced into a deep and paralyzing sleep.
Fortunately, Dashell’s aim was impaired by his vision, and — thanks to Skye — my reflexes were better than they used to be. I dodged, and the dart missed. And when Dashell’s hand disappeared in his coat to load a second dart, I ran.
Only speeding across the slippery wet stone on one good foot was impossible.
My body was rigid with coldness. My shoes may as well have been anchors, that’s how sopping wet and heavy they were.
My toes were numb, squished, and my socks were drenched and ballooned.
I groped for the walls, not looking back, time more precious than ever as I heard their coughing start to lessen.
There was no victory in injuring them. I never intended for anyone to get hurt.
Only, in that moment — because I knew Helen wouldn’t listen — the one thought I had was to lure them to the pain-amplifying chamber.
There, I could take advantage of what Pepper had already done.
I could immobilize them with even more suffering.
Once they were trapped in the clutches of their pain, I could run back down and search the well Pepper couldn’t stay away from, where I suspected Belinda was.
Hopefully, it hadn’t transformed her too.
Hopefully, I could search it without becoming like what had happened to Pepper.
I heard a gun click, and all in one second there was wind, the lanterns stuttered, a zip was right on target, and I knew it was too late for reflexes. I closed my eyes tight, bracing for the impact.
Except I wasn’t hit.
A blood-chilling yowl roared through the room as something mighty landed with a heavy thud and shook the floor.
On instinct, I turned. I let out a shriek of fear as I faced a red-brown mountain lion with golden-brown eyes, stalking forward.
The tranquilizer dart lodged in his heaving side had no effect on him. He prowled closer, his approach focused and predatory, his otherworldly eyes a hypnosis trying to herd me away to his private den.
I backed away from the large animal, whose muscular back heaved with effort as his shoulders rolled. His lithe body moved closer. Closer. Closer.
“Whose Familiar is this?” Dashell said to Helen, his hands moving quickly around the pistol-shaped dart gun to load another tranquilizer. That done, he stopped, waiting to shoot.
The mountain lion bared the full length of his massive canine teeth. I shook with terror. Still, I could not take my eyes off him.
“Shoot him,” Helen screamed over a piercing bombardment of the animal’s catlike screeches. “That’s not a Familiar!” she shouted. “Shoot!”
I felt the mountain lion’s hot breath on my legs a beat before his strong nudge nearly knocked me backward. His long, white whiskers jabbed through my leggings as he nudged again, rougher.
Look at me, he said, I came to protect you.
How I understood his meaning, I didn’t know. There was something in his eyes I knew. A gold collar around his neck.
Ven?
But Ven was supposed to be dead. Jaxan had Severed him.
“Ven?” I croaked, just as a dart slammed into his muscular side, and he hissed.
One after the next, darts flew at him. Ven tossed his head and hissed louder, growing increasingly agitated.
The fifth dart in, his amber eyes snapped into something different — a precariousness I knew because I’d felt it.
I burned with it. I knew he was reaching the point where his anger wouldn’t be contained.
His territorial energy was too unstable, like I was. Ven growled, much too quiet.
“Stop it!” I yelled, and threw the entire bag of baby carrots out of my satchel and into the connecting room, hoping he’d chase it. Shoo, shoo, I waved.
But Ven stayed, growling as he continued taking darts that should have been aimed at me.
“Stop it!” I shouted at Dashell. “Stop it, or he’s going to attack you!”
The last dart struck Ven in the side.
He roared and spun, leaping paws-to-chest into Dashell and forcefully knocking the Echelon down. There was a crisp crack of skull on stone as Dashell’s head smacked the ground. Ven pounced on Dashell’s flattened body and brutally pinned him.
Helen screamed into her hands as blood leaked from Dashell’s head, and Ven, not done yet, took Dashell’s neck in his jaw and fatally ripped into him.
In his last breath of life, Dashell’s fingertips glowed a faint spark of blue, then Dashell and Ven were gone. Teleported, as if Dashell had held on to life just long enough to spare Helen the heartache of witnessing the exact moment it ended.
I was too shocked to move. I’d witnessed the killing of an Echelon. The youngest Echelon in Everden’s history was now dead, I was certain of it. Yet my brain kept replaying the sequence, unable to wrap my head around where and when and how, even though I’d witnessed it.
A prolonged scream of agony ripped out of Helen. The pain of it pierced my soul and caused me to freeze. I stood where I was, waiting for her scream to stop repeating, for her to run out of breath. I waited for anger. I waited to hear every scathing thing she deserved to say to me.
“What have you done?” she cried. “You controlled that beast! You told him to attack! What have you done?” In between furious, asthmatic breaths, she repeated the question.
“What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?” Then, after a long inhalation, she said, “You never should have come here.”
I didn’t disagree.
“I didn’t want to,” I said quietly. “I wanted to stay in the human realm. I thought you were going to let me.”