10. Maxim
Chapter Ten
Maxim
Whoomph.
The force I can’t identify thumps me into the sand dune beside my cousin, smacking us both into the grit.
Kaiba isn’t breathing, no matter how hard I pummeled his chest only moments ago, trying to get his heart to beat.
Now, I fight to understand this new force originating from the north.
Rapidly, I scan the plumes of black smoke enveloping the Ember Towers along the border. Dark clouds containing burning iron float closer to me with every passing second, carried on the hot wind.
Those toxins killed my cousin and now—
A cough sounds on my left and my focus quickly returns to Kaiba.
He rolls onto his side toward me, hacking up black air, his eyes watering and face taut with visible pain. “Fuck, that hurts.”
“Kaiba!” I scramble across the short gap between us, reaching for him before I remember to keep my distance and reduce the chance I’ll burn him.
I scramble away from him again, crouching in the sand. “You’re alive!”
His face scrunches up as he struggles into a sitting position, only to lean over the sand and hack out more black air.
“I’m not sure I want to be,” he rasps before he descends into another bout of coughing that makes my heart sink.
By the sound of it, his lungs are damaged…
My outstretched hands fold into fists. Fucking useless hands that can only burn Kaiba more. “Cousin—”
But he’s suddenly focused downward, staring at his palm where he was holding it near his mouth.
“What the fuck?” he whispers.
I draw a sharp breath as the final puff of black air from his mouth wafts away, revealing an icy-white powder coating his hand and wrist where his breath landed.
As another shudder racks Kaiba’s body, the air frosts in front of his mouth.
“Frost?” I shake my head. “Impossible.”
There’s no way frost could reach us here in Ember, let alone be sustained in the heat of my kingdom. Let alone enter Kaiba’s lungs.
My cousin’s gaze rises to mine, his eyes wide. “My chest is clear. I’m cold, but I can breathe again.”
I can’t believe it. “But how—?”
Whoomph-whoomph.
Icy power slams into us. Two forceful beats in a row.
We’re hurled into the air, tumbling uncontrollably, airborne for all of three seconds before the second beat dashes us against the ground.
Smack.
My head rings and it takes every ounce of my self-control to contain my fire.
I can’t let my fire out!
Kaiba’s too close to me. I’ll kill him.
As I try to process what happened, try to constrain my fiery instincts, a roar reaches my ears.
A sound like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
A howl of…
Fury and pain and vengeance.
My heart pounds and again, I fight to control my fire, every last nerve in my body suddenly lighting up.
“Kaiba,” I shout, fear pushing at my heart. “Get away from me!”
He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t argue, throwing himself across the sand and leaping to his feet, sprinting away from me across the dunes.
Only to dig in his heels a few fraught seconds later and stop still, frozen, every muscle in his body visibly tense as he stares into the northern sky above the flaming towers.
I follow his line of sight as I draw myself to my feet again.
An immense wall of white rises up in the north, filling the horizon behind the billowing smoke, ascending so high that it’s visible above the tops of the mountains along the rest of the border.
Despite the roaring sound in the air, everything has become still.
Even the meandering smoke seems constrained, shimmering in place.
My mind struggles to process the stillness while my ears register that the howl is, if anything, growing louder.
A heartbeat later, the temperature plummets.
I shudder as icy air wafts across my cheeks and my nearly-bare chest, trying to reconcile how gently the air brushes me, as softly as feathers, while the roar of sound is deafening.
I’m wearing fire-resistant leather pants and beige boots, but across my chest crisscross multiple straps of deep ochre leather, an earthy color that quickly turns white.
Fine particles of frost are landing on my clothes and skin.
At the same time, around my feet, granules of sand begin lifting upward, floating up off the surface of the dunes.
Before my eyes, the granules draw together into the unnerving shapes of—
“Snowflakes.” Kaiba’s voice reaches me, coming across as a whisper, even though he’s clearly shouting where he stands.
His hand rises before a snowflake made of sand—fucking sand!—floats onto his upturned palm, joining the thick, white powder he coughed up.
Ahead of us, from the north, a ripple of icy-blue energy becomes visible from within the wall of white.
The energy flows across the sky, high above the smoke, a single, sharp, half-circle like the blade of a scythe. It flows in our direction, high in the sky, but slowly, almost lazily, angling downward. A trajectory that will bring it right to our location on the ground.
The ripple of energy could be screaming, for all I know.
All I can hear is the roar that continues to cut through my senses like knives, and all I’m certain of is that the ripple of power will reach us within a minute, if that.
I meet Kaiba’s eyes across the distance.
We won’t be able to outpace the ripple of energy, just as we couldn’t outrun this icy air. The frost is fucking everywhere and growing colder by the second.
We also can’t escape north, where the Ember towers are still billowing with smoke. Well, I could, but Kaiba can’t.
Then, to our left, far in the distance, is the dark channel that bled from the bloodlands into my kingdom a week ago, bringing with it the dire threat of vampyrs.
Aeliana Vividari, the Iron King’s powerful mother, lies sleeping in that darkness, her starlight keeping the vampyrs at bay. Kaiba’s mother, my aunt, hasn’t left Aeliana’s side, and neither has our Iron Fae captive, Riven.
Kaiba’s focus flies from me to the far channel of darkness, where his mother could now be in terrible danger.
His thoughts will no longer be of himself. Just as my fears turn to the two women I care about in that darkness. My aunt raised me. I owe her a lifetime of care. And as for Aeliana, I gave Antony my word I’d keep her safe.
In a world where my fire can burn everything to ash, my word has to mean something.
If the burning smoke doesn’t hurt them, the plummeting temperatures could.
Yet I am not the one capable of protecting them.
My presence brings danger, not safety.
“Go!” I roar to Kaiba. “Protect them with your life!”
He doesn’t waste a second. Launching himself into a run, he pushes against the churning air, every muscle in his body visibly straining as he races westward.
He must be whistling for his golden serpent—no doubt a desperate call, since we have no way of knowing if the serpents made it into the sand dunes in time to escape the black smoke.
A second later, Kaiba’s serpent bursts from a dune on my right, spearing across the sand and into the air, dipping sharply southward to evade the smoke still billowing from the Ember Towers before adjusting course toward Kaiba.
Within moments, Kaiba leaps onto his serpent’s back and they dash away.
To stave off the cold, Kaiba will need to burn his quiet fire, the gentle flame every Ember Fae carries in their heart—every Ember Fae, that is, except for me. I have no gentle flame.
If Kaiba combines his quiet fire with his mother’s, I’m certain they will be able to warm the air and shelter in place.
If they can’t, they will need to seek refuge underground, but that will leave the darkness open to vampyrs…
I tell myself that’s a problem I’ll face if or when I have to.
Right now, my focus returns to the ripple of energy that has reached the border. The icy-blue scythe disappears behind the rising smoke and then—
Whoomph.
I see and hear the impact before I feel it, my mind seeming to lift out of my body as I try to comprehend the scale of destruction happening along the border.
The icy-blue scythe rips through the burning Ember Towers.
Instantly, the fires extinguish and the smoke clears, allowing me to see the border for the first time since the towers started burning.
For a single heartbeat, everything stands still. The pressure in the air builds, my ears buzz, and then the scythe smashes through the towers like a swinging blade.
Each row of structures explodes, first the row of Iron Towers, then the Ember Towers.
Massive chunks of jagged rock fly into the air, sailing south across the border, some pieces of debris sailing high while others smack the now-frost-white sand and tumble violently along the ground.
If there were any fae, Iron or Ember, alive within those towers, their bodies will have shattered.
I have seconds before the debris will hit me, let alone the cutting force that’s angling down toward me like a slow-moving blade.
But fuck—my heart sinks because of what I can now see forming behind the remains of the Iron Towers.
A third threat.
An avalanche of snow.