Chapter Eleven
Everything happened between one heartbeat and another. Sid’s body falling, broken and bloody and beaten, to spin away into darkness. His spirit rising out of it and moving, but not up, as Pritkin had half expected, in order to attack him. Not even out, toward one of the tunnels and freedom. But down.
To where the biggest vein of brimstone ran in a glittering ring around the cave.
Pritkin had no time to stop him, no time even to brace himself, before he was hit by a vast wash of air from the explosion. It sent him tumbling helplessly backwards, head over heels, with no way to right himself or even tell where he was going. Until he crashed into a wall like a bird hitting a window.
He slid down to a ledge, body bruised and wings askew, in time to glimpse Sid streaming past, a faint outline against a curtain of silver fire. But he didn’t pursue. Not because he couldn’t have caught him, but because whatever spell Sid had used to ignite the brimstone had caused a chain reaction, exploding vein after vein, one right after the other like a massive firework pinwheel, all the way back to—
“Cassie!” He hadn’t seen her before, hadn’t had time to see anything in the life or death struggle with not one but two ancient horrors. He would have thought he was hallucinating, but Casanova was there, too, screaming his fool head off as the ledge they were on cracked and splintered and—
“No!”
Pritkin saw them fall, saw Rian grab Casanova, saw her reach for Cassie—who was too far away. Rian stared up at him for s split second, horrified and apologetic, and then she and Casanova winked out. While Cassie fell into a pit straight out of a medieval vision.
John dove, not knowing if she had enough strength left to shift, not betting on it because the damnable, damnable woman never held anything back, never once put her own safety ahead of anyone else’s, a fact that was going to get her killed one day, but please God, not this day. But he couldn’t see anything through billowing clouds of red dust, could barely breathe through the waves of fiery heat, and there was no hope of hearing her cry out, not with the roar of all that raw power being released, the crack of huge swaths of stone as they calved off the sides of the cave and fell, many exploding from the inside as they did so…
“Cassie!” It was a desperate, stupid, useless. Because he hadn’t caught her, and if she hadn’t shifted, somehow holding concentration in the midst of an inferno, there was no chance left—
“Over here!” He heard it, faint, so faint, that it might have been a figment of his imagination. But he turned anyway, banking left, barely missing a mass of burning stone with a few screaming miners still clinging to it as it fell, and then he saw her.
She was half on, half off a ledge, one leg dangling over nothing, rivers of molten brimstone cascading on either side, the whole shelf ready to blow at any moment. But she was alive. Somehow, despite all possible odds—and then he had her.
“I…tried to shift to you, but I landed…here—” she broke off, choking, as a stinging cloud of gas and debris showered them, seemingly from all directions.
The whole place was imploding, with huge gouts of fire belching out of tunnels, molten brimstone dropping like silver rain, and falling boulders shattering off pieces of the overhang above them. Shifting back to Dante’s while surrounded by this much explosive was impossible; they’d be dead before he could finish the spell. But staying put was equally out of the question.
A great wash of air boiling up from the inferno below buffeted them as he took off once more, launching them toward the only halfway clear air he could see. And then there it was: a piece of sky, blessedly dark against the searing light, just a crack far, far above his head. But a second later there were two, and then a dozen, and then the whole top of the mountain was cracking and fissuring and falling in.
He pulled Cassie’s T-shirt over her nose and mouth, raised one forearm over his eyes to shield them, and strained upward. Sparks showered down everywhere; smoke masked the only way out after barely an instant; and the heat was unbelievable. He couldn’t reassure Cassie, even if he’d had the breath, because close as she was, she wouldn’t have heard him. He had never before been inside and explosion as it was happening, but it was deafening. It cracked and rumbled, whistled and roared, thundered and boomed, on all sides, as it consumed the mountain from the inside out.
Even the knowledge he’d gained from the Irin was insufficient to chart a course through something like this. The demon had never done it, so there were no memories to plunder, no visuals to guide him, no anything but desperate clawing against air so dry, it had hardly any lift. John had the impression that the only thing he was doing was managing not to fall, while the headway they gained was mostly from the huge surges of air rushing up from below.
He had been riding the edges of most of them, but one finally caught him full on, picking him up as if he was no heavier than the burning bits of ash glittering through the air, and then throwing him up, up, up—and out.
They burst out through the remains of the mountaintop, just as what looked like a volcano erupted below them. The whole mountain breathed in for one last great gasp before bursting outward, the colossal explosion throwing huge burning pieces of rock high into the sky. But not as high as John flew, his borrowed wings beating the air in time to the rapid pace of his heart.
He didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down, until they had put whole mountains between them and the smoking hulk behind. He finally set them down on a blessedly cold, dark hillside, far enough away that he couldn’t even feel the heat anymore. Only then did he sink to his knees, gasping for breath, the great singed wings falling around him and still smoking slightly.
But he didn’t let his passenger go.
For a long time, they just stayed like that, John eventually moving into a sitting position, pulling Cassie’s body back against him as they watched the awesome power erupting on the horizon. She kept swallowing, tiny little gulps that John could barely hear, which could have been from a parched throat or too much smoke or a thousand other things. But he didn’t think so. Because she was also trembling.
“Close your eyes,” he told her softly, and she did, tilting her head back against his chest, her breath hitching again. But she didn’t cry, didn’t go into hysterics, didn’t do anything. Except stay there, her hand tight on his thigh, her breath hot against his chest, until her own slowly evened out again.
After a long time, one small hand moved, slowly, tentatively, tracing the feathers falling around her, stroking the black slashes along one huge wing. She didn’t ask where he’d gotten them, didn’t ask why they mimicked the marks on his shoulder. She didn’t ask anything, just kept running those soft fingers through the down, along the spines…
“How long will they last?”
“A few hours,” he said hoarsely. He should tell her, he thought, that the feathers weren’t just a projection. That for the moment, for however long the Irin’s essence held out, they were an innate, physical part of him. And that her fingers stroking along the marks felt just like they once had, moving over his scars.
He ought to tell her, ought to ask her to stop. It’s what a gentleman would do, he knew that. But then, he was half demon.
And tonight, he thought maybe he’d just go with that.
“They’re nice,” she murmured, pulling one around her.
“Yes.” One hand tightened in her thick soft hair. “Yes.”