38. Chapter 38 #4
Silence, smoke billowing toward the bright midday sky. Shards of glass sparkled in Finn’s dark hair and he was smiling like he’d never been so proud, yanking me to my feet. “See?”
Glass glittering in the grass, shiny epileptic flashes from every angle.
Finn’s flames reduced to half-mast around us, though a few upright seraphim had taken advantage of the receding fire.
They looked weakened, woozy. Bits of glass peppered the grotesquely curved contortions of their snakelike bodies, buried deep in their arms, their legs, their chests.
The moment before Finn blasted a gout of fire at one with glass in its eye, I realized the ruined iris had turned a curious shade of blue.
It wasn’t glass but ice, and it was everywhere, shattered about Valic as he dragged a blade across Luceric’s throat, foot-long shards of it spearing fallen seraphim into the earth. I stared, dumbstruck, as if so much heat had cooked my faculties. Sweat rolled down my face.
White mounds all around us in a circle behind the fallen seraphim, as if the humans had been knocked over by a massive wind.
Hands clawed the air. Some were lifting themselves onto their elbows; some were whipping their heads around in uncomprehending horror, as if wondering how they’d gotten there.
“It’s not just ice.” Finn had my face in his hands, forcing me to look at him. “That was the least of it. You blew them back. You knocked down my fire. Didn’t I tell you for years you ought to be training with your mother?”
The humans were screaming now, tripping over their hems, elbows pumping, running out of their sandals to flee.
I looked away from Finn. How could Luceric even stir with all the wounds he’d taken?
His robes glowed with his own blood. His throat was in ruins, the handle of a knife humming in his chest, but still he mustered a few feeble twitches, surrounded in smoking ash from the remnants of his wings.
Flames gleamed on the slices of ice strewn across his almost-corpse.
His wrists were slender blackened twigs of bone where the fiery chains had been.
They had to put him beyond all hope of repair, Remy said flatly. It involves some overkill.
“There might be a second wave incoming.” Finn’s hand fumbled for mine. “We’ve got to go.”
Valic was as gold as Finn as he looked up, gold with celestial blood, his face pouring with it, his chest heaving, and in an instant, he’d shimmered oddly and disappeared.
My palm felt scorched around the hilt of the blade Remy had stolen off of Finn, which had gone a solid, frosty white. And I don’t know if it was me or Remy who drew it back and sent it hurtling through the air and into Luceric’s eye. It almost felt as if it were a joint decision.
Luceric’s body jerked at impact, the hilt buzzing. Then he grew still as death.
A flash flood of embattled emotion, a plunge of breathtaking depression.
Mine or his? I could hardly tell, entwined as we were, the boundary between us worn thinner than gossamer.
Joy battled grief, rage crossed swords with calm.
And there was satisfaction too, but the most prominent flavor was despair, because still his father was dead, gone forever, unreachable.
In a strong light there was still nothing to celebrate here.
Throughout this mental tossing flashed head-snapping images of his father, smiling, his father, dead, his father’s blood spreading across the moat of the In Between and marbling the silver water of the river.
Remy’s pain felt like my own, branded across my heart.
Then my hand lifted of its own accord and squeezed the outside of my shoulder.
It’s not yours to carry, he said.
But I felt it all the same. I would take it as my own, if it would help. You just need time. I was trembling like a leaf despite the wall of heat. It takes time to feel better.
When he shrank back into his cell, he took most of his emotions with him, though the residue clung film-like to my skin.
Finn tipped me a half smile, an eyebrow arched.
“Feel better?” He moved forward into the nest of fire to rip the blade from Luceric’s eye and slid it back inside the waistband of his pants.
“I’m afraid I don’t have an endless supply of blades like your standard Fury demon, and I’m rather attached to this one. ”
Finn lifted his hand to let loose another torrent of flame, shrouding Luceric in fire.
He watched him smolder for a moment, calm even as pandemonium raged and seraphim roused, though he overrode everything else in sight: dark hair feathered red by the flames, firelight all mixed up with the bloom of gold on his skin, eyes like candlelight, beauty and malice and a moody sort of pleasure all rolled into one.
He turned back to me in a shower of sparks, his edges shimmering just like Valic’s had. There was enough humor in his eyes to temper the wicked satisfaction as he looked down at me.
“Shall we?” he asked, taking my hand just before we disappeared.