Page 118 of Moonmarked

What mattered was that I had to get to Rune.

My muscles unlocked. I ran, and I couldn’t even tell you whom I passed or how I made it to the other side of the box, just that I basically launched myself at the opening in the floor. There were stairs and there was light floating over my head, a corridor that stretched in front of me, so that’s where I went.

Rune had to be down there somewhere, underneath this arena. I could find him—I knew I could. That box up there had somehow stopped me from releasing this heat that had built up inside me, but it would be there now, and I would use it. I would make this entire fucking arena float on air until I found him, until I took him out of there, until I made sure he was safe.

Because he wasn’t dead.

Rune wasnotdead, not just because I refused to live in any kind of world where he didn’t exist, but he was a smart man. He’d have had a plan, a way to protect himself from that lava. A way to stay alive even after the ground swallowed him whole.

He will survive.

And that was the only thing that mattered.

Footsteps behind me. Voices called my name, told me to stop, but I didn’t. I found a door that led to another stairway leading down, and I took three stairs at a time without stop. I’d find my way. I was sure I would.

I’d always find my way to Rune.

Inside me, all that energy, both the warm and the cold, had settled for once. It wasn’t painful, it wasn’t hurting me—it was sitting back and watching, like it was a conscious being of its own, the magic, or whatever the fuck it was that I had inside me. It knew, could see through my eyes, and it was waiting.

I pushed open a set of doors, and the light was much brighter—windows covered one wall and the sun still shone outside, as if it hadn’t seen what had happened. As if it hadn’t witnessed Rune fall.

Never mind, though. Because when I found him, he was going to get up again.

Stop her!

I pushed open another set of polished doors, and there were windows here, too, and soldiers, three of them coming toward me with swords on their hips. For a second, I wondered if they’d tell me if I asked them how to get down to the bottom of this fucking arena—but then they spread out in front of me because they heard whoever was chasing after me screaming. Running. Trying to catch me.

I tried to escape. I really did. And the energy inside me responded when I shot forward and an arm wrapped around my waist, another around my arm. Soldiers pulled me back, and this time my hands did heat up with the energy that rushed through me. If I could see them, I knew they’d be lit from within.

Except I never got the chance to evenimaginethrowingthese men off me before something hit me hard on the back of my head.

Darkness swallowed me whole just as fast as the Hollow had done to Rune and the giant.

The painthat pulsated on the back of my head woke me up—like a calling, a whisper begging me to open my eyes.

I did.

Darkness around me, and a little golden light coming from somewhere on the left. I was lying down on something hard, and it smelled like hay in here, and my limbs felt so, so weak.

The voice continued to whisper in my ear, and the more I blinked, the more I remembered who I was and what had happened and where I’d been the last time I was awake, why the back of my head was so goddamn painful.

Rune.

I sat up with a scream stuck in my throat. The image of him on that giant’s shoulder, disappearing under the boiling lava when the ground collapsed, replayed in front of my mind’s eye. I saw nothing, heard nothing but my own desperation trying to crawl right out of me with that scream, and my hands were in my hair, and I was pulling so hard my scalp was on fire. Tears streamed from my eyes and I was sitting on something cold, dragging myself back until I hit something else with my back. Nowhere to go, no way tostop thinkingabout how Rune had disappeared on the giant’s shoulder. No way tounseehow all that lava had spread over them, pulling them under.

No,said a part of me, the bigger part, the one thatrefused to believe that Rune was dead no matter what the hell my eyes had told me.

Justno.It wasn’t possible.

While the other part of me continued to replay the image in detail. How I’d thought he won. How he’d been so close. HowI’dbeen completely useless, trapped in that fucking box, unable to do the one thing that I shouldn’t have been able to do at all, but couldn’t the one time when it mattered. When it was important. To save Rune.

And now…

No, no, no, no,the voices in my head insisted and I got as small as I possibly could, and strings of my hair broke in my fists, but I would not accept it. Whatever the hell that was, how Rune had ended up in the Hollow, it wasn’t real. It didn’t happen.

Except…I’d seen it with my own eyes, and no matter what I wanted to believe, no matter how much I wanted to deny reality, I was here and Rune wasn’t.

Runewasn’t.

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