In a cave at the far end of the system, a figure in a sweatshirt and hood caked with mud broke cover.
“Timothy,” I whispered as I marveled at the fact that my younger brother was truly there. Not only was he there, I had pulled him into a vision where we’d been able to communicate about real events.
Within six strides, a group of trolls rushed out of the cave and surrounded my brother.
“All right, Kori. Now we need to fucking go.” Ash scooped me up and onto his body, and I wrapped around him, but I couldn’t help one more quick glance back.
Ravage called out an order, and all of his scattered groups of soldiers changed direction, heading back for the bridge.
“Do you think Ravage knows? Could you tell Timothy wasn’t me from here?”
Ash ignored my question. “Kori, keep your head down. We have to go, or we’ll all be caught.”
Part of me bristled that Ash was yelling at me to follow a plan I created, but unfortunately, he was right. I tucked my head against his shoulder.
Gripping my hands into fists, I peeked past Ash. “Make sure Death and Timothy’s groups are close to Ravage before we go.”
Ash didn’t listen. He wrapped his arms around me and broke into a sprint, bouncing up and down as he ran in long strides. The echoing thunder all around us drowned out any other sound, and I couldn’t see anything but Ash’s shirt. My teeth rattled together, and stomach flipped end over end.
There was an echoing boom, and I stole a look back. The three crowds of trolls had merged, and they had rammed their way through the army and across the bridge, but their progress halted as screams rose up from the front.
A shadow fell over us, and all I could see were dozens of massive furry gray legs surrounding us on all sides.
“The king has seized several of us, and they’re killing their own family,” the nearest troll boomed down.
Damn it.
Either Ravage figured out the trick, or he was willing to risk a troll crushing me.
“We need to keep moving,” I yelled up. “The trolls have to push past the ones Ravage is controlling. We stop, we die.”
The troll called out a low, throaty wail, and the crowd of trolls pushed forward and swelled back, like a giant living and breathing creature with hundreds of heads.
The troll beside me stumbled, and for one moment, I saw past him into the crowd. My heart flipped as I caught sight of a human-size figure just on the other side of the crowd of trolls.
“Brendan?” I yelled over the cacophony.
His head came up just a little, and I only saw a sliver of his face, but that was enough. I would know anywhere that frown shaping his mouth. What I didn’t recognize was that his lips and skin appeared almost as gray as the trolls’. Under his eyes were dark circles like he hadn’t slept in days.
“Brendan?” I struggled in Ash’s arms, but he gripped me tighter.
“Please, let me down,” I called over to Ash, but when I glanced back, his expression was hard.
“No, Kori.”
I didn’t have time to fight off Ash, so I threw all my body weight sideward into the wall of troll legs. “Let my brother through! Please.”
The trolls squeezed until there was a little space between bodies.
“Climb through, little human,” one of the trolls called down in a strained voice.
Brendan’s brown eyes found mine through the space. “You have to get away from me, Kori!”
He wasn’t making any sense. Brendan was telling me to run away when he was climbing through to me. He reached out, and the trolls made way for him.
“I knew you were alive,” I called, gripping his wrist in a circus hold.
Instead of climbing across, Brendan pulled me back through the gap, jerking me so hard, my arm threatened to yank out of its socket. He was dragging me toward the warriors. “Let go,” he shouted as he violently shook his head. “Kori, get away from me. Don’t come after me. Give up on me. It’s the only way you’ll survive.”
He yanked again, but a troll reached back and wrapped its long hands around my waist and hoisted me off Ash and away from Brendan. “Stop. Brendan, come here. We have to get through that doorway. We can make it.”
Brendan’s familiar eyes met mine. “I’m dead. Whatever you do, don’t trust me.” He reached out and grabbed my index finger, before yanking it so hard that pain seared through my hand. “Get away from me.”
I screamed, and the troll holding me lifted me away. “No! Please, grab him. There’s something wrong with him.”
I scrabbled desperately to regain Brendan’s hand. I was going to drag him in if I had to. There was something horribly wrong with my older brother, but there was nothing on earth that we couldn’t sort out together. But before I could reach him, Ash dove through the break in bodies and shoved my brother away.
Brendan cried out as he fell off the side of the bridge.
Tears flowed from my eyes as I watched my brother disappear. What just happened? How far was the drop? Twenty feet? Fifty?
Ash turned, and his umber gaze met mine. The whole world seemed to hold its breath as we stared into one another’s eyes. I wanted to demand answers, but words caught in my throat.
“He’s a vampire, Kori!” Ash called as if the words were ripped out of him. “Brendan has orders to take you back to Ravage that he can’t refuse. He’s still--”
Ash was yanked away and into a crowd of warriors, and blood exploded through the air.
Pushing and shoving, I tried to get closer, but the trolls wouldn’t let me through. Another surge back smashed me against the jagged fur of the troll that was holding me. From all around, the crowd constricted.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t think.
All I wanted was for it to stop, for everything to stop so that I could get out of this crowd and find my brother.
And then, suddenly, everything silenced. It was as if thousands of echoes were bouncing around us, and then there was nothing but a few labored breaths and grunts of surprise.
The troll I was plastered against lifted me higher in the air until I was level with their gaze. “What happened?”
I craned my neck, trying to see what was going on just as the trolls around me did the same.
My jaw sagged open as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing and failed. The entire crowd was still. Aside from the trolls directly around us, the crowd was frozen in place.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kori
Faces contorted. Hands reached out; fingers splayed to the sky. Warriors around the trolls pointed their guns into the crowd. One thing that did not freeze, however, was the smell. It permeated the air, heavy with sweat, blood, and metal.
At the front of the bridge, droplets of green blood froze over the trolls that had just moments before been tearing each other apart. One troll was suspended in the air as they were thrown from the bridge.
Caught in a crowd of warriors, Ash froze mid-swing as he fought for his life against seven assailants. At the other end of the bridge, my brother Brendan stood, staring at the scene of carnage with a look of misery on his face.
Heady relief welled up in my heart. They were alive. They were both alive.
The small section of crowd around me that wasn’t stuck, seemed to quickly recover from their shock. The trolls before me began shifting frozen troll bodies out of their path with large grunts. Their progress was slow, if they made any at all. The bodies locked in around us, like boulders all piled together.
“We have to lift them,” said a low guttural voice from just behind me.
I looked over my shoulder to where one of the largest trolls I had ever seen was lifting one of their frozen family members into the air and setting them on the other side of the crowd.
“You have powers, like your brother,” the troll holding me said as their bulbous yellow eyes inspected me. “You froze time.”
“I’ve never done anything like this.” Even though I believed
the words when I said them, they still felt like a lie. “We should probably use this time to stop the king. It might not last.” I wriggled a little, trying to get more comfortable in the troll’s hand. Their grip was loose, but I was far from comfortable dangling from their massive fingers. “We need to kill Ravage so the trolls in the front will stop hurting each other.”
The trolls around us kept lifting our neighbors and setting them out of the way.
“Find the Broken Prince,” the troll said as he stepped through the cleared pathway. The other three creatures who weren’t frozen followed us.
Almost all of the faces I passed held the same expression, a mixture of fear, desperation, and anguish.
I did this.
I wasn’t solely responsible for every death, but I used these trolls as a shield intentionally. Yes, they were using me back as I’d intended, but I told them they would be safe. Ravage must have anticipated even this.
Maybe he did know me.
Maybe he knew me better than I knew myself.
By the time we made it out of the crowd, the trolls were making their way up the bridge, knocking vampire warriors off the side without even seeming to notice. The troll carrying me stopped and reached into the crowd, scattering the warrior bodies there and exposing Ash. Blood coated his chin and down his front, and his hands dripped with crimson. His own blood stained his neck from where teeth had ripped into his collar, exposing gleaming white bone . The troll’s long fingers wrapped around Ash at the torso and hefted him up.
I peered up into the troll’s yellow eyes. “Can we go after my brother, too? He’s right there.”
“No.” They bared their tusks. “Your brother is helping the Broken Prince.”
“Brendan is being forced. Could you please set me down?”
The troll didn’t respond, and they didn’t notice when I wiggled in their grip. Even with being held at their side, if I managed to wriggle out, I’d have a ten-foot drop. I relented and craned my neck to get another glimpse of my brother, assuring myself that he truly was alive and on his feet. As soon as the troll put me down, I would come back for him.
Ruin and Death were trapped somewhere in the crowd, but the trolls marched by. A troll had scooped up Timothy, and my dirt-caked brother was nestled in their arms like a child.
“We have to leave your brother for now,” The troll holding me called out. They lifted me up and pointed to the end of the bridge. “They can get in together when that one is dead.”
We all followed the gesture to the King of Nightendale. Above the entrance, Ravage floated thirty feet in the air. Below his feet, the trolls battled, their fists flying and hands choking one another. They were trapped in a fury of limbs. I was guessing that there were ten of them, but it could have been half that number.
One troll crouched down, going to their knee, and another climbed onto their shoulders. They braced against the edge of the doorway, and the kneeling troll stood slowly. The troll on top reached up and plucked Ravage out of the sky before bashing him against the wall.
A wet smack rang through the air, and the creature held up something that didn’t look whatsoever like the King of Nightendale. He looked more like a flattened disk. Acid burned up my throat, but I managed to eke out, “That won’t kill him. He’ll heal.”
“How do I kill him?” the creature growled. The troll looked back at me, their head nearly turning one-eighty on their neck.
“He needs his body destroyed in a way that could never be repaired.” I thought about all of the ways Ravage had taught me to kill him this year and decided to tell them the very first method Ravage told me.
The troll’s fingers pinched on Ravage’s head.
“Wait!” I called out as my vision swam. “Wait. Please. We need him alive. He has humans trapped under a magical tree in his garden, and it’s possible that he’s the only one who could bring them back.”
I didn’t even know what I was saying. It was a theory at best, and even to my own ears, it sounded like a ridiculous excuse. But even after everything, I couldn’t watch this happen. I couldn’t be part of it.
The troll’s yellow eyes darted from me to the one holding me.
“Slide him under Trego’s feet, so when time moves forward again, every troll in our family will trample him.”
With a nod, the troll dropped Ravage to the floor and stomped on him several times. Every footfall made a squishing sound that turned my stomach, but I forced myself not to react.
After the first troll stomped on Ravage every other one took their turn, ending with the one who was carrying Ash and me.
When we’d walked through the portal, the troll set us down on cobblestones, and I inspected Ash for hidden injuries.
“You’ll be safe here, just stay out of the way of the stampede when they come through the doors.” The troll gestured to the doorway. “Aren’t you going to unfreeze them?”
“I don’t know how,” I admitted as I got to my feet. I rubbed down my face, feeling my rough, dry fingers rasp over my cheeks. “And I have to go back for my brother Brendan . . .” I trailed off as my legs turned into wet moss, and I toppled forward. My head smacked into the stone, and I felt a moment of pain, before the world around me vanished.
One second, I was lying on the cobblestones in the deep, and the next, I was staring at the hedge maze inside the Palace of Portland.
I stood surrounded by high hedges, as my brother Timothy tossed up a coin beside me.
“Thank you for this back,” he said as he flipped it in the air. Pale dirt crusted his face and clothes, and when I glanced down, not only was I naked, but I was also coated in dried mud.
A low murmur of voices headed our way, and after a second, Brendan, Genevieve, and I turned the corner. We were dressed in fine clothes, and our features were painted in bold and dramatic colors. Brendan brushed his hand along the hedge wall, making a shushing sound.
“Did you know that a long time ago—before the dome, the Queen of the Deep used to rule all vampires?” my twin Genevieve said in her melodic voice. I hadn’t realized the pain that had been thrumming in my heart from being separated from my twin until I looked into her face.
“Yes,” Brendan drawled. Always the know-it-all about every subject. “Everyone knows that story. She’s the first vampire—crafted by demons with large bat wings and three-inch fangs.”
They passed straight by us and turned a corner, disappearing into what I now realized was the hedge maze in Portland Palace.
“I remember this… I did it again, didn’t I?” I whispered as the familiar, red dome light flickered above us. “I pulled you into my prophecy.”
“Yep.” Timothy tossed up his coin. “I’m starting to get the feeling that your Tempus power functions differently than mine… in a much bigger way than I previously thought.”
“I’m starting to think I don’t understand anything about myself anymore. I have unprecedented powers and no control over them. I protect murderers who do unthinkable things to the people I love most.”
Timothy smiled, but it looked a little sad on his lips. “You saw what Ravage did to Brendan, didn’t you?”
“He’s a vampire.” Hot tears splashed down my cheeks as I thought about my older brother who’d raised us while he was a child himself. All Brendan wanted to do—all he ever wanted to do—was protect humans, whether it was coming up with more efficient and affordable energy generators or by planning a rebellion. Now, Brendan would be forced to betray all of his morals. He would have rather died than be turned. “And even after that, I convinced the trolls not to kill Ravage permanently, Timmy.” My head fell into my hands, and I gritted my teeth through my next words. “Time froze, and they had him. They were going to destroy him, and I stopped them.”
“Time froze? So, that’s what happened?” Timothy asked.
“Yes.” I wiped a hand down my face, feeling the grime.
Pocketing his coin, he raised his hands pressing his fists together. “I think I’ve figured y
our powers out. Now let’s pretend that there’s a chute that boulders are supposed to roll down, like at a quarry. Usually, you just have boulders come in from one direction, but something changes. Instead of one boulder, which would easily roll down, you have two boulders that are the same size coming from opposite directions, heading for the same chute. Their weight, size, timing, everything about them is equal. Which one will slide down the chute?”
I stared at his hands, realizing what he was meaning. “Neither.”
“But say someone did something to disrupt this perfect balance—I don’t know what, but it wouldn’t take much. Maybe they added weight to one side or changed the timing of the boulders falling. Which one would get through?”
“Both.”
He dropped his hands and pulled the coin back out of his pocket, but instead of tossing it up, he glared at it. “Generations of blood mages have had children together, parents with two different powers reproducing, but you’re the first recorded blood mage with two powers. If you take that and add in the high rates of childhood deaths of blood mages, it’s not too far of a leap to guess that maybe humans aren’t supposed to have more than one power. Maybe the only reason you survived for so long was because you were latent.”
“For so long, but that’s over… because I have two powers now and it’s killing me.” It made so much sense. I scrubbed a tear off of my face. “You’re brilliant, Timothy,” I said, but my voice broke as I said it. “You’ve been standing in Brendan’s shadow for too long.”
“Brilliant is an overstatement, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it.” Without giving me any explanation, Timothy pressed his coin into my hand once more, and I squeezed it tight.
“So, do you know any way to stop my powers from killing me? What about binding them?” Even before I asked it, I knew there was no way to bind the Tempus power, and there was no point in binding Ignis. The two times I used Ignis power, I was completely fine afterward.
Timothy chewed on the side of his mouth. “Maybe this Queen of the Deep knows something.”
“Have you had any prophecies about her?”
Ash (Fire & Blood Book 2) Page 18
