Page 120 of A Chill in the Flame
Time could rewind.
Things could be fixed.
This was not Caris.
“Stop!” Ophir cried to the demon. “Sedit, help!” She pointed at her creation, lucid for the first time. She focused on the scent of sulfur and blood, vastly preferring it to the scent of roses. A door. Dwyn had told her to call a door. To where? For what? She looked around to see piles of broken bodies. Her winged snake continued to strike, picking offanyone who had broken their legs or been trampled by the crowd, unable to escape. They would not live to see another day.
Sedit leapt for the demon, but she didn’t have the time to see what their battle entailed. She envisioned a door, focusing on how it would open to somewhere better, somewhere safer. She closed her eyes and lifted her hands, thrusting her intention toward the open space in the platform until a door appeared.
“Get Dwyn!” she cried to Tyr as she scrambled to her feet, tugging at the unconscious girl’s arms. Power rippled through her voice as she rallied her strength.
Tyr growled his displeasure as he yanked Dwyn roughly upward, throwing her over his shoulder. “Go, Firi! Go!”
She ran for the door, twisting the handle as she called for Sedit. She sprinted through the door, out of the pastel morning lights of the desert and into the dark, cool, damp shadows of an overcast forest. Tyr pushed through behind her, Dwyn over his shoulder. Tyr dropped Dwyn to the sodden forest floor. With the anger and pent-up rage of someone who’d helplessly witnessed a massacre, he began kicking the door over and over and over again until it fell to the ground.
The wooden door banged. Its handle rattled as pressure pushed on it from the other side. Moans and cries and grunts poured from the crack as it opened. The Tarkhany crowd was quick to follow, and within a minute, they would not be alone.
Fifty-three
Rain. Moss. Trees. Wood. Mud. Rain. Rain. Rain. Cold. Sofucking cold. How was it this cold?
“Where are we?!” Tyr gasped through the onslaught of ice-cold rain that greeted them.
“What?” Ophir blinked wildly around, trying through the torrential downpour to figure out where she’d taken them. It was as though she’d been tossed into the snow in her underthings. Her skin pinked against the frigid rain, showing early signs of pending hypothermia. She recognized nothing. The earth, the trees, even the smell was unfamiliar. She sputtered through the storm, wiping away at the water that threatened her eyes.
“Can you burn the door?” Tyr shouted through the rain.
“Not in the rain!” Her words came out in a frantic whine. She trembled against the cold, her thin, gossamer desert attire clinging uselessly to her in the frigid rainfall.
“Block it! Block it now!”
Yes, she could do that. She summoned a stone, allowing it to shoot up from the earth below it, blocking the door so that it could never open again. The creature on the other side succeeded in banging against the door, a single, razor-sharp claw scraping uselessly in a high-pitched ring that resonatedthrough the rain. It cried out in horrified, bloodcurdling frustration as it found itself unable to pass.
The silence that pressed down on them was deafening. The forest was a dense, lush green unlike any she’d seen before. The tree trunks were enormous. The scent was vaguely pine, though she didn’t recognize any of the vegetation around her. She looked to Sedit, who seemed to be happily chasing after a bird.
“Dwyn?” She knelt to where Tyr had roughly left the unconscious woman on the forest floor. She checked her pulse, and though faint, it was still there. Her black hair was plastered to her face, her neck, her shoulders as the rain drenched every inch of her. The flowing fabric of their gowns suctioned to their bodies with the rain, chilled gooseflesh running down their skin.
“It’s a paralytic,” Tyr said, rain dripping off his brow and chin as he reached out to her. “It won’t kill her. Though it is useful to know she can’t use her borrowed powers when it’s in her system.”
Ophir’s eyes flashed a deep shade of ochre. “Are you making jokes? About this!” She pointed a shaking finger toward Dwyn. “This was the drug in my system—this was the drug…” Her voice broke off as a wave of tears hit her.
He softened, kneeling beside her. Even if he’d wanted to lower his voice, the deafening rain wouldn’t have allowed it. He put a hand on her back. “I’m so sorry, Ophir. I know. I was there that night. The drinks…”
“Who was that woman? The woman who poisoned us?”
Rain doused him, pouring over his hair, his face, shrouding him in a thin veil of ice. “That was her husband. The man is a shapeshifter. They…disagree.”
Ophir sank more fully into the mud, her gauzy lavender gown soaking up the chilly, wet earth and sticking to her.
“Ophir.” He said her name gently. “Can you make a shelter? Blankets? You’ll freeze to death in that.”
He was right. They couldn’t stay exposed in this storm.
“And Dwyn,” she agreed. “She needs a roof over her head to rest and heal.”
She coughed through the pummeling rain as she looked at the paper-thin material that had been so perfect for the desert only moments before. It clung to Dwyn’s immobilized curves, revealing her chill, her shape, her deathly pallor. Ophir closed her eyes but not to concentrate. She didn’t want to see anymore. She’d seen enough. She’d done enough. She kept her eyes closed as she waved a hand, certain that if she opened her eyes, she’d see that she had somehow managed to fuck up blankets. Maybe she’d made them out of barbed wire or knit them together with baby teeth instead of thread. She never made anything good. She never made anything right.
Ophir dropped her head into her hands as the tears flowed freely.
