38. Chapter 38 #3
“Her blood will be on your hands should she die,” he said to Finn, though he didn’t look away from me. “Are you willing to risk an eternity in your damned wood? The seraphim won’t spare her.”
Maybe it would be as easy as Finn claimed, I thought, when he chained Luceric’s other hand in flame. I almost believed it might be, until I heard the far-off rumble of keening. I assumed it must have been coming from the slow white tide of humans, that they were screaming.
“Finn,” Remy yelled, my voice high and thin. “Get her out of here.”
Remy and his brothers cursed as one as the air turned into a furnace.
A howling wave of flame and steel fell upon us from the heavens, shapes growing sharper and sharper as they tore closer, streamers of smoke trailing behind them.
Bald heads, eyes like vipers, scales glinting in the firelight.
The seraphim were garlanded in flame, but now there was a circle of fire around us as well, lifting higher and higher as Finn’s hand lifted, too.
Through smoke and swirling flame, I saw the points of fiery golden swords orbiting ten feet above our heads.
The air tasted black, ashen, choking me with every breath I sucked in. “Finn!” Remy’s voice was muffled as his brother pressed me into his chest.
The ravenous crackle of flames, Finn’s firm voice in my ear. “We’re not blinking.”
“You promised—”
“I lied.”
“There’s too many, they’re going to kill us, you fucking idiot, not just her but the both of—”
“Then do something about it. How long do you think she’ll have before they breach my fire? You don’t want her to die, do you?”
Dull thuds as more of Valic’s knives found their marks.
I threw a panicked look over my shoulder.
Luceric yanked at the chains of fire and Finn’s flames had devoured both the angel’s wings.
The wall of flaming celestial swords were piercing the demonic fire.
It looked like the mouth of Hell, the Hell that humans had imagined.
A sudden spill of ice poured through my veins. It wasn’t my choice to do so, but I groped blindly at Finn’s waistband, yanked loose the blade that hung there, and plunged it into his thigh. The instant his grip loosened, I was off.
My body wasn’t mine any longer; the flames bowed before me as if I were their liege lord, shuddering away from the frost in my blood as I made to run.
What are you doing? I shrieked inside the cell in my mind that Remy had just vacated.
He’s going to get you killed.
I can’t get back home without him! You can’t blink me anywhere in here—
I can make you run—
He broke off as the smoke cleared, revealing a thick, clotted crowd of humans advancing slowly, dreamlike, their eyes blind and blank and staring. They shuffled through pools of molten celestial blood that stained their hems, but the bodies of the angels in children’s skin had somehow disappeared.
Remy tightened my fist on the blade he’d stolen from Finn.
I felt the burn as the steel went cold as ice.
He would have to hack his way through them, so tightly packed were the bodies; men and women and children, lurid flashes from every which way as the light beamed off the golden sunbursts on their breasts—
My throat went oily, and I had never sounded so demonic as I ordered them aside.
They only moved closer, a pale curtain of horror, immune to lulling. White everywhere. I would drown in it or else have to murder a few of them to make what I knew would be a doomed bid for escape.
Sudden heat and an eerie whistle of wind at my back, as if a flaming blade was slicing through the air, terrifyingly close—
And then something seized me from behind, the earth beneath my feet vanishing.
Gravity quailed. My stomach flailed. My vision swam, a red and orange haze.
When it cleared and my feet slammed into the ground, flames had taken shape all around me again.
We were back inside Finn’s flames and his hands were clamped on my shoulders.
He glared down at me, embers misting about his sweaty face.
“She stays with me,” he shouted. “You’re going to get her killed or yourself damned.
” His arm was about my rib cage again and he spun me around to Luceric’s writhing body.
“Don’t worry about the seraphim,” Finn called out to Valic beside him over the roar of the flames and all the keening. “Just kill him, do it now before more come, I don’t know how much longer I can hold them off.”
A dark shape overtook Luceric, knocking him back.
Valic’s arm was a lethal blur. The seraphim looked like living torches as their faces took sharper shape behind Finn’s fraying flames.
The air was full of smoke and shrieks and ash, and one might have assumed I’d have something better to think about than my bloodrose, but I saw its petals in my mind’s eye for the first time in days as the sword points grew close enough to burn me with their kiss.
Stop it, Des, I’m not going to let you die.
And I didn’t want to see that naked stem before I breathed my last, so I looked at the sky instead, hoping to discover some shred of brilliant blue.
I found little but a roof of flame and low dark clouds that caught the color of the fire, red and orange and gold swirling amongst the black. The heavens were spangled with embers.
It was beautiful, in its way. A very eerie beauty.
I had the sudden impression of being somehow past it all, like I was on a raft floating out into an endless sea.
I was already gone, in all practical sense; I ought to bow my head to fate.
If I were smart, I would, though some small part of me resisted, arguing that death would always find me in the end, but that didn’t mean I had to curtsy and scrape to it.
I tightened my hand around the blade, the only weapon I had with which to protect myself, just as the seething mass of seraphim sliced through Finn’s flames. Ducking to avoid being speared like a fish, I tried to drag Finn down with me, but he didn’t budge.
In the past week, I had lived more than I ever had back in Monde’s End. I could at least take that with me, wherever my eternity led me.
I covered my face with my hand, smearing my eyes with stinging sweat and soot, trying, rather unsuccessfully, to accept the possibility of my death, even as I drew back the blade—
And then I felt light-headed, self-immolated with burning ice, half-dragged back into Remy’s cell and more afraid than I’d ever been in my life. When a burst of fresh air made my head cease swimming, I peered through the gaps of my fingers and felt something snatch my elbow.