Twenty-Five.
Finn and the Flames
I don’t know how long I cried as I lay slumped over Bishop’s dead body. His blood had long since stopped pouring out of him, and he only had my body heat to keep him from turning unforgivably cold. I didn’t care that I was topless, or that my back was probably getting infected the longer it went without proper care. Bishop was dead. He was my responsibility, and he was dead.
Von would never forgive me. I would never forgive me. I’d ruined his family forever.
I slowly went through the painful steps of trying to say a peaceful goodbye to my non-relationship with Von. Though I wanted to run to him more than ever, I knew this was something that would keep us broken.
I cried quietly in the dark until I passed out on Bishop’s bare chest, sticking us to each other with his blood and my filthiness. I hadn’t eaten or drank anything in who knows how long, and I’d lost too much blood to do anything more than rest atop Bishop. When I rested, I didn’t dream, and I guessed that Von wasn’t asleep. It was just as well. I didn’t want to do a surreal showdown. Von deserved the chance to yell at me out loud and to my face.
I heard the occasional shouting squabble upstairs, but I didn’t so much as lift my head to try and decipher what was going on. I didn’t care. If they were going to kill me, then I guess that’s how it would end.
The squabbling picked up after a while, and then I heard the bang of a door, followed by several screams, things knocking around the room and something that sounded like a roar from a tidal wave. Then the screams really picked up.
The Manas were in pain, and aside from my heartrate picking up, I didn’t have an ounce of sympathy for them. I clung to Bishop, guarding the body I lay atop with a vicious protectiveness. He was mine now. They wouldn’t pry his body from my fingers. I had something left in me. It wasn’t much, but the Manas couldn’t have it.
The door flung open and heavy footsteps rained down the wooden staircase. “No! No! Don’t be dead! You can’t be dead!” I looked up and saw Finn, wild eyed and charging for me. His hands reached for me, but retracted, and I saw the fear as he took in my state. “What did they do to you?”
I wanted to answer, but I was so confused at seeing his face that I merely gawked up at him like my IQ had dropped a significant amount. “Finn?”
He was gentle as he reached down to feel for Bishop’s pulse, his jaw tightening. “Let’s get you out of here, sinta.”
“Finn?” I repeated, the world moving slower than I knew it was supposed to as the screams rose impossibly higher up the stairs. “You’re here?”
He brushed his fingertips lightly over my cheek, and I felt them tremble. “Of course I’m here. Where else would I be? I’ll always come for you.”
The promise hit me at just the right angle, but I had no more tears. “Take me home,” I begged.
“As you like it, sweetheart.” He tried lifting me from Bishop, but he was afraid to pry me from my treasure. “I don’t know how to move you out of here without hurting you.” His eyes raked over my back, dread crossing his features.
“Take Bishop first.”
“He’s dead, October.”
“Take him or leave me.” I was firm on that.
Finn stared at the resolve in my eyes and nodded. He stood and ran up the stairs, coming back down half a minute later with Lang, who did a similar freak-out until Finn talked him down. “I can move her, but I need you to take the body out.”
Lang nodded, afraid to touch me. “Hurry. The smoke’s going to be hard to move through.”
Finn didn’t hurry. He was careful as he pried my fingers from Bishop. Then he slowly wrapped my arm across his chest as he slid me off the body, my skin making a horrible squishing sound as my bare torso unstuck from Bishop’s. I kept my mouth closed through a scream as Finn pulled me up so I could cling to his chest instead of the corpse’s. When he stood in a fluid motion, his arm banded around the back of my hips, pressing me tight to him so my breasts were nuzzled to his t-shirt and hidden from public view. My legs were too tired to wrap around his waist, but they tried, just to give the appearance of being a team player. Finn’s other hand cupped the back of my head, securing my face to his shoulder. I could hear his quickened heartbeat thrumming through his body. “It’s over now,” he said to me as he climbed the stairs, careful not to jostle me too hard.
We went into a thick fog of unbearably hot, black smoke, and Finn broke out into a run through the house, dodging enormous bat wings and keeping his eyes on the exit. “Hold onto me!” He removed his hand from my head and drew a long knife from his belt while I clung to him with weak arms. I bit my lip through a scream as he sliced through the upper half of a Manas that tried to impede our escape.
I saw Mason as a wolf, teeth bared and growling as he ripped into an enemy he showed no mercy to. I saw Kabayo fling a legit mace over his head and knock a Manas out of the air, along with several pieces of the ceiling that rained down. Ezra had a blowtorch and a can of gas, standing at the entrance with a look of pure malice mingled with utter disappointment. He gave the torch another shot at doing away with the enemy, ignoring the screams for mercy as bat women flew up into the sky in unquenchable flames. They burned as the wind encouraged the fire to finish them off mid-flight, their ashes descending like autumn leaves to the ground.
Ezra cried out when he saw Finn holding the bloody mass that was me, but Finn didn’t stop. “I’m taking her to Dagat until these Manas are all dead! Until the threat on her life is gone!”
“No!” Ezra shouted in a rage.
Finn ignored Ezra and ran me out the front door. He murmured a few words, and just like that, the world in all of its chaotic ugliness disappeared.
Twenty-Six.
Bare Breasts and Banak
I clung to Finn as the greens and browns of Terraway materialized before my eyes. Dagat wasn’t muddy like Sakuna, nor was it dry and dusty like Silo. The lush world was filled with greenery that had blue wet vines looping throughout the landscape. I heard a waterfall nearby, but I didn’t lift my head to investigate. I clung to Finn, afraid and in far too much pain from being jostled.
Finn ran us to a grouping of trees that were several stories tall, but were completely flat and marshy on top, with blue vines dangling like party streamers. He kissed my face over and over as he lowered me to sit on the earth. Finn wasted not a second as he dug around like a madman at the base of the tree for a few baga roots. He all but crammed one down my throat, making me cry out as I choked, my ribs pulling painfully. He cupped his trembling hand to my face so I could drink the water that surfaced in the well of his palm. The water tasted like sunshine and healed the desert in my mouth, doing wonders as the fountain from Finn trickled through my body. I didn’t care that my breasts were exposed; I greedily tipped his palm with my hands so I could get more, not fussing over the fact that I could taste blood, and I didn’t know for sure who it belonged to.
He gripped the back of my head with his other hand, and I could feel the fear in how tensed his fingers were on my scalp. “You can breathe now. I’m here, and I’ll take care of everything.” He met my eyes with intensity that made me rally, which I didn’t think was possible. His voice was scared through his pep talk, higher pitched than usual, and with too much urgency. “It’s not as bad as you’re thinking it is. I can fix this. I can fix it all.”
I nodded as my lower lip quivered. I didn’t think there was anything anyone could do to take care of me at this point. I could barely move without the skin on my back ripping.
“Say, ‘I believe you, Finn.’”
I swallowed another mouthful of water that felt like the best thing in the world to my insides, barely choking out an, “I believe you, Finn.” I sucked down all the water I could before my walking well started to dry. “More?” I begged. “Please. I’m so thirsty. It’s been days.”
“You can have anything you want, only drink quickly. You’re still bleeding, sweetheart. How did you get so banged
up? Why would they do this to an Omen?” His voice was sad and genuinely perplexed.
“Hide me, Finn.” My voice rang with fear, and I hated the sound of it. I was small, and that feeling had never sat well with me.
“You’re safe with me, sinta. But we have to move. Careful now. Up we get.” Though Finn was gentle, there was no amount of movement cautious enough to keep me from trembling with too much pain. He ran me forward, not slowing for the voices that called to him or the many three-tailed monkeys that dropped down from their blue and dark green trees to chitter at him. Finn bolted alongside the river, drawing the eye of quite a few women who were swimming along the shore. I could only see their top halves, and idly wondered if they were Mermaids. They had seashells cupping their buoyant breasts, just like in the movies.
I don’t understand how Finn ran for that long without stopping for a breath. When we finally reached our destination, Finn didn’t slow. He ran up gilded steps that led into a palace of pure, sparkling gold. “Stand down! King Banak. I need to see King Banak!” Finn shouted, and the guards fell away at the level of clout Finn possessed. It was kind of crazy that he could run into the palace with a bloody woman and demand to see the king with no prior notice.
“The king’s in the Hari room,” one of them told Finn.
As we rushed through the palace, I noticed there was a canal that ran through the left side of the rooms Finn bolted through. Occasionally a woman’s head would pop up from the still water’s surface. More strangely, a man’s torso and shoulders supporting a guppy-lipped green-tinged fish head also watched us with his glassy fishy eyes. I caught sight of both their large, jade and iridescent scaled fins as they swam away from the grotesque sight that I was. It felt like I was in a surrealist painting. Everything that should have been normal was slightly off, making the whole world seem about seven inches away from being a cartoon I was bleeding my way through.
I clung so tight to Finn; I knew I was going to leave claw marks. “I need a h-hospital,” I whispered into his ear. I rested my weary head back on his shoulder, my nose nuzzled against his gills that simultaneously freaked me out and fascinated me.
“I know, sweetheart. First things first.” He ran without stopping through a series of winding hallways that were decked in gold opulence with seafoam green sconces. The window dressings hung in satin waves to the shimmering floor, looking like the ocean itself had been called upon to frame the windows of the palace.
Finn yelled at the guards to move away from the door, and like the subordinates they were, the two obeyed. They opened the heavy gold-plated doors before Finn had a mind to kick them down. “I need access to the healing waters!” Finn demanded without preamble, once the doors to the Hari room closed behind us.
I didn’t look up, but buried my face in Finn’s shoulder, hoping he was taking me somewhere safe. I don’t know if it was the psychotic bat girls or the bug people or the zombies that gave me a healthy distrust of Terraway and all of its magics, but I decided to let Finn handle this one with no involvement from me.
I heard a man’s deep voice bark, “What do you mean, barging in here like this when I’m clearly with a kendi? You know what this room’s for.”
I heard a woman’s scared whimper and cringed. This was the bedroom for the king to use with his harem. Finn had brought me beaten and bloody straight into the harem he oversaw for the jackfish King of Dagat.
“King Banak, I need your help. This is the new Omen, and she’s damaged, maybe beyond repair if we don’t get her into the healing waters.”
I heard the springs on the bed shift as the king got off the bed to face Finn. “You know the waters are kept secret to outsiders. I trusted you to guard them because I thought you understood that they can’t be used by the other kingdoms.”
Healing waters? Ezra never mentioned those.
“The Omen belongs to all of our kingdoms. If she dies, we all die!”
Banak answered with a curt, “Our kingdom’s plenty safe. Let the other countries help her.”
“It’s safe for now. The water level’s holding for now. Without her, we’ll run out of food to feed the Merpeople.”
Banak blew a loud raspberry, and though I still couldn’t see his face, I wanted to punch him clear across the mouth. “Dagat’s fine. If the famine gets much worse, we can always take Sama’s rations. I don’t know why you’re always fending off the inevitable.”
Finn shouted as he clutched me tight, his fingers digging into my scalp and butt. “You’ll grant me this favor because it’s my job to keep our land from war! How do you think it’ll look if we could’ve saved the Omen, but didn’t? We can be the heroes of Terraway if we put her back together! Imagine the songs they’ll write about you.”
Banak paused, curious. “Songs, eh?”
Oh, I hated him already. Before I even saw Banak’s face, I hated him with a burning passion that could tear mountains and jackholes down with my fury. If only I could do more than barely lift my head.
“Songs about how King Banak saved all of Terraway in a single day.” Finn’s tone turned steely. “You’ll do this for me, Banak. You trust me to keep you from war. Let me do my job.”
King Banak waved his hand to Finn. “Very well, but the healing waters stay secret. If she breathes a word of this to Ezra, I’ll cut her tongue out. You hear that, kendi? You can still reap without a tongue, you know.” He chuckled when I only clung tighter to Finn. “Wash her up and then bring her to me. I haven’t seen a real pair of legs in ages.”
I was half-naked and knew I couldn’t fight my way out of a guarded palace. I could barely stand. I pressed my bare breasts tighter to Finn’s chest, hoping he would protect my body when I couldn’t. I gripped Finn around the neck, my heart pounding as Finn laid down the law. “You’ve got a whole harem to play in. She’s an Omen, not your kendi. The other kings hear about you forcing her into your bed, and they’ll have something to say about it. You’ll risk her going on strike and not reaping another day of her life.” He held me protectively, angling me away from the king with a scowl. “You might not care about the safety of Terraway, but I’m running out of allies on the outside. You like the silks that come from Lumipad, don’t you? You do this, and we’re on our own.”
The king sighed, the bed shifted, and I heard a horrible wrenched scream from the woman on the mattress. I shut my eyes and let out a quiet whine of distress into Finn’s gills. “Fine. Take her to the waters and be done with it. And don’t barge in here again unless you’ve got a pair of legs I can keep.”
“Yes, your majesty.” Finn’s arms were trembling with barely controlled rage as he marched us through the room and out the second door at the back.
Twenty-Seven.
The Healing Waters
“I’m sorry,” he said through gritted teeth as we passed through a dim hallway. This passageway was not bedecked in gold, but the moldings instead were lined with large oval rubies. “You’ll never see that room again, so help me. If there was any other way to get you to the waters, I wouldn’t have taken you there.”
“Hurry,” I pleaded, every part of my body aching and burning as he carried me into a small room. It was serene and quiet inside, and when he closed the door behind us, I heard none of the bustle through the castle.
There was a trickling fountain dripping into a small wading pool in the ground that looked like it was built for about three people. There were no windows, so Finn lit the room with the tips of his fingers, giving us just enough light to see a foot or two in front of us.
I sniffled into his soft gills. “You let him take that woman. You let him take her into that room. You’re just as much responsible for that awful place, now that you can act on your own will.”
“I know.” He squeezed the back of my head and gently lowered my feet so I could stand. I swayed where I stood, covering my bloody breasts with filthy and trembling hands as Finn reached for my jeans and gently tugged at the button. When I shirked away from his touch, he held up his han
ds. “Just so you can bathe in the waters. You’re covered in blood, sweetheart. I’ll get you clean clothes after this, I promise.”
My lower lip quivered as he slowly rolled my pants down my legs, his nose brushing my quaking knee on the way down. Though it was cozy and warm in the small room, I shivered as I stood in only my underwear. “I j-just want to go h-home.”
“You can go back as soon as your home’s safe, sinta.” Finn stood and removed his clothing with deliberate eye contact, stripping down to his black briefs and revealing too many lacerations on his muscular form. He had bruises peppering his torso, and a large, fresh, angry slice on his thigh that drew my eye.
My mouth fell open when he turned and I caught a glimpse of a series of angry crisscrosses on his back. “What happened to you?”
“I’m captain of an army.” He glanced over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow at me. “I’ve been fighting Manas and Ekeks in Lumipad so we could get the sagrado stone to their well. You fought with me against Sama’s army. Remember that? It’s a lifetime of battles,” he said, motioning to his scarred body.
I didn’t want to ask what weighed on my heart, but knew he would tell me the truth. Finn wasn’t the type to sugarcoat things. “Is Bev… Is she alright?”
Finn nodded once. “She’s not right in the head, but she’s well enough to carry the stone from one place to the other. They should reach the well today, if there are no further attacks on the stone. Danny’s still with her.” His eyes steeled as he reached for my elbow. “You’ll probably hear it from Danny, but I struck your mother.”
I gasped, my eyebrows bunching together before words could form.
Finn pulled me closer, palming my chin in his free hand so I was looking up at him, my cheeks glowing with warm light from his fingertips. “She has a habit of running her mouth about you. I won’t look the other way on that. I don’t care if she’s your mother or not. You’re not stupid, and you’re not ugly.”
Treat (Terraway Book 5) Page 13
