Page 111 of The Eternal Mirror
“He’s learning new ways to use the splinter.” She presses her lips together. “We’ll never stop him.”
“We will.” We have to.
She shakes her head. “I have to go see to the wounded. There’s no one else now.”
I stagger down the hill in her wake, stepping over corpses and broken weapons. The survivors part around me like water around a rock. They stare at me like I’m something holy. They whisper “dragon,” and as the word spreads through them, they fall to their knees.
Now I know why Amber hates it so much.
I walk past them.
I’m not any fucking god.
I find Thorben directing survivors to clear the bodies and get the injured to the healer's tent, the one where the witches lived and died. I leave him to it. Amber disappears inside the tent without a backward glance. She’s losing all hope. And who can blame her? We won tonight but lost so many good men and women. And Khronus will come back with another army. Amber’s right; as it stands, we will never beat him. We need something else.
I help to move the wounded, working on automatic mode. Not thinking, just keeping going. There are men and women in worse shape than me still working.
Dawn is just lighting the sky when I see Zayne.
He stumbles into the camp, with cuts across his cheek and his jacket torn. And in his arms—
Josh.
Unconscious. Pale. His limbs too still, too loose.
Zayne’s voice is raw. “He ran away from the camp in the night. He said he wanted Amber. He must have woken up, scared, and came looking for her. I didn’t even notice he was gone until after the battle was over. I found him behind the ridge over there.” He nods toward where Khronus was last seen. “He won’t wake up.”
I can hear the panic in his voice. I move fast, meeting them in three strides.
I look down.
Josh is breathing. But barely. And there’s something wrong with the air around him. It shimmers—just a little—like magic. He must have been caught in the magical blast.
My stomach knots.
“Let’s get him to Amber.”
Chapter 41
The Beginning of the End...
Outside the tent, the sun is rising. It’s a new day. And my guess is it’s going to be as crappy as the last one.
The fires are still burning.
Not the big ones—they’re mostly stamped out. But everything smells scorched. My magic. My skin. The air.
So many dead. And Killian is gone. They didn’t find his body. Maybe he burned. Or...
I’m kneeling next to a soldier with a gut wound, and I’m shaking so hard, I can barely lift my hand to rest it on his chest. There’s blood everywhere. He’s crying. Whispering for his mother.
“Shut up,” I mutter, not unkindly, and push a little bit of power into him.
The light flares, then fades. The wound closes.
But I feel it. The empty spaces inside me. There’s almost nothing left.
Sheela used to do most of the healing. She was better than me—she had years of experience. She was also nicer to the patients. She’d laugh and say I was the worst healer she’d ever seen. She won’t ever laugh again.
