Chapter 34
34
In the dim light of Kravax’s two moons, I ran behind Sai, trying to keep up as he weaved around trees and ducked under branches, the silk of my jumpsuit snagging on a never-ending string of pine needles. I had never wheezed so hard in my life, my lungs burning, my eyes watering, my heart thundering. After another five minutes spent wondering if my chance of death by sudden cardiac arrest outweighed my chance of death by Kravaxian, I said, “I think we can slow down?—”
An explosion lit the sky, a deafening boom shaking the trees, cutting me off.
“What the hell was that?” I cried, spinning around, grabbing Sai by his shoulder, and shoving him behind me. “Is it them? Did they wake up?” I squinted up at the sky, seeing nothing but stars, moons, and then?—
“It’s not them!” Sai shouted, sprinting out from behind me as a massive flaming dragon burst into the night sky. “Sunny, it’s not them!”
“Wait!” I took off after him as he raced back the way we’d come. “Sai, wait. ”
“It’s magic,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s Makenna. They’ve found us. Our friends are here!”
Catching up with him, I reached for his bound hands, urging him to slow. “We still…need to…be careful,” I said urgently, gasping for air. “We can’t just”—I paused, placing my hands on my knees to catch my breath before I passed out—“run out there.”
“Yeah, okay.” He winced, patting my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Standing up straight again, I waved him off. “I’ve just done more running in the last two days than I’ve done in my entire life.” When he laughed at me, I pointed a finger at him. “Hey, did you know Makenna was one of your mom’s SOs?”
He scoffed. “Of course I knew. She’s like my aunt.” When another dragon made of light roared above our heads, Sai leapt into the air. “The FFKs must be freaking out.” His laughter was manic. “I don’t think they have magic on Kravax. Or dragons. It’s brilliant. This is all so Makenna. She’s hysterical.”
“Wait, Sai,” I said as a sudden surge of adrenaline rattled me. “What about Reya? If Makenna is here, Rax and Morgath must be here too. What if they try to hurt Reya? They won’t know she helped us.”
Grasping one of my hands in his, he yanked me along. “Then we need to move faster. Come on.”
He led the way again as we followed the light show back toward the cave, hearing nothing but the snapping of twigs beneath our feet between the occasional deafening explosions of magic. And then, once we were closer, Tano’s and Axel’s panicked cries.
When we reached the tree line, it was pure chaos. Magical oorthorses, dragons, and even a flaming, stampeding kurot assaulted the silence of the woods. In the clearing, Tano and Axel huddled in their cave, ducking out occasionally to cower in fear at the fire in the sky. I couldn’t see Reya, which made sense, since she was likely only now waking up. No Marisia either. Probably hiding in the cave. What was more distressing, when I looked around the clearing, was that there was no sign of Makenna or my crew.
“Where are they?” I turned to Sai. “Do you see them?”
With a brow furrowed in deep concentration, he shook his head.
The biggest magic dragon hovered outside the Kravaxian’s cave, flapping its massive wings and slashing at the air with its glowing talons. “Let them go at once!” it roared. “Or perish in eternal hellsfire.”
“That’s a bit dramatic,” I said.
Sai’s shoulders shrugged, his lips tilting in amusement. “That’s Makenna.”
“They are not here,” Tano bellowed, white-faced, practically pleading with the dragon towering above him. “They escaped. We do not have them anymore.”
Just then, thank the stars, Captain Declan Jones’s head popped up from his hiding spot behind a boulder. I pointed him out to Sai, and we slid through the remaining trees until only a few tall pines separated us from the action. Sinking to my knees, I grabbed a small rock from the ground and threw it at the captain. The first rock fell well in front of him, unnoticed. The second rock, however, hit him squarely between the eyes.
He jerked back.
I winced.
Sai snorted. “Nice shot.”
The captain rubbed at his forehead then looked at his fingers. When he turned in the direction of my poorly aimed rock, I waved, and relief washed over him.
Sai and I started his way, but the captain raised his hand, his palm facing us in a clear stay put gesture.
“Stay here?” Sai asked while I scanned the grounds for Freddie, not finding him—because of course the captain wouldn’t bring our Languages and Customs expert on a dangerous recovery mission. Especially since his only useful purpose would be holding me in his arms once it was all over. And even though that seemed indispensably valuable to me, I could see how the captain might disagree.
“It’s probably a good idea,” I said.
“But I don’t want to stay here. I want this to be over. I”—despite his bravery, his steadfast calm in the face of utter bedlam, Sai’s little chin wobbled—“want to go home.”
“Oh, darling.” I pulled him in close, tucking his head under my chin, rocking him from side to side. “Me too. I want to go home too. I— ungh .”
“Sunny!” he cried, his eyes ballooning as I clawed at the icy fingers twisting viciously in my hair, hauling me to my feet. Yanked back, I screamed, “Help!” and pushed Sai as hard as I could toward the captain, who burst out from behind his boulder to grab him.
“I don’t care about the whelp,” Marisia hissed into my ear, wrapping her arm around my neck, holding me in a death grip so tight I could barely breathe. “I’ve never cared. But you tried to turn the head of my mate.”
“Oh…give me…a break,” I rasped, digging my nails into her arm while she frog-marched me into the clearing.
Cinching her arm around my throat until spots danced in my vision as an otherworldly pressure built from the base of my skull to throb behind my temples, she snarled, “The only thing I will give you is death. ”
Something sharp wedged itself into my heart then. Something vital roaring to life inside me. I didn’t want to die. But more than that, deeper than that, I wanted to live. For the first time since the accident, and maybe because I was facing my mortality head on, or maybe because someone kept showing me all the ways that life could be beautiful again, I wanted to live. I wanted to live and grow and love and get a second chance at all of it. I was going to get that chance. I was going to live .
Wheeling me around so we faced the riot in the sky, Marisia roared, “I do not fear your tricks! Come out, offworlders. Show yourselves, or I will kill her.”
“Marisia, no ,” Tano bellowed from the cave, cowering in fear. “You must not anger these spirits of fire.”
“Ha,” she cried, spinning me around, her grip loosening just enough for me to suck in a ragged breath. “No, Tano. You must not anger me .”
The distraction was apparently all Morgath needed. Because from the corner of my eye, I watched him step out from behind a tree. With a voice as dark as night, an expression so menacing shivers raced up my spine, and a sonic cannon pointed direction at us, he said, “Put Sunny down.”
“No…not that,” I croaked, trying to shake my head, because while I was relieved to see the nonlethal weapon, I knew—either from Marisia’s chokehold or the sensory bombardment of the sonic cannon—that I was about to be knocked unconscious. And I hated being unconscious. “I can fix this,” I promised. And when I raised my foot, smashed it down on Marisia’s instep, and threw my head back into her face, I thought it might have been enough to convince him to lower the cannon.
It wasn’t.
The last thing I remembered before the sonic boom robbed me of my hearing, my eyesight, and then my consciousness, was pain searing across the back of my head, the satisfying crack of what I hoped was a broken Kravaxian nose, and Morgath’s apologetic wince when he pulled the trigger.