by Eva Ashwood
I leapt into action, sending out bursts of energy. “We have to make a landing spot for him! He’s going to die if he hits the ground.”
Trace and Merrick joined me, interweaving their magic with mine. Every time Lachlan reached one of our nets or hovering cushions, he plowed right through it as if he had jumped from a hundred story building or been tossed out of an airplane. As he grew closer to the ground, panic surged in my chest, and I sent out an enormous burst of energy. It was so bright that it lit up the entire forest floor. I could hear the men around me, but it sounded like they were far away in a tunnel. The energy surged through my whole entire body as I did everything I could to create something to catch Lachlan before he hit the solid ground.
I could feel the power burning through me, like gasoline fumes burning hot and bright. But it died just as quickly. When the energy had run out, I dropped my hands, and the light dimmed back to normal. Trace put his hand on my shoulder as I sucked in ragged breaths. I felt about ready to collapse.
“Ari, it’s okay.” Trace’s words finally came into focus, the muffled sound fading. “You got him!”
I looked up, blinking away the stars in my vision and finally seeing Lachlan’s body on the ground several yards away.
Fuck. It was a good godsdamn thing Trace had told me my spell had worked. Otherwise, I might’ve passed out for real. Lach looked like he was fucking dead.
The three of us raced toward him, our strides eating up the ground. As I approached, my heart pounded hard in my chest, and came to a stop next to the Irishman’s prone form. I put my hand out, stopping Merrick from reaching out and grabbing him.
“He’s hurt. Shit, he’s very hurt. He’s still alive though.”
Trace bent down next to me and used magic to scan Lachlan’s body. “Dammit. I think your magic definitely saved him, but he’s in rough shape. Between the fall and whatever the bird did to him when it attacked, he’s going to need something, anything that will help his healing accelerate. Otherwise…”
When he paused, my stomach clenched so hard I felt like I might barf up everything I’d ever eaten.
“Say it,” I grated.
Trace swallowed hard, his blue eyes glinting. “If we don’t find something, Lachlan will die.”
My jaw tightened. Trace and I locked gazes for a moment, and I could feel the shared fear that traveled between us like an electric current. Lach was important to both of us. To all of us.
We were a team. A group. A partnership. And it wouldn’t work if we were missing a piece.
Merrick snapped his fingers, drawing my attention. When I turned to him, he was glancing at the forest around us. “There are packs. Packs that have supplies in them, and useful charms hidden throughout the course for the Gods’ Challenge. Pretty sure if we search, we’ll be able to find something that can help, something like a healing potion. Like last semester.”
Standing up, I nodded, forcing my fear down. Fear wouldn’t help Lachlan. Action would.
“Trace, can you create something that will help us carry him?”
The dark-haired man nodded, standing up and rubbing his hands together. He sent out a slow stream of energy that wrapped itself around Lachlan’s torn and shattered body. It cradled him gently, lifting him up into the air.
“We should be able to move him this way,” he said quietly. “We’ll be able to move quicker and protect him better. I’ll only be able to hold this magic for an hour or two, and then someone else will have to take over so I can recharge.”
Merrick and I both nodded. We headed deeper into the forest, not really caring where the rest of the students had gone. We searched high and low, hunting for anything that could save Lachlan’s life. Most of the time, he was unconscious, and as worried as I was, I was almost glad for it. I could tell he was in an immense amount of pain, but I wasn’t even sure that he was conscious enough to understand it.
We searched for hours, combing through every inch of the forest around us as the sun sank beneath the horizon, moving out into the desert and then back into the woods again. All of us were dead on our feet, but Merrick and I traded off with Trace, creating spells that would help protect Lachlan as we carried him with us.
Frustrated, I cut through a bunch of moving vines and grunted, screaming my rage at them as they retracted. Behind me, Lachlan groaned. I turned around and pressed my hand to his forehead. “I know, I know, Lach. I just need you to hang on a little bit longer. I know we’re so close to finding what you need.”
Trace came to stand next to me, his body tense. “How’s he doing?”
I shook my head, blinking back the tears that stung my eyes. “I don’t see him surviving much longer. We need to find something, and we need to do it fucking fast.”
“Here. Finally. Here!” Merrick’s excited cry drew our attention, and he emerged from the underbrush a second later. He had a large pack slung over his back, and as soon as he reached us, he handed over a small blue packet with three vials inside. “I knew it as soon as I saw it. It’s a healing potion.”
My eyes went wide, and I smiled at Merrick as I took the packet, disbelief and happiness making my blood pump faster. I looked to Trace, and he squinted slightly as he considered. “Yeah, Merrick’s right. You have to give him all three, starting with the green, the red, and then the yellow. This is one of the best healing potions there is.”
We laid Lach down gently on the forest bed and unwrapped him from the magic that had been holding him in the air. I winced at just how black and blue and bloody his body really was. Trace tilted his head back as I administered each bottle to him, making sure that he swallowed before moving on to the next.
When it was done, we all grew still, our focus entirely on Lachlan.
Thank fuck for magic.
There were still days when I resented this “gift” the gods had foisted on me, but at the moment, I was more grateful to magic than I could say. Because it was saving Lach’s life.
It was amazing. As soon as the potion hit his system, he began to heal. Color came back to his cheeks, replacing the dull sallowness, and the black and blue bruises started to fade.
All three of us settled in around him and watched every second of his crawl back to life. It took over an hour, which let me know how bad his injuries really had been. When his body no longer looked ragged and twisted, when the bones looked to be reconnected, and whatever bleeding was happening on the inside no longer showed through bruises and cuts, he began to regain consciousness.
All three of us scooted closer to him, and I grabbed his hand. “Lach? Can you hear me?”
He groaned loudly. “Bloody hell. What kind of… godforsaken birds do they have in this realm? I hate fuckin’ birds.”
All three of us laughed, and tears began to flood down my cheeks. I’d held them back during our entire search for a healing potion, but abject relief broke down all my emotional barriers. I didn’t care if I looked weak, I was just happy as fuck to have him back.
Lach tried to sit up, but Trace put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back down. “Hold on there, buddy. Let the potion work just a little bit longer before you get up.”
Lachlan relaxed back into the softness of the leaves beneath him. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks, ma.”
I chuckled, grabbing one of the large man’s hands and pressing it between mine.
As Lachlan rested, Merrick opened his hand, revealing a small piece of paper.
“I found this too. It’s a clue. It looks like a small part of the map.” He held it aloft, tilting it slightly so that Lachlan could see it too. “It’s hard to make out what’s going on here; part of the map is missing pieces. But from what I can make out, the lower portion is where we started, Giant’s Pass. The others went to the right, and we went to the left. This, in the upper left-hand corner—I believe that’s where we are now, and from the looks of it, the gem is somewhere in this general direction. That means the others went the wrong way, but we went the right way.”
“I knew
that all along. All part of my master plan.” Lachlan laughed as he sat up slowly, his lips quirking up in a devilish grin.
“Yeah, good thinking, Lach,” Trace said.
“That’s not what we’re here for though, is it?” the Irishman asked, rolling his shoulders experimentally, as if making sure everything truly was healed.
“No,” I agreed. “It’s not. Let the others fight over the gem if they want to. I want answers, and to get those, we need to find the gods.”
“That means we need to get out of the Gods’ Challenge playing field,” Merrick said, glancing down at the map piece again. “Maybe we can use this to get closer to where we want to go.”
“You good?” I asked, glancing at Lach. I wanted to tell him to lie back and rest more, but I knew he’d never go for that. I wouldn’t either in his shoes.
We gathered our things, and I helped Lachlan to his feet.
His skin was healed and unbroken, as if he had never been injured. He seemed to have even more energy than he did before the bird took him. My heart squeezed with happiness, something warm and sweet spreading through my stomach.
There was no denying it anymore. I cared about these men so much more than I had expected to in the beginning.
Merrick shouldered the pack again, and the four of us kept our magic ready at our fingertips as we turned away from where the clue was pointing us, and instead headed toward the outskirts of the Gods’ Challenge playing area.
We were heading deeper into the godly realm, with no idea what we would find… or what would find us.
Chapter Fifteen
Sitting down on the edge of a rock, I pulled open the pack I had found.
The men gathered around, waiting to see what exactly was inside. Merrick’s pack was mostly practical items—charms and healing potions, and wilderness gear. I had found a second pack earlier in the day, but with the man-eating plants everywhere we turned, we’d decided not to stop until we found a safer area. It was midday, and aside from a small break to nap around dawn, none of us had slept. We had been hiking for what felt like a million years.
Since we knew that traveling in the opposite direction of the gem would draw unwanted attention and suspicion, we had created illusions of ourselves that would move slowly toward the gem. I wasn’t sure how convincing they would be, but hopefully they would keep focus off the four of us until we made it out of the challenge playing area. I was fairly certain the magical surveillance wouldn’t follow us beyond that.
Because no students were expected to leave the playing area. Ever.
“So, what’ve we got in there?” Merrick asked excitedly, drawing my attention back to the pack in my hands.
Trace chuckled. “It’s amazing how out here in the jungle, and the desert, finding a backpack with some random shit in it could actually make us excited.”
“At least while we’re out here, we can appreciate the small things.” Merrick shrugged. “When we get back though, I’ll appreciate large plates of bacon, orange juice, and clean sheets.”
Lachlan scoffed. “The first day we were back last semester, I just appreciated walkin’ around the corner and not havin’ some sort of creature try to eat my fuckin’ face.”
We all chuckled as I began to pull things out of the pack. “A canteen that seems to already have water in it, a knife, some rope, and…”
Everyone sat there staring at me, waiting to see what else I was about the say. I pulled out a black satchel and opened it up, reaching my arm elbow deep inside even though originally it fit in the palm of my hand. I smiled as I gripped what I knew had to be rations and pulled them out, tossing one to each of the men.
“It might not be plates of bacon and orange juice, but I’m starving enough to eat anything. If I had to eat another bug, or the insides of a moving vine, I told myself that Trace’s arm would be the next thing to go.”
Trace wrinkled his nose, then brightened. He gave me a bawdy wink as he opened up his rations. “I’m going to take the fact that you’d eat me first as a compliment, Snow.”
We all laughed and sat there comfortably as we ate the same tasteless granola bar-type things that we’d had last time. Whatever. They were just as gross as always, but I hadn’t been kidding about being hungry enough to eat anything. After I’d finished my share, I leaned back against a nearby boulder.
“So, how long have we been walking?” I asked.
Merrick took a sip of the water and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth “A little over a week since we got Lach back. I didn’t even think it was possible to walk through the godly realm for that long.”
I nodded. “From what I read in the library back at the school, the godly realm is roughly the size of earth. A portion of it is given to the Gods’ Challenge, and while it’s not a relatively large piece, it’s very broad and spread out. Only here, it’s constantly changing and someone else has control of what we see.”
Everyone sat in silence for a moment, thinking about just how large of an area we had traveled. Exhaustion seeped through my bones like lead, and I groaned. “As good as it feels to just sit here, we’ve got to get going. Remember, once one of the actual contestants finds the gem and claims it, we’ll all be brought back to the academy. So we need to find what we’re looking for before that happens. Last time, we were here for almost a month, but it’s already been a week. I really don’t want to have come all of this way just to miss out on it because we took too long.”
All the men grunted and nodded, and we heaved ourselves to our feet. Sitting for too long was dangerous. We needed to get a move on, and we had to find that same sense of urgency we’d had at the beginning. The answers to our questions were so close, it was almost as if I could feel it. There was a pulling in my chest, a strange sort of surety that filled me, growing stronger every day; I wasn’t even sure where it was coming from.
I packed all the things we had found back into the bag, and Lachlan swept it out of my hands, throwing it over his back before heading out. I swatted his well-toned ass, but didn’t object. He’d let me carry it for the past several hours, so I could accept his chivalrous gesture without feeling like a slacker.
The next hour or so of hiking passed in almost complete silence, but as we crested another hill and came into a clearing, we all stopped, speechless. Our gazes scanned the area, finding what looked like an invisible but very powerful barrier separating us from the rest of the godly realm.
“Well,” I muttered. “I think we found the end.”
Merrick began to walk forward. “Or the beginning. Whichever way you want to look at it.”
I lifted my eyebrows and followed after him, reaching out and pulling him back before he could touch the shimmering shield that plummeted into the ground in front of us. It moved as if it were alive, and it was so thick and foggy that I couldn’t see to the other side.
Lachlan scowled at the barrier. “So, exactly what are we supposed to do now? Is there some sort of challenge to this? Are we supposed to figure out the right way to get through it?”
Trace shook his head. “No. This is a barrier to keep us away from the gods. None of us were even supposed to reach it. This isn’t a test. There’s a good chance that this barrier could instantly kill all of us, or at least spit us out back where we started. In fact, I have no real clue what it does. All I know is this is our side, and that’s their side. I can’t imagine they’ll be too happy when we get over there.”
I shrugged, not giving two shits what the gods wanted. “They’ll just have to deal with it. They’re the ones who have all these fucking secrets, who made us need to search for answers, so they’ll have to deal with us coming into their territory.”
The guys looked at me for a moment as if I was crazy, and then Merrick laughed. “You’re the fucking best, Aria.”
I bit back a grin. I’d never admit it, but I loved that the men all seemed to like my fiery temper. I didn’t need to hold back with them or pretend to be anything but what I was.
W
e all went to work, pacing back and forth in front of the barrier as we tried to figure out a way through it. We stood just a few feet apart from each other, reaching out toward it but never quite touching it. It didn’t seem to hurt any of us, but at the same time, no magic that we cast was able to part it or move it aside.
Trace chuckled. “It reminds me of the slime in those movies. The stuff that comes off of the ghosts.”
Merrick laughed. “Ecto-plasm.”
Suddenly and without warning, the barrier began to swell and expand. Before any of us could move, it had wrapped itself around our arms and was sucking us in like invisible, powerful Jell-O. I yelped and struggled hard, trying to reach for the men. They reached back, grunting hoarsely as they tried to lock arms. But the strange magical material was far too strong. The substance ripped us apart, and before I could put up any more resistance, I was completely immersed in it.
I opened my eyes, holding my breath. It was literally like floating in a sea of Jell-O. I knew I couldn’t suck it into my lungs—I couldn’t breathe it like air. I’d never been hugely claustrophobic, but the feeling was so fucking foreign, so strange, that it made panic beat in my chest. I renewed my struggles, flailing my arms back and forth. My limbs moved too slowly through the substance, and I couldn’t pull my magic to my fingertips.
You’re going to die. You came all of this way and you’re going to die in a fucking vat of Jell-O.
No way. I shushed the stupid voice in my head that kept insisting this was the end. There was no way I was going to let the godly take me down like this.
I had to calm down. I had to use the very finite second I had left to figure out a way out of this.
I stopped my body from moving and allowed myself to stay suspended in the magical barrier. Closing my eyes, I drew power from within myself, picturing my magic inside of me, searching for anything that I could use to fight through this. The gods may have control over a lot of things, but the magic inside me was mine.
My magic spun and turned inside of me, and I began to push it out into my limbs. I imagined heat, a fire inside me that burned so hot it cut right through the gods’ shield around me. Even with my eyes closed, I could see the bright red burning light that emanated from my skin. I could feel the thick substance pulling back from my body, and suddenly, I felt a yank. My entire body flew forward, emerging from the barrier and tumbling down onto the ground. As I landed, steam hissed from all around me, and I released the magic from my skin.
