Chapter Seventeen #2
He stares at her hand, one moment, two, before his amber eyes return to her hazel ones. “I’m not supposed to leave. I’m supposed to make sure it keeps burning.”
He sounds as young as he looks. Anna swallows, lets her hand fall. A quick glance proves the fire is getting closer. The heat of it makes her skin damp, sweat rolling down her collar and between her shoulder blades.
“You should run,” he says, but the warning falls flat. As if he doesn’t believe it will really make a difference if she heeds it or not. “They’re going to come for you, too.”
Anna’s heart stutters.
They.
Her knees tremble as she straightens, retreating a step. There are shards of bitter truths in her throat, cutting like glass when she swallows. When she speaks, the words are shredded and metallic on her tongue. “Where’s Khiran?”
The boy—Malik—doesn’t answer, not in words, but Anna can see it reflected in his eyes. It’s just as destructive as the fire surrounding them—just as deafening. Anna’s chest rises and falls, gasping, but she can’t find her breath.
The key was in the ignition.
The key was in the ignition and their bag—their bag was on the seat.
She sways, stumbles. Malik watches her with detached curiosity as she sinks to the ground, but she doesn’t care. She is unraveling, fragile satin threads of control slipping between her fingers and curling in the heat. Ready to blacken. Ready to burn.
A thought echoes like a nightmare in her mind, over and over, until Anna can feel the cruel cut of the truth.
Khiran would die before he left her.
Together. They promised each other that they would face whatever came together.
“Aren’t you going to run?” Malik asks.
Anna’s fingers curl against the ground, ash and earth burying beneath her nails. She stares at the furrowed grooves her hands leave behind. Run? Where would she run to? Khiran is gone. “No.” She lifts her head. Meets Malik’s concentrated stare.
He’s waiting, she realizes. They’ll come for him, pluck him from the chaos he’s created, and take him home.
Home.
They would take Khiran home, too. Home to The First.
If she waits here, they’ll take her, too.
Malik only watches as she folds in on herself, drawing her trembling arms around her chest. “You’ll burn,” he murmurs. Anna could almost believe it to be a warning if not for the confused inflection marking it as a question.
A laugh, bitter and pained, claws up from her throat until it twists into a sob. If there are tears streaking her cheeks, she can’t feel it. The heat of the fire makes her skin prickle and her eyes sting. It won’t be the first time she’s burned.
Maybe it will be her last.
In another life, Khiran had spun her stories of this boy while her hands tended to her garden.
The Calamity. The boy with a short fuse and scorching power.
None of us are immune to his flames, Khiran had said.
Anna doesn’t know if that’s true for her or not.
She only knows the risk of burning is worth the chance of being brought back to him.
Anna breathes deep, the air laced with soot and heat, as she lifts her head.
Studies the boy described as a bomb. Marcia had enjoyed their fear—had drank from it as if it were the sweetest of wines.
Anna sees none of that cruelty in him. There is no wicked, cutting smile.
No sadistic pleasure in his dark gaze, only apathy.
A voice—her name—so soft she barely catches it.
It slips through the static humming in her ears, the roaring rush of flames.
She stands, soot darkening the front of her dress, and strains her ears.
She’s scared it’s not real. Scared her heart is meddling with her mind, but she hears it again and the relief is so great she almost collapses with it.
Khiran.
She runs. Towards the sound of his voice. Towards him.
It’s impossible, but she swears the trees sway away from her.
Their flaming branches parting to make a path she can travel without fear of being tangled in them.
She follows it, even when the splitting of limbs and the screaming whistle of steam becomes so loud she loses the sound of his voice.
There is something else there now. An urgent buzzing under her skin telling her to listen. To trust.
She doesn’t know what she’s hearing, what she’s feeling, but she’s too desperate to question it.
Her pulse drums in her ears, blood rushing beneath her skin.
There’s a wall of fire in front of her, but she turns sharply, following the instinctual pull of her heart.
A clearing, not yet touched by the destruction, opens up ahead.
Khiran’s there, his back to her and his eyes wild and searching as he screams her name into the chaos. Looking for her.
She answers, his name cracking with the weight of her relief.
He turns, just in time to catch her as she launches herself around his middle.
Shaking, his hands are on her face, her body, checking her for burns.
Her fingers tangle in his soot stained shirt, gripping him with an urgency that borders on desperation.
Anna can’t tell where his trembling begins and hers ends.
“Anna,” he murmurs, a choked breath. “I thought—”
He doesn’t finish—can’t. She doesn’t need him to. She holds him tighter, because even though the world is burning around them, she still needs this moment to convince herself that he’s real. “You were gone.” Her voice catches, words tangled and barbed in her chest.
Khiran pulls away, his hands anchored on her shoulders. “Marcia is here.”
She swallows. Nods. “I know.” There’s a bruise blossoming along his jaw, circling his neck like a shadowed collar. Her hand reaches between them, tracing the damage. Blood smears across his skin. Her hand is covered in it. “You’re hurt—”
“It’s not mine.” His brow furrows, searching her face with growing trepidation. “Anna, how did you know?”
Her eyes meet his. “Malik.”
Khiran pales, his grip on her tightening.
“You saw him?” His eyes flit over the flames, a bitter laugh staining his lips.
There’s nowhere for them to run. The fire has encircled them.
“Of course. That’s why she didn’t follow.
They’re burning us out…” He shakes his head, hiding his face behind his hand.
The wind shifts, smoke stinging her eyes and clouding her lungs. She coughs into her sleeve and blinks back the tears trying to clear her eyes. Her throat aches with it. The expression Khiran wears is nothing short of tormented. Anna understands why.
I’m supposed to make sure it keeps burning.
They’ve been forced into a corner they can’t escape—not without magic. If they stay, Malik’s flames will devour them. If they leave, Marcia will follow the thread of magic, ready to draw blood on the other side. Only one of the options provides them with a chance.
Anna suspects that’s just how Marcia wants it.
“We can’t face Malik,” he murmurs, hand dropping from his face. His skin looks sallow, wrung of hopes and sharp with bitter realities.
Anna studies the shadows lining his eyes. “He’s a child.” Her voice still shakes with the horror, the heartbreak, of it. “You didn’t tell me he was still a child.”
Khiran scowls. “He isn’t. He’s older than I am—don’t let his appearance fool you into believing otherwise.”
Anna thinks of the look in his eyes when she touched his shoulder. Thinks of how similar it looked to another boy all the way in California who was only ever angry because he hurt. “You’re wrong.”
He doesn’t argue with her, but she can see his doubt. It doesn’t shake the conviction she feels in her heart.
Khiran presses the handle of a blade into her hand.
Anna instantly recognizes it as the one she used to cleave her finger from her flesh.
It’s stained with blood—Marcia’s, he tells her.
He managed one good hit before he’d fled into the fire.
He has some burns on his legs and scorched clothing to show for it, but the gamble had paid off.
Marcia refused to risk following him. Why would she, when all she needed to do was wait?
Drawing on Khiran’s magic is the only option left to them.
He holds her close to his chest, his arms a vice binding them together. “Are you ready?”
Anna wets her lips. The heat of the flames surrounding them makes her thoughts muggy. Their plan is more thin hopes than a strategy—travel to the other side of the world and hope the distance causes enough of a delay that they can slip into a crowd before Marcia can catch them.
Khiran’s hand slides along her jaw, tilting her face to his. “Anna?”
There’s a determined edge to his stare, rimming his eyes and tightening the line of his shoulders. Anna tries to draw courage from it, swallowing the fear suffocating her. Her eyes drop to his lips, heart splintering.
These could be their last moments.
She leans into him, her fingers tangling in his shirt and the flat of the chipped blade pressing over his heart, and brings her lips to his.
Soft and reverent, as if kissing him slowly could delay the inevitable.
His mouth slides against her, fingertips burying in her hair at the nape of her neck and the hand on her hip holding her flush against him.
When he pulls away, his forehead pressed intimately to her own, Anna feels the loss as keenly as the scorching heat stinging her skin.
She has so much to say to him, so many feelings she’s never found the words for.
Finding them, saying them, now would feel too much like a goodbye.
Instead, she grips the knife until her knuckles go white and holds his gaze. “I’m ready.”
His chin dips, pressing one last kiss to her trembling lips, murmuring against her parted mouth. “Hold on to me. Don’t let go.”
It is, perhaps, the easiest thing to promise. Still, she repeats it like a mantra. Winding her arms over his shoulders, she holds him so tightly her chest aches with the pressure and her muscles tremble with the strain. His hold is equally fierce, a protective cage she’s terrified of escaping.
The world folds around them, violent and crushing like a ball of paper in a clenched fist. It hurts.
It feels like she’s at the center of a storm, centrifugal force tearing pieces of herself in every direction, until the only thing that feels real is the press of Khiran’s body against her own.
She’s screaming, she thinks. Her mouth is open and her lungs are empty.
The sound of it is lost, pulled from her lips and smothered in the weight of the universe.
Darkness creeps at the edges of her vision, spreading like an oil spill. She’s suffocating in it. Drowning.
Hold on. She has to hold on. She promised.
But it’s too much.
The last thing she’s aware of is the sound of her name, the breath in her ear, before she passes out.