by Dean Murray
I felt a pang of loss once again at having traded away part of what made me the person I was, but even that was drowned out by amazement at the sheer amount of damage I'd managed to inflict on Fenrir.
My sun lance didn't just throw him into the nearest wall, it also vaporized a four-foot chunk of flesh and bone out of his shoulder. For the first time I could see fear in Fenrir's eyes.
I started to smile and then something, maybe the sound of wings, brought me around to my right. My sword was out of position, and the creature flying toward me was much too close, but I had no other choice but to at least try to get my weapon into play.
The fae was only slightly bigger than a monkey, but its tattered, bat-like wings, and scaly skin made my skin crawl. The two-inch knife-like claws on the end of its fingers and toes were flexing in anticipation, and it was already within inches of my unprotected flesh.
There was another fae behind it, this one in the shape of a dark horse that walked on claw-tipped fists, but I knew I was going to be dead before the horse made it close enough to be a threat. Fenrir had outsmarted us. He'd lured us out and then kept us occupied for long enough that the other Unseelie fae had been able to get within striking range.
I opened my mouth to scream my defiance at the snake monkey that was about to kill me, and then a ball of crackling darkness hit the smallest fae, knocking it away from me at the last second.
"Get back behind the ward!"
Kyle's yell broke the shocked immobility that I'd been laboring under, and I turned just in time to see Fenrir lunge back towards him. I tried to warn him, but Fenrir—even with a smoking hole in his shoulder—was just too fast. Kyle started turning, but it was too late and Fenrir's jaws closed around Kyle's left shoulder.
It was hard to separate out Kyle's scream from mine, but we both went on the offensive. I cut loose with a second peak-memory-powered sun lance and then a split second later, I saw another bar of glowing liquid gold erupt out of the back of Fenrir's neck.
The paired, peak memory attacks had done what no single attack had managed yet. We'd both targeted the same spot on Fenrir's spine, me from the outside, Kyle from inside the dire wolf's throat where his hand was trapped, and we'd managed to kill him.
The sound of the approaching fae from my right drove me back across the ward as my emotional reserves evaporated and my sustained effects all fell away. My sword was almost too heavy for me to lift, but I grabbed on with both hands and pointed it towards the dark horse as I prepared to charge back through the ward.
"No!"
I spun around just in time to see Kyle stumble back across the wards, arm hanging limply at his side, blood streaming from his wound.
Chapter 12
"Heal yourself! You've got to do it now before you lose too much blood!"
I caught him before he could hit the ground, but Kyle looked up at me with glassy, uncomprehending eyes, and I knew it was too late. He was already too far gone, but I didn't want to give up on him. I lowered him the rest of the way to the ground and applied pressure to the spot on the front of his shoulder that seemed to be bleeding the worst, trying to buy him time to come out of shock.
I knew nothing about healing effects, but I still would have tried to do something if I'd had any emotional reserves left. Instead I did the only other thing I could think of that might help. I hauled back and slapped Kyle as hard as I could.
"Don't you dare leave me here by myself!"
Barely visible into the faint illumination of his dying light effect, his eyes started to roll back up into his head, and then he shuddered. I realized in that moment that I'd never seen the full extent of Kyle's will. His body was failing him, his abilities were exhausted, he had to be in unimaginable pain, but he forced himself back from the edge.
The flesh underneath my left hand heated up like the world's worst sunburn at the same time that I felt his power flow outwards like a million electrically charged ants. The jolt of discharging energy did what even the risk of second-degree burns hadn't been able to do, and I reflexively pulled my hand back.
I expected to see blood pouring out of damaged arteries, but the skin was unblemished—even the blood had been burned away.
"You did it!"
Kyle looked up at me and weakly shook his head. "I stopped the blood loss, but I couldn't do anything about the venom."
The effort of healing so much damage finally caught up with him, and this time even Kyle's will wasn't enough to fight off unconsciousness. The tiny orb floating above him disappeared at the same instant, leaving us in complete darkness.
A loud crack and the bright discharge of high-voltage electricity brought me around to see the black fae horse thrown more than forty feet through the air. There was a second crack, this time the meaty sound of breaking bones, when the fairy hit the rock wall, and I dared hope for the briefest of seconds that the ward had been strong enough to kill it.
My hope was short-lived. A couple of seconds later the four-legged form started moving around again. The ward hadn't been strong enough to kill it, but based on the way it was moving, it wasn't strong enough to take down our defenses. That was good, it meant that we were safe until Fenrir reformed and came back.
Part of me was hoping that this most recent death would be enough to make even Fenrir too weak to tackle our defenses, but I knew that was just wishful thinking. I needed to get moving, needed to at least get Kyle back behind the fourth ward. I wasn't qualified to judge how much more abuse the third ward could take. It might last for another couple of days, or it might come down the next time any of our attackers pushed up against it. Either way I didn't feel safe with nothing more than it between us and three Unseelie Court fairies who desperately wanted to end our current incarnations.
I checked once again, trying to summon a strong enough emotion to work at least a strength amp, but there just wasn't anything left. I carefully slid my sword through the front of Kyle's belt, sheathed Excalibur at his waist, and then grabbed both his arms and started dragging him across the cold, stone floor as Kyle's ward finally bled off enough energy for it to get dark again.
Dragging Kyle was physically the hardest thing I'd ever done. The tiny ridges in the stone that I'd been so impressed with on my first trip through the city were great for providing extra traction, but right then I would have traded them for something slicker, something that would have made it less of a challenge to keep Kyle moving.
As hard as it was physically to pull the better part of two hundred pounds of dead weight across the floor, dealing with the complete lack of light was almost worse. I'd gotten a good look at my surroundings as the discharge from the wards had lit up everything for several hundred yards, but it only took a few seconds for me to start feeling disoriented.
I nearly had a breakdown right then and there. There was an incessant flicker that I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye that caused my skin to crawl and shivers to work their way up and down my spine, but in the end it was the flicker that saved me.
Within a couple of minutes my joints were aching and my muscles were burning, but I was slowing down more because I knew I was wandering around aimlessly than because of the exhaustion pulling at me like a lead weight.
I happened to be looking in exactly the right spot to see the flicker again and finally realized what it was. It was the time-bending effect from Kyle's pseudo-artifact. It wasn't a perfect guide, but I'd watched it on both of the last two trips out of the bunker and it had always formed a kind of shallow 'V' with Kyle at the front.
It made sense, expanding the area of the effect couldn't be cheap from an energy perspective, so he'd created it to expand only in the direction he was moving. That was something I could use.
I stopped pulling and carefully walked around Kyle until I could pick up his feet and pull him a couple of inches back the direction we'd just come from. My sword grated on the stone in a way that set my teeth on edge, but it only took a couple of inches before I saw the flicker again as the time b
end expanded out again.
It wasn't much to wager our lives on, but I thought that I could make out a line where the field ended. The darkness inside the field was richer. There was a depth to it that reminded me of velvet or the roses that had been waiting for me on the table at our last meal.
I carefully marked the middle of the field and adjusted our course so that we were traveling towards what I thought was Kyle's bunker. Now that I knew what I was looking for I made better time. It was still brutally hard to continue forward with nothing more than my normal, unamped strength to do the work, but now I could use the erratic jumps of Kyle's field to fine-tune our course as we went.
I started crying when I saw the fourth ward. It was just a faint shimmer in the darkness that didn't give off any usable light, but it told me that I'd at least managed to get us behind the next layer of protection.
I wanted to take it as a sign that we were going to make it safely back to the bunker, but that was still far from guaranteed. We were headed in roughly the right direction, but all it would take was for me to end up going down the wrong hall for us to never find the actual doorway down into the bunker.
It was a journey of several hundred yards, and all it would take to miss the bunker would be for me to be off by a few feet one way or the other at any point along the way.
I started shivering—from cold rather than just from fear—about the time I hit the fifth ward. It took me another dozen yards before I realized what was going on. The Lost City was the same temperature as always, a bit on the cool side, but that wasn't enough to explain the way my body temperature was dropping.
It was Kyle. His hands were like ice and he was sucking the heat out of me at an alarming rate. I was running out of time.
I couldn't have said where I found the strength, but I managed to pick up the pace and it was only a few more minutes before I noticed that the darkness wasn't as fierce as it had been previously.
It was the bunker. With all my freaking out I'd forgotten that Kyle had left the door to the bunker open and the lights from inside were just enough to guide me into the right hallway. Given how hard it had been for me to drag Kyle, I didn't have high hopes for being able to get him down the stairs without killing both of us, but it wasn't like I really had much of a choice. I pulled him inside to the landing at the very top of the stairs and then swung the massive door shut behind us.
I pulled Excalibur out of its sheath and left it and my sword both at the top of the stairs—as exhausted as I was, an extra fifteen pounds might make the difference between success or failure. My hands were useless blocks of wood, but I knew there wasn't time to stop and wait for my body to warm back up now that we were inside the bunker.
I picked Kyle up from behind, wrapping my arms around his chest since my hands weren't functioning, and slowly backed down the flight of stairs to the first level, hoping the entire time that my back wasn't going to give out on me before we at least made it to the couch. Ironically, once we got to the couch I was too exhausted to get him up on it.
I set him down on the floor next to it and forced myself down the stairs at something at least slightly faster than the shambling walk my body kept telling me was the best we could manage. Everything I'd ever heard or read about hypothermia was racing through my head the entire way down to Kyle's bedroom.
Just having my arms around his chest had made them ache—he was that cold. He wasn't even shivering, and I had to assume that everything that was happening right now was because of the poison. It was possible that nothing I could do would make the slightest bit of difference, but I had to at least try. If he was freezing to death from the inside out, then I was going to have to try to warm him up from the outside in and the only blankets I for sure knew about were on his bed.
Less than five minutes later I was back with the heavy comforter from his bed. I draped it across the couch and then lifted him up onto the couch, climbed on top of him, and pulled the comforter over both of us.
It was like hugging a snowman. My hands were already numb and my arms had been aching from the cold, but now it was my entire body pressed up against him and my core temperature was dropping faster than I'd realized it would.
To say that I was shivering would have been a profound understatement. I felt like my body was going to shake itself apart, and I realized that there was a distinct possibility that he was too cold, that he was going to suck all of the heat out of me and kill us both, but I stayed there under the covers with him.
I didn't have any other choice. Without him I was dead anyway, and I was pretty sure that Jace, Kat, my dad, and Ari would all follow along behind within a matter of days or weeks.
I'd read somewhere that it's a bad idea to let yourself fall asleep when you're extremely cold, that it's just your body's way of shutting down, but I couldn't seem to stop myself. Eventually the cold got to be too much and I closed my eyes.
Chapter 13
I woke up feeling like I was on fire, which didn't make sense because I was perfectly comfortable in every other way. Jace and I fit together like we'd been designed for each other. Lying there with my head resting on his chest, his arms around my waist, felt like perfection. I couldn't remember ever sleeping better than that, which I was pretty sure wasn't usually the way it was supposed to be.
I reached up to run my hand across the stubble along his jaw, and reality finally blew away the cobwebs around my mind. Jace's breathing wasn't right, it was too shallow and quick, and I shouldn't be hot, I should be cold.
No, not Jace, Kyle. Everything came crashing back to me and my eyes popped open. I'd never turned off the lights, so I could see that Kyle was flushed and panting. It seemed impossible that he'd gone from freezing cold to burning hot, but I couldn't argue with what I was feeling.
I threw the blankets off of us and rolled off of him, but I knew that wasn't going to be enough. Any time a fever in an adult reached one hundred and five degrees you risked brain damage. I didn't have a thermometer, but I was pretty sure that Kyle had crashed into the danger zone while I'd still been asleep. Just uncovering him wasn't going to be enough to bring a fever like this down.
I reached for my anger and felt it crash into me with welcome strength. There was plenty to be mad about, everything from my dad being Mephistoles' prisoner to the fact that Kyle might die at any minute, but that was okay, anger was what I needed to save him.
I amped my strength up to three or four times normal and picked Kyle up so that he was hanging across my right shoulder. The trip down to his bedroom took less than sixty seconds and then I was carefully lowering him into his gigantic bathtub.
I checked his pockets, put his wallet on the side of the tub and then turned the cold water on full-force as I let my strength amp lapse. It wasn't going to be enough—the tub was too big, it was going to take forever to fill.
I could feel him radiating heat even from inches away, half an inch of water wasn't going to do the trick. I stood there looking for a solution for several seconds and then I turned and ran back towards the stairs, amping myself back up to triple speed on my way.
I ransacked the kitchen, trying very hard not to rip the cabinet doors off of their hinges as I went. Kyle's refrigerator was older than I was. There was ice in the freezer, but it was just in a pair of white plastic trays. I grabbed them anyway and then snagged a pair of big glass pitchers as I flew back downstairs.
I'd known that the tub was filling up slowly, that I had time still, but part of me had still been worried that I was going to come back and find Kyle drowning. He wasn't, the water was still less than an inch deep, but he was weakly thrashing around, pulling at his shirt like it was burning him.
I set both pitchers down and grabbed his shirt. I only intended on pulling it up out of the way, but it had taken more than its fair share of damage from Fenrir's attack and it tore like tissue paper. I turned the tray over and dumped the ice cubes onto Kyle's chest, hoping that they would buy us enough time for the tub to finish filling up
.
The ice cubes from the second tray joined the ones from the first tray, and then I grabbed both pitchers and took them over to the massive sink that took up a significant percentage of the space underneath the eight-foot-tall mirror.
I turned the cold water on in the sink, and then shoved the first pitcher under the stream. As soon as it was halfway full I swapped it out for the second pitcher and then hurried back over to the tub so I could pour the cold water on Kyle, starting at the bottom, soaking his jeans so that the wet material would help regulate his body temperature.
It continued on like that for what felt like forever, but which couldn't have been more than another half hour or so. By the time the water was covering up his ears, the ice cubes had long since melted and I'd realized my next problem—I couldn't just leave Kyle in the water like that or he was going to drown.
I turned the water in the sink off, set the pitchers aside and then bent down to check the temperature of the water. It was cool, but by no means as cold as it had been when it came out of the tap, and if anything Kyle was just as hot as he'd been before I'd put him in the tub.
I slipped out of my shoes and socks, emptied my pockets, and then climbed into the tub with Kyle so that I could hold his head up out of the water. I rested his head on my lap and used my hands to splash water up onto his chest, praying the whole time that his fever would break, and that he'd be okay. I needed him to be the same Kyle he'd been before he'd been injured, needed his help if I was going to get out of this underground prison.
As the water got deeper I debated turning it off, but at the rate he was warming up the water that was already in the tub I knew that wasn't an option. Instead I just pulled him up so that his head was lying against my chest and held him there.
