Page 115 of Spark of the Everflame

As I fought to catch my breath from my frantic sprint into town, my legs feeling like jelly for more reasons than one, I edged along the cordoned-off perimeter and studied the guards holding the line. Somehow they had linked their magic, each of them connected by a thick rope of glowing pale blue light. I suspected any effort to break through would leave me with my own burns to tend to.

The armory itself was almost entirely destroyed. Fire raged along the back wall, and though the front of the building was still intact, the flames were spreading quickly. Whatever the Guardians had done, it had been brutal and horribly efficient.

I fell back into the throng of spectators and circled the site, pausing near the front where a group of Descended were tightly gathered. Occasionally, one of them would break away and disappear into the building, only to emerge empty-handed moments later.

Then, I spotted him.

With his raven hair and night-black clothes, he cut an ominous silhouette against the raging wall of flickering orange. I couldn’t make out the details of his face, and his imposing body was shrouded by the crowd clustered around him, but somehow, even among the pandemonium, I knew him. More than that—Ifelthim, his strange aura sweeping across my skin.

Luther.

As if he’d heard my thoughts, his head snapped in my direction. Even tucked as I was among a sea of onlookers, his glowing blue eyes found mine in an instant.

I shoved my way forward until I was nose to nose with the nearest guard. “I’m here to help,” I shouted over the noisy crowd. “Get Prince Luther—he’s right there, he knows me.”

“I don’t care who you know,” the guard said blandly. He appeared wholly unconcerned with the bedlam occurring behind him. “No one in or out.”

“Just get the Prince, he’ll tell you—”

“No.”

“I’m a healer. If people are hurt, I can help.”

“No.”

“You’re really going t—”

“If I have to tell you no again, I’ll do it with my sword.”

I glanced over his shoulder—Luther was still watching me, though he hadn’t moved from his position.

His face was typically devoid of emotion, but I caught the hint of tightness in his steely eyes and the set of his jaw. There was something harsh in his expression, something akin to...

Suspicion.

A tremble ran down my spine.

Did he think I was responsible for this?

Shit—Iwasresponsible for this. All of it. Perhaps not in the way he suspected, but the blood stained my hands nevertheless.

Guilt would come later—gods, would it come—but for now I still had a chance to stop the hemorrhaging. Literally and figuratively.

“Luther,” I yelled, waving my arms in the air. “Over here.”

He made no move toward me, not even a glimmer of a reaction.

“LU-THER!”

He shook his head and mouthedgo home, then began to turn away.

“Luther, you arrogant prick, come over here and talk to me!”

In the crowd, a hundred eyes turned on me like a mouse that had just awoken a lion. Luther’s shoulders rose and fell abruptly in what I had no doubt was some kind of irritated sigh, but he finally stalked over to meet me.

I had forgotten how tall he was, the way he towered above me with that perennially frozen glare. His hair was unbound and hung in a loose black curtain around the sharp angles of his face, his olive skin glistening from the intensity of the inferno’s heat. Beads of sweat trailed along his scar and dripped down the column of his throat. My hand flexed with the insane and wildly inappropriate urge to brush one away.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he warned.

---