Page 43 of Death Match

As her spirit rose, I squeezed my eyes shut. Helplessness and regret slammed into me, the same feelings I’d experienced when I had been faced with Wyatt’s death and could do nothing to stop it. My entire being shook with the force of it.

I had failed. If I couldn’t even save a room filled with churchgoers, how the hell was I going to save the world?

Another whimper from the pastor, and I realized I didn’t have time for self-doubt now. I may have lost the woman, but this man was counting on me to save him. And I wouldn’t let him down.

He watched me with fearful eyes.

“Stay with me, okay?” I said, my voice failing me. I cleared my throat and tried again. “You’re going to be okay.”

He nodded weakly.

Shouts came from behind me. Men’s voices, yelling commands.

Rescuers?

“Help! Over here!” I coughed between words with a scratchy throat and smoke-filled lungs. “We’re over here!”

My power flared again, the light momentarily blinding in the dark, cramped space. As if playing off my words and signaling for the strangers to come this way.

Suddenly, two men in full firefighter gear crawled into view. They squinted against the harshness of the white light radiating from my body, so I told my power to settle some. To my surprise and relief, it listened. It felt good to be in control of something.

Shielding their eyes, they finally looked my way. Even with their faces mostly covered by their helmets and masks, I could see the astonishment in their expression. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

A skinny woman holding up most of the ceiling and roof and glowing like a human lighthouse? Yeah, definitely didn’t see that every day.

I, on the other hand, was more worried about the pastor—not to mention all the other church goers. My only hope was that everyone else had managed to get out in time and we were the only ones who’d been trapped under the wreckage.

“Him…” I managed to get out and nodded toward the pastor to make sure they saw him there. “Save…him.”

They spotted him and hurried into action, pulling off the fallen rumble from him and doing all they could to haul him out. My muscles cramped painfully, but I begged them to stay in it. Don’t quit. Not yet.

Another pulse light caught my eye, and when I peered over, I found the ghostly form of a woman hovering near her body. As expected, she was stunned and confused as to why she was looking at herself on the ground. The firefighters didn’t notice her there as they worked tirelessly to free the pastor from fallen beams and chunks of plaster to pull him out.

When she met my gaze, I quickly looked away, my stomach twisting into a tight knot. I was chickenshit.

I bit my lip. And I was supposed to be an Archangel? I was supposed to save the entire world, as well as the ones I loved and cared for?

What a joke.

A minute later, the rescuers came back. One of them went for the woman’s motionless body and the other came for me. But before he could reach my spot, the familiar silver swirls of the Trial’s arches swirled all around me, swallowing all I could see. The firefighters, the woman’s ghost, whatever was left of the church—all of it was gone.

When the smoke cleared again, I was back in the center of the maze, in the thick of the jungle-like scenery and surrounded by a circular wall of solid rock.

The sudden change disjointed me momentarily, and it took me a second to remember that that entire scenario in the church hadn’t been real. Even if it had felt that way—and boy, had it felt that way.

Relief washed over me at knowing the danger and that woman’s death wasn’t actually on my shoulders. My knees buckled, and I collapsed onto the ground. I sucked in a deep breath of humid, earthy air to settle my nerves and was relieved to no longer be choking smoke and ash.

“Jade!” Eli’s excited voice boomed from above, making me jump in surprise. “You did it. You beat another Trial.”

I had? Thinking of the dead woman in the church, I sure felt like I had failed. I hadn’t saved everyone.

Tilting my head toward the cloud-streaked sky, I replied, “What the heck was that supposed to be testing exactly?” Listening to people scream and panic, watching a woman die and a man almost die…that seemed more like torture to me.

“Your physical strength,” Michael’s voice chimed in.

Ah.

But couldn’t they have given me some weights to bench-press or something to test that? Why throw me into a figurative and literal fire like that?

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