Page 56 of Kidnapped Rejected Mate
I want to run away from this. I want to hide. I want to never face my own strength. Right now, the only thing I want is my bedroom, the safety of my isolation, the knowledge that I never even tried to be something, or do something, better.
But I’m not that girl anymore.
I pull my hand from my stomach, swearing to the baby inside me that I’ll be the mother they deserve.
I’ll be a mother who walks through fire for her child. I’ll protect them from anything, even themselves, when it comes to it.
And when I stand up tall, facing Tara and starting to rise into the air to face her, I see the surprise flicker over her face, the shock.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, knowing she can hear me, even through the roaring of the flames. “But I’m not going to let you hurt anyone else, Tara.”
For a second, she looks defeated, crestfallen.
Heartbroken.
Then, she screams, raising her hands and aiming them at me, and I feel the great crack of her magic striking through the air before I ever see it coming toward me.
Chapter 29 - Soren
At first, running through the forest is difficult, as we have to dodge the burning trees and roots, the low-lying plants that trip us up. We’re used to making our way through fires like this, but this is different. There’s something in the air, in the way the forest cowers, that communicates a deeper, more malicious presence. Before, I could almost get lost in the motions of fighting the daemon fire and forget what it was, forget that it was different than a normal fire in more than just behavior and intensity.
It comes from somewhere else. Somewhere other than this world, the hells beyond our plane. And when it’s pulled in here, it reacts violently. Daemon energy often starts fires upon contact with our world because it’s too intense, and it doesn’t belong here.
And now, more than ever, I’m remembering that fact. This fire reminds me of that very first one that took the town by surprise, razing through everything and leaving nothing but ash in its place. For days after that, the members of our pack wandered the streets in a daze, searching for things that were long gone, swallowed and destroyed by the flames.
“On your ten,” Lachlan says from behind me, his hand swinging out to my arm, finding me and grounding me in time and space. The smoke around us is so thick and black that it’s like we’re wandering through the forest in the deepest part of the night, or trying to make our way through it on another planet without a sun at all.
It’s disorienting, but helpful when we communicate with each other. In our haste, we left our comms back in the station, so all we have now is our voices. And I’m afraid that if I openmy mouth to shout, I might breathe in too much smoke and collapse.
“Thanks,” I murmur, though I know Lachlan can’t hear it.
The thing most people don’t realize about fires is that they’reloud. The trees groaning, creaking. The rush of hot air from the temperature change. The wind blowing through the area, whistling through the branches. Once, I heard someone from the Midwest say that a tornado sounds like a train. That if you wake up in the middle of the night and hear a train, you should be scared.
A fire sounds like standing under a helicopter or behind a jet engine. All that exhaust and hot air from behind an engine, but times a million. Like sitting in the center of a convection oven.
It doesn’t help that it’s an unseasonably hot day, that the air seems to spark with every step we take, almost like it’s carrying extra magic, bleeding out from whatever is happening with the girls.
The wind, combined with the dark and the smoke, is like being in a tunnel full of debris, the smell of burnt objects ingrained in your nostrils. Disorienting. Maybe it’s exactly what it would feel like to be caught up in a tornado, sucked up into the sky, not knowing which way was up and feeling random, destroyed bits of your life flying around you as you flail.
In our human forms, our senses are still sharp, but not quite as good as they would be if we shifted. But we can’t shift, or we won’t be able to use the packs of extinguishers on our backs, the thick, suffocating stuff we spray in wide arcs on either side of us, pushing through the forest and doing what we can to snuff out the blue flames around us.
For the first ten minutes, we make impossibly slow progress, each of us frustrated and ready to move, but just trying to stay alive and avoid the falling branches.
As we get closer and closer to the ridge, it gets easier to run, to push ahead. Because there are no trees left to run around. The daemon fire burns so bright and so hot, the entire canopy has been reduced to the finest silver ash. We tromp through it like soldiers on the beach, the stuff flying into the air, spinning and shimmering. It would be beautiful if it weren’t the aftermath of such destruction.
If it didn’t remind me of racing home in high school, barely making it to the house in time to find Gramps trapped in the flames, pushing aside a fallen beam to pick him up and carry him out. If this ash didn’t make me think of that first fire, everything we lost, the way Aurela retreated, and I never saw her in town after that—then, it might be pretty.
But more than all that, the stuff drifting through the air with the embers and smoke is making my lungs feel small, tight in my chest. Occasionally, I try to cough to loosen up the feeling, but I work to keep my muscles tight, or I might actually hack up a lung.
I had asthma as a kid. Sometimes, and especially when we’re firefighting, it gets bad enough that I feel like I might suffocate completely. I try not to let the guys see how much it affects me, but they notice, thumping me on the back, even though it doesn’t do much to help.
“Aurela!”
We come flying up onto the ridge just as she leaves the ground. Though I’m focused on my mate, I can’t ignore the hellish landscape around me, the fissures in the ground,spreading from the cliff’s edge and all the way to the forest, dividing the space into cracked, scattered pieces.
Blue flames dance between the cracks, hot air blasting from them. It’s impossible to breathe, impossible to think. The smell of sulfur is hot and thick, smoke sitting heavy in the air, so each breath I take burns on the way in.
“There!” Kalen says, pointing, and I can barely hear him over the roar of the fire. When we follow his hand, we see several fire daemons beating onsomething. It must be the girls.
