Page 208 of Swords of Soul and Shadow
Skibs cracked into the windshield above, but he didn’t slide off. He stayed perfectly still—too still. The dash squealed at Kase.
The glow hadn’t waned. Kase looked over to find Hallie bathed in light, her eyes still shut tight, her right hand squeezing his goggles. He hadn’t realized she still had them. He blinked hard. Her power radiated off her being like a brilliant star in the night sky. It was blinding. She was a beacon—beautiful, alarming, and powerful.
The hover slowed, landing with a jolt. Without him having to think about it.
Skibs slid off the windshield. Hallie collapsed in her seat, and his old goggles fell to the floor with a soft clunk.
“Hallie?” he asked, breathless; she didn’t answer him. He went colder than the hover had ever made him. “Hallie!”
She’d done it. She’d done something to the ship or Skibs or—orsomething. It hadn’t been his imagination, and now she was paying for it.
Kase fumbled with his safety buckles, which took entirely too long thanks to his stiff, frozen fingers. Blackness encroached on his vision. He’d given too much of himself to the ship.
He practically fell out of his seat. He didn’t know where the dragon was or if Skibs was even alive. He didn’t care.
Hallie’s limp, gray form, held in place only by the safety straps, was all he could see.
Chapter 40
UNTIL THE STARS FALL
Hallie
THIS TIME, THE PAIN WAS different.
Her skin still burned, but not with heat—it burned like holding a fistful of snow without her gloves. The dark did not gleam with gold; instead, it pulsed with a halo that glowed faintly blue.
Under her skin, the fire remained. Its searing heat warred with the icy, piercing sting scraping over her skin, both only worsened by the caress of some kind of fabric. A blanket, maybe. Everywhere her skin was exposed, the fabric’s touch only fanned the flames.
But once again, she knew she wasn’t dead. Because she could hear familiar voices floating somewhere nearby…and because death would’ve been better than this.
The last thing she remembered was losing control of her power as Ben fell from the dragon’s back. She’d been gripping both the goggles and a power tendril, but she’d lost hold of both.Heaviness thickened the blood in her veins at the memory of the giant reptile, its huge wings spread wide, maw open, flame building in its throat.
Kase.
Hallie jerked and pushed herself to her elbows, the pain receding with her panic. She winced still. The room was dark, lit only by a small gas lantern near her cot. Hanging linens surrounded her little cell. One was black as night but streaked with dust. Seemed she’d been given a more private room than most. She wasn’t sure why; she wasn’t anyone special.
The voices on the other side of the partition weren’t concerned with waking the convalescing, clearly. Several shadows moved across the hanging linen in front of her. It felt like watching a strange show at Grieg’s Theater, though not one she really wanted to see. One of the shadows—and the owner of the loudest voice—was Kase. His curly hair was slightly amorphous in shadow form, but she could tell it was him; the shadow he was arguing with was his father, straight-backed and lean as ever. The third shadow was more difficult for Hallie to distinguish, as he or she was only a bystander to the argument at hand.
Kase was okay.
Her vision blurred for a moment.
“If anything, I saved lives.Again,” Kase shouted. “And now we have Skib—I mean, Ben—who could—”
“Who has been working with theCerls,” Harlan said, his voice quieter than Kase’s but not without ringing authority. “I warned you about the dangers of using that machine!”
“I was doing a patrol.”
“That you weren’t scheduled to do for three more hours.” When Kase failed to come up with an answer, Harlan scathingly added, “And you endangered Miss Walker, one of our greatest assets we have in this war.”
“She’s not just anasset,” Kase growled.
“Yet another reason why I’m unsure as to why you risked her life in the hover.”
Kase went silent again.
Hallie’s heart ached for him. His father was right, though Hallie loathed to admit it— she’d had no business being up in the hover. If she was to do anything at all, she couldn’t risk her life needlessly before she was able to restore the swords and the Essence powers to the Gates. Stupid.
