* * *
“Almost there, Jason. Almost there.” Vallon lugged him to the pile of debris. “If you can climb we can get free.”
Already Fi had clambered part way up the unsteady pile, and had turned back to help with the almost comatose detective. But the way her hands trembled, the pallor of her face said she was almost done in. Vallon knew how it felt.
“Just go, Fi. I’ve got him.”
“You can’t manage him on your own.”
“Watch me.” She shrugged him further onto her shoulder in a quasi-fireman’s carry. “Jason, gotta go.”
A hissing sound, and the sulfur stench took her breath away. A dark creeping cloud flowed from the corridor they’d just traversed.
“Acid,” she coughed. “Get, Fi.”
With the sulfur fumes meeting the wet soil and air, sulfuric acid was the result. It would kill her and Jason if she didn’t get him out and away.
She tried to help Jason up the debris pile, but his legs didn’t work. Deadweight.
“Dammit, Jason, I’m not leaving you.”
She let him slide to the bottom of the pile just as a blast of heat came from the corridor. A red glow filled the gloom back where the corridor turned and sent a long finger towards her. More magma joined it.
“Shit.” She grabbed Jason by the shoulders and hauled.
His body up onto the pile. She clambered a few more feet and felt the instability of the pile. The whole thing could come down if she stepped the wrong way. She reached down for Jason and struggled to pull him farther up the pile. What the heck she was going to do when she got him to street level, she didn’t know, but she wasn’t going to leave him to die here so horribly.
She’d already lost one lover to the lava.
A small choked sob as she clambered farther up, and she almost fell. The sulfuric acid burned when she inhaled. It strangled her and made her bare skin peel.
The red fingers of magma had flowed into the room, and up against the debris pile. Bricks softened and began to dissolve.
“Not like this. Not like this. Jason, wake up.”
But he was dead weight in her arms as she continued up. Fi looked down.
“Vallon?”
“Just go. The air’s too bad here. Get help if you can.”
The magma filled the floor and began to undercut the debris pile. It shifted and began to rattle and roll into the deadly pool. Bricks moved under her as she grabbed Jason and hauled his arm over her shoulder. Up. One step at a time, for all the good it was going to do.
“Help. Help!” Fi’s voice came from overhead. She must have made it to safety. That, at least, was good.
But the pile was sinking from street level. If she didn’t get there soon, there’d be no way.
A groan and Jason’s eyes flicked open.
“Vallon?” His voice was barely audible over the squeal of steam and the brick cracking in heat.
“I’m a little busy at the moment, but if you could possibly move those limbs of yours it might help.”
He glanced down the pile of debris. “Fine kettle of fish you got me into.”
“I told you to stay home, but oh, no, the big man has to come along.” She was panting but couldn’t seem to get air.
“Who else was going to protect you?” A cough, and blood spattered both of them.
“Jesus, Jason.” The fumes sent her into another paroxysm of coughing. Her throat was raw.
With his feeble help she hauled him up another foot, and then suddenly people were around her. A fireman threw Jason over his shoulder and another half-carried her up out of the pit, and she collapsed on crushed brick and battered pavement.
“Vallon?”
She looked up at Landon’s voice and there he was, squinting against the daylight. She nodded because she couldn’t breathe. Tears ran from her eyes, but there was no time for that. At least Jason was getting proper first aid.
“I thought you were dead.” Typical Landon.
“Not yet,” she wheezed. “I need Vellum.” It came out as a croak and another coughing fit took her.
“You need a hospital.”
She shook her head. “A hospital won’t stop that.” She lifted her chin at the pit. “Vellum and a pen. Please.”
It took everything she had to speak past the blood in her throat. She climbed to her feet. Gleason and the interloper, Amundson, were there, but she’d only trust Landon. She had to save them both because there were damn well questions he had to answer.
When he still didn’t act, she staggered across the trembling street and grabbed the tools she needed from Margorita Chavez’s exhausted hands. Then she returned to the pit, where magma now filled the room. The last of the debris pile melted into it, so no one else was getting out this way. At the pit’s edge Fi still crouched, Landon waited, and the firemen worked over Jason. She knelt down beside Fi and -reached-.
Power. There was no sign of Rebecca or Xavier, either. Earth power alone fed the huge magma chamber that Rebecca had brought under the city. The chamber swelled and strained, and the earth domed from the building pressure. The cause of the quakes and the utter destruction to come.
Already the city had raised about ten feet. If she didn’t stop it, there would be another volcanic peak where the Emerald City once stood.
“Tell them to heal the street. I have other things….” Her voice gave out, but Landon listened this time and scurried uphill.
How do you stop a volcano’s eruption? Dissipate the power? That was what Xavier tried to do; but Xavier’s efforts had threatened the entire west coast.
Vallon plunged deeper than she’d ever thought she could.
Down, past the underground, the volcano’s heat having dried the ground. Down past the emergency bunker. Down past the chamber where Xavier was lost, where she’d last seen Rebecca screaming as the pillar disappeared.
Down. Molten magma seared her skin, but she sought something else. Golden channels of power, the web beneath the city that funneled the power to the nexus of the magma core.
There. Veins glittered in the earth, brighter than gold, hotter than blood, scented of frankincense, the power humming in them like an angelic chorus.
Her pen poised above the paper, but what should she draw? The power building under her feet was not something she could simply wipe away. She couldn’t just send into the earth, either, or the entire tectonic plate edge could give way.
There was only one other way.
Her pen quill touched and ink sank into the paper as she sank into the soil and her vision doubled. Golden web of power. White vellum as she drew it down, stretching herself along the web. Stretching herself farther than she ever had, down, down to the true veins of the earth.
She sent the dangerous power coursing through them and the earth groaned. Still not enough to stop the danger. Whatever Rebecca had done, now the earth itself fed the building storm. There was no way her simple effort could send enough power away.
But Xavier had thought he could do it. He had been more than a guide to the power.
More than a guide to her, too.
She shut that thought down, because what had he been to her?