Page 54 of Sebastian

I couldn’t breathe.

None of that mattered. I could still feel Newt’s weight in my arms. He seemed to be in one piece.

But was he alive?

This thought spurred me into motion. I opened my eyes and struggled to see through blurry vision. Newt’s face greeted me. Bright red blood trickled down his forehead, nearly the same color as his hair. His eyes were closed.

My first instinct was to shake him and demand a response. I so desperately wanted to hear his voice, but I stopped myself at the last moment. If he was injured, too much movement would make it worse.

His chest rose with a shallow breath.

He was alive.

I could handle anything else so long as he was alive.

What the fuck had happened?

As I rose up from the floor into a sitting position, Newt cradled in my arms, my shoulder screamed with pain. A splinter of wood several inches long stuck out of my flesh. I couldn’t pull it out without letting go of Newt. The stake would have to stay in place for now.

Some sort of explosive. That’s what my mind told me. There had been some sort of explosive on the other side of the door, likely triggered when I turned the handle.

My head hit something solid when I sat up. Everything was darker than it should have been. I felt along the solid surface hovering over us and realized I was looking at the underside of my bed frame.

When the explosive went off, the bed had been thrown across the room. It probably would have killed us, but luck was on our side. The frame had wedged perfectly in the corner, creating a little pocket of safe space.

It would have been so much easier to lie there and just wait for rescue. Surely, Damien was already looking for me. I couldn’t see anything outside our protected corner beneath the bed frame, and had no way of knowing what state the apartment was in. Waiting for rescue would probably be safer, and I was so tired. All I wanted to do was lie there and continue holding Newt until everything was safe again.

Except, it was getting hard to breathe.

The air was too thick, and the taste of ash lingered on my tongue.

I let go of Newt just long enough to peer around the damaged bed frame.

What had once been the wall of my bedroom was now a burning hole of wood and plaster. Fire licked every surface it could find, rapidly climbing higher until it touched the ceiling. There was barely any floor left. Our apartment was practically a crater. Even as I watched, a few more floorboards crumbled under the flames, and a half-destroyed chair fell into the burning pit.

More and more thick smoke filled the room. My vision blurred and each breath came a little harder than the one before. Behind me, I heard Newt cough, a deep raspy hacking that made my lungs hurt just from the sound.

If we didn’t escape soon, either the smoke or the fire would kill us. Even if rescue was on its way, we wouldn’t survive long enough for them to get here.

We needed to get out on our own.

“Come on, Newt,” I said to the unconscious man as I lifted him into my arms. “We’re getting out of here.”

I shoved the remains of the bed frame aside and stumbled to my feet.

Maybe, if I sprinted, I could make it to the staircase without getting too burned by the fire.

That plan was immediately killed when I took a few unsteady steps and one of the floorboards collapsed under my foot. I stumbled back until I hit the far wall. Fire had eaten away at the building’s supports. We were practically standing on a pile of matchsticks. There was no way we’d make it to the stairs, assuming they even still existed.

It was a miracle this portion of the apartment was still standing at all.

There was nowhere to go.

More smoke blew into my face, filling my nose and mouth immediately. I coughed so harshly that I nearly dropped Newt.

No, there had to be a solution. We were still alive. So long as we were alive, there was hope.

The window. It was only a few feet away, and the floor around it still looked stable.

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