11 Finn #3
“Give me the kids!” She braced herself against the window frame. “I’ll take them out the window. You carry Deborah through the courtyard.”
“Through the ash devil.”
“It won’t burn you. We established that.” A section of ceiling dropped six feet to her left, spraying embers. She didn’t flinch. “But it will burn me and it will burn them, so the kids go out the window and Deborah goes with you. Move.”
I looked at the witch. “I’m going to carry you. It’s going to be hot, and you’re going to want to let go. Don’t let go.”
“I won’t let go.” Deborah’s bloody face was steady now. “I’ve been holding on to things for longer than you’ve been alive, young man.”
I lifted the boy and set him at the window.
Sloane caught his shoulders and hauled him through in one smooth motion, the little girl still locked against his chest. The boy’s feet cleared the sill and Sloane swung them both down to the ground outside.
I heard her voice—calm, certain, the voice of a woman who’d been running people out of danger since she was barely more than a child herself:
“Straight to the garden. See the big man with the shotgun? Run to him. Don’t stop. Go.”
Small feet on gravel. Running.
I turned back to Deborah. Got one arm under her back, one under her knees, and lifted. She weighed nothing—adrenaline and fire do that—and she locked her arms around my neck and buried her face against my shoulder.
“Close your eyes,” I told her. “Don’t open them until I say.”
I walked into the ash devil with the witch in my arms.
The column took us. Gray and roaring, ember-light spinning, that hollow scream they make when air and ash fight over who owns the sky.
The heat pressed. It bent. The ash came against my skin and found the oath and recognized it, and the burning parted around us the way a river parts around a stone.
Deborah’s arms tightened on my neck but she didn’t scream and she didn’t let go.
I came out the other side into the courtyard, gray from crown to boot, ash falling off me in sheets.
Through the smoke and the ruined walls I could see the yard—the defenders on their feet now, the Seeker line shattered, and Sloane climbing back out through the east window, moving slower than she had a minute ago, the fever taking its toll.
I carried Deborah across the courtyard, through the blown wall, and onto the lawn.
The defenders parted for me in silence. Ten people who’d been pinned down and losing, watched a stranger walk out of an ash devil with their witch in his arms, coated in the gray remains of the home they’d built their lives around.
Nobody said a word. Some silences are louder than any sound a person can make.
I set Deborah down into reaching hands. The older defenders took her—practiced, the hands of people who’d been catching each other for a long time.
Sloane came around the corner of the house.
She was walking. Barely. I could feel it through the bond—the crash coming, the massive expenditure of fighting and running and climbing through windows in the grip of a Heat wave finally presenting its bill.
Her face had gone from flushed to gray. The pistol hung at her side, too heavy to holster. Blood on her hands, her jaw, her shirt.
She made it as far as the well-head.
Her knees hit the stone and she caught herself on the rim, and I was there—I was there, six strides—and I caught her before she fell, my arms going around her, her forehead dropping against my chest, and the sound she made was one of relief.
The sound of a woman who’d held herself upright through an impossible thing and had finally, finally found the wall she could lean against.
“Kids?” she whispered against my shirt.
“Safe. Both of them.”
“Deborah?”
“Broken ankle. She’s being worked on.” I pressed my mouth against her hair. Ash and sweat and violets and the deep, sweet burn of the Heat. “You were supposed to go around the outside.”
“The outside was on fire.”
“Everything was on fire. That was the whole problem.”
“Then it didn’t matter which way I went.” Her fingers curled into my shirt, too weak to grip properly, and the ghost of a laugh moved through her. “I got the kids out.”
“You got the kids out.” I held her tighter, and the bond hummed between us, low and golden and vast.
The house gave a long groan and sat down into its own foundation, and forty years of hiding went up in one bright column.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The hedge-witch caught my wrist before I could carry Sloane out of the garden.
Her fingers found the ash-filled lines of the oath tattooed there, and her bloody face went strange. She looked up at me with something that wasn’t gratitude anymore.
It was closer to recognition. Closer to dread.
“The Oath moved,” she said. Her thumb pressed the deepened ink and it hummed. “I felt it move—all of us felt it, like a lodestone turning. We didn’t know what it meant.” Her grip tightened. “She’s been waiting for you. She said someone was coming who’d carry it. She’s been waiting for you.”
“I don’t—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I got my arm free, gently, and I went to take care of my mate.