35. Chapter 35
What the fuck is that about, Remy said. His mother’s head snapped up to the archway in time for the noise to crash through Frost again.
I heard its earsplitting echoes and felt it thunder from above and below as if it were sounding through every floor of Hell, and armored guards had begun to spill out across the snow as if they’d been drawn from wherever the back rooms of Frost lay.
“Go.” She pushed me toward the stone landing of Frost. “Go back to your room. I’ll find you once we’ve figured out what this is about.”
What’s happened? I flattened myself against the archway as the Frost guards raced up the stairs toward Fang and the antechamber. I know it’s an alarm, but for what?
Nothing good. An attack, a mass breakout, a mutiny.
The last time I heard it was when they realized I threw open the doors of the In Between.
He sounded more perplexed than worried. Go down toward Flame and up to the apartments.
It sounds like you’ll be crushed if you try wading through the antechamber.
I did as he said, slow and cautious down the slick stairs until the frost began to melt beneath the heat emanating from Flame.
The torches guttered out for a moment, leaving me in a darkness so complete it was as if ink had been poured into my eyes.
The stone above my head throbbed beneath pounding demonic feet, and when the flames sprang back to life and I glanced up nervously, I smacked straight into a hot, solid mass which turned out to be Finn.
“I’ve been looking for you.” He spoke in a rush, his hands clamped around my shoulders. “You weren’t in your room; one of my contacts lit a fire. Valic set off an alarm. We’ve got to go.”
“Go where?”
“There’s an event.” Finn’s golden eyes danced in the torchlight, his skin made brighter by the flames.
“Organized by humans. Celebrating the many blessings Luceric has laid upon their city and a community prayer for more of the same. What’s the betting he won’t show up to watch them revel in his divinity? ”
Footsteps pounding up. Finn whipped his head around, and over his shoulder I saw Valic hurtling toward us.
“We have to go,” he said, “now, before everyone knows it’s a false alarm and realizes we’ve gone.”
“I can’t go anywhere.” Remy’s voice coiled around my own as he smacked my palm against my right knee. “She can’t go anywhere, my mother’s got an ice manacle at her ankle—”
Finn knocked my legs out from under me, ripped my boot off, and peeled off my three layers of socks. Saw the ice circling my ankle, glittering in the glow of his own skin.
“Where’s Riquin?” Remy asked. “Take him, he’s better at lulling if that’s what you’re after—”
“It’s daylight, dumbass,” Valic said, with a we’ve-got-to-go bounce on the balls of his feet. “He can’t go anywhere and he’d lose his shit if he knew we were taking you.”
“What about Casper?” After being contained and bored into submission by my humanity for years, Remy’s heart was thrashing like a wasp beneath a glass, zinging my eyes between both of his brothers.
“He’s been gone even longer than Finn was and he doesn’t have any clever ways of getting or sending word—” Valic broke off when a ball of flame sprouted in the center of Finn’s hand, licking up his fingers. Finn had been gazing down at my exposed ankle but now he looked up at me, eyebrows lifted.
“No,” Remy snapped, fitting the pieces together quicker than I had. “No, you’ll have to burn her so badly you’ll see her bones.”
“Maybe not. It’s only a bit of ice. She can handle it.” He tilted his head, as if to see me better. “I bet you can handle a lot.”
“It’s not just a bit of ice, it’s my mother’s ice.” Remy wrenched my ankle out of Finn’s grip as he snatched the reins from me. “She can’t heal like we can. You’ll leave her with a charred stump and she’ll die from infection.”
From a pocket of the bag slung over his shoulder, Finn produced a green bottle.
“If it works on our stubborn wounds I don’t see why it wouldn’t work on hers.
Guards will be coming soon to sweep the staircases, make sure the circles are locked down.
Yes or no?” He was asking me, not his brother; I knew that crooked, questioning almost-smile was for me.
I felt a burst of longing in Remy’s heart, as if the veins running through it that had been scraped dry for years had suddenly flooded with an emotion I couldn’t place.
It was as if he’d let me in, or forgotten to lock himself down for the first time. I had never felt his thoughts so clearly as I did right then, and they took my breath away.
For years he had wallowed, seething in the hothouse of my mind, over the injustice of his father’s death.
Always, he’d boiled over it; from the speechless rage of our jarring beginning to the pulsing anger of the present.
How he wanted to go back in time somehow, make everything different.
If only he’d gotten through the antechamber quicker; if only Marcic, fucking Marcic, hadn’t held him up; if only he had noticed, in all his outdoor wanderings, the extra coins in the ferryman’s boat—all that, in a second, just before he sank back into his cell.
I felt myself nodding, heard myself saying yes.
Finn straightened out my leg. “Valic, keep her quiet.”
You don’t have to do this, Remy said as Valic hit the stone steps beside me and curled an iron arm around my belly, pulling me into his lap. This is crazy. You might get hurt out there even if the serum can heal your wounds.
You want to go, I can tell. Valic’s hand slithered across my mouth as the flames in Finn’s hand grew brighter. You want to see him dead and if it can be over, today, then so much the—
Pain like I had never experienced, blistering across my ankle.
A hoarse chant of no no no ringing through my head; whether from me or Remy, I didn’t know or care.
Everything in me, every particle and atom, spun drunkenly around and homed in on the agony hissing across my skin.
I couldn’t wrench free from Valic’s arms, from Finn’s grip on my ankle; I couldn’t see from the careful angle in which Valic held my head, but it hurt so badly my skin had to be blackening like a slab of beef much too close to a flame…
Hands on either side of my face, Remy shouting my name, misty gold coins swimming before me that eventually resolved into a pair of eyes.
“Are you okay?” Finn gave my chin a little jerk. “Speak. Are you all right?”
“Did you kill her?” I felt Valic’s voice rumbling against my sagging back, his arm a steel bar against my stomach. “Can they die from burns?”
“She’s not dead, she just passed out, their bodies sometimes do that when the pain is too great—are you okay?” Light slap against my cheek. I tried to blink the fuzz from my eyes. “The serum can take some time to work; can you manage or will I have to carry you?”
I suppose he found the answer in my face, because he hefted me into his arms and took off down the staircase, past Flame’s blinding archway and up the stairs that led toward the apartments, knocking back a bewildered, lagging Flame demon with a sharp you never saw us, do you hear me?
You’re okay, Remy said, as the shock receded. The pain was still there, every throb sending multicolored lights popping in my peripherals and a sick swoop in my belly, but it grew lighter with every step Finn took.
Bedlam in the antechamber. The echo of voices carried down the hallway, torchlight flashing across the back of an armored guard sprinting away from us.
Finn stopped at a bare stretch of plain stone, one hand braced against it, pausing as if he needed to catch his breath from bearing the burden that was me. But then it was as if the light of the sun shone from behind the stone, a bright thread that formed the outline of a handleless door appearing.
My blood swished in my ears, a glitter not unlike the effects of alcerin seeping into my veins. What is that?
Finn is a lieutenant in Flame. He can access certain exits out of Hell that less ranking demons can’t.
Finn looked down at me as he shouldered through the stone door with Valic right behind us. A swift and searching glance as if to take stock of whether or not I’d faint again.
Daylight blasted into my eyes. For a moment, I saw nothing but Finn’s golden glow and hazes of green and gray. Tree branches from the edge of the wood waved idly in the distance, as if welcoming me back. And in a blink, they disappeared.