33. After
Chapter thirty-three
After
Laurel
Abbie bursts through the doors, her face flushed and streaked with soot, her eyes red and streaming.
“Fire!” she screams. “Ashford House is on fire. Get out now!”
Smoke rolls into the hall behind her, thickening as it spreads along the ceiling. She looks over her shoulder, eyes wild with panic.
Carrson pulls out of me and rises. He wraps my robe around me, then snatches his from the floor as the crowd surges into the aisles. Men and women shove past one another, overturning benches in their rush toward the doors.
“The front stairs are burning!” a man bellows. “The main doors are blocked too.”
Those are the only ways out I know.
“Everyone, listen to me!” Carrson shouts, wearing his robe and tying the belt at his waist.
His voice slices through the panic, and the room obeys. Carr, Jack, everyone turns toward him.
“Go to the tunnels.” Carrson points toward the hallway leading to the kitchen. “Get to Rosewood Hall.”
The crowd changes direction. Gray and cream robes stream toward the kitchen, people organizing themselves around Carrson’s command.
Carrson takes me by the elbow. Abbie reaches us, and he catches her arm too.
“Hurry.” He watches the smoke thicken across the ceiling and descend toward us.
Thomson falls into place behind us as we run for the door.
A crush of people block the closet concealing the tunnel entrance.
They’ve bottlenecked at the narrow opening, shoving one another in their desperation to get through.
Carr and Jack have remained behind, forcing people into pairs so they can fit.
I don’t see Jackson so I assume he’s already in the tunnel.
“Carrson. Laurel.” Carr waves us forward. “Go. Get down there.”
Carrson stops in front of him. “What about you?”
“I’ll be fine.” Carr gestures toward the opening. “Take Laurel. You need to go. Save her.”
He knows exactly which command Carrson can’t refuse.
Abbie tugs on the sleeve of my robe. “Please, Laurel. We have to go.”
Smoke spills into the kitchen. I inhale before I can cover my mouth and double over, coughing until the room tilts around me.
“That’s it.” Carrson wraps an arm around my waist. “We’re leaving.”
With Abbie and Thomson beside us, we squeeze through the closet and descend into the tunnel.
It’s packed with bodies. I can’t see the front of the crowd, only shoulders and robes moving through the darkness while smoke pours in behind us. I hope someone has opened the exit at Rosewood Hall. Otherwise, the tunnel meant to save us will quickly become our grave.
“Where are Sam and Cicley?” I shout to Abbie.
“Outside,” she yells back. There’s a blast of smoke at my back. We all cough. “They’re trying to get control of the fire. Sam started it in the cornfield to force everyone outside, but the wind shifted. It spread to the house.”
If I hadn’t been running for my life, I would’ve stopped her right there and made her explain everything. “What do you mean Sam started it?”
Wood groans overhead.
Everyone ducks as a smoldering beam crashes into the passage behind us. Sparks scatter across the floor, and a woman farther ahead screams.
“She was trying to help you,” Abbie says between ragged breaths. Tears carve pale tracks through the soot on her cheeks.
“To stop the sealing?”
Abbie nods.
I almost tell her the truth. They were too late.
The sealing is done. As far as The Order is concerned, Carrson and I are legally bonded and sealed, but before I can say the words the smoke thickens.
I press my sleeve over my nose, but the thin fabric does little to filter it.
Abbie’s coughing grows harsher, her lungs already damaged by whatever she inhaled before reaching us.
“Carrson!” Carr’s voice tears through the tunnel behind us, ragged with smoke and urgency.
Carrson stops.
He turns toward his father’s voice, then toward me. His body shifts one way and then the other, duty tearing him in opposite directions.
“Go,” I tell him.
“Laurel—”
“I’ll meet you at Rosewood Hall.” I press my bloody palm against his chest. “Go help your father.”
He searches my face, needing to know I mean it.
“We’ll be okay,” I say. “Now go and hurry. Stay safe for me.”
He hesitates, but his dad calls for him again, and Abbie can’t stop coughing.
“Te amaré solo a ti en cada vida.” Carrson kisses my forehead, then he turns and disappears into the smoke with Thomson beside him.
I wrap Abbie’s arm around my neck, and we push forward only as fast as the packed bodies ahead allow. Screams and shouted directions ricochet off the stone walls, overlapping until every voice seems to come from everywhere at once. Smoke burns my eyes, making them tear up.
Abbie stumbles. Her weight goes slack against me, her head lolling forward.
There’s heat against my back. I twist around and see flames consuming the far end of the tunnel, the direction that Carrson ran. Figures move through the orange glow, the dancing fire stretching their shadows across the walls and ceiling until they look warped and macabre.
Dizziness rolls through me, accompanied by a violent throbbing behind my eyes.
“Carrson!”
I search for him in the smoke as dirt sifts from the ceiling and scatters over my hair and shoulders.
I want to turn around and find him, but Abbie’s knees buckle.
Her feet drag over the stone. She doesn’t respond when I call her name.
The smoke is everywhere now, so thick I can’t see what’s in front of me.
I haul her to me and keep moving because she can’t.
Carrson is somewhere behind me in the fire, and every step toward safety carries me farther away from him.