by E. C. Jarvis
THE WAR
BOOK THREE OF THE BLOOD AND DESTINY SERIES
BY E. C. JARVIS
Copyright @ E.C. Jarvis 2016
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form, including photocopying, recording,
or other electronic or mechanical methods – except
in the cas of brief quotations embodied
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permission by the author
First edition
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
About The Author
Other books by the author
CHAPTER ONE
A deep rumble from below could be heard over the reverberating engine. Cid turned his head to look down, instantly feeling sick for doing so. He’d flown many airships in his days and even a hot air balloon or two; none of those experiences compared to the sensation of flying the aeroplane contraption. He ran a gloved hand through his mop of brown curls, which whipped around in the wind, then tugged on the U-shaped steering device. The plane turned in the sky. Cid tried not to push the steering forward nor pull it backward; mastering the control of all angles at once seemed impossible. It was not a natural sensation; his entire body had stiffened to a rigid point in fear of screwing up and crashing into the mountainside.
Eventually, the plane came around, and he found himself pointing at the gap in the volcano from where he’d just emerged. The rumbling came from within. He saw Larissa standing at the edge, blond curls whipping about in the hot wind along with the rags of her tattered dress. Behind her, a stream of red and orange lava snaked down the smooth floor in her direction.
“Fuck,” Cid yelled through gritted teeth as the sound of his heartbeat overtook the engine noise. In the distance, Larissa waved her arms at him. He cursed again and dropped the controls to shrug his shoulders. The plane immediately dipped, losing height in an instant. He grabbed the controls too hard, and the metal beast swung side to side as he tried to correct and overcorrect to regain a straight line.
Cid kept an eye on the river of magma as it crept towards Larissa. Obviously, she couldn’t climb down the volcano fast enough to escape it. Of all the ways one could die, burning to death, even quickly, seemed the most horrific. Cid only saw one option. If he could manoeuvre the plane at just the right angle, she might be able to jump down from the ledge and land as he flew past. In the split second that passed between the thought forming in his mind and the plane approaching the last chance to enact his ridiculous plan, he settled upon trying. If the only other choice was to watch her burn to death, it was worth the attempt.
He tugged on the control and the plane reacted, swinging shakily through the sky. He drove wide, trying to calculate the angle of trajectory, the speed, the distance, and to compensate for the crosswind trying to wrestle the controls from his hands. Before his mind had finished the calculations, he found himself alongside the mountain, his wingtip almost scraping the jagged shards of blue-grey rock.
Cid sucked in a breath, holding it in his lungs. The wind assaulted his eyes—his goggles still sat uselessly atop his forehead—and the plane shuddered. He pushed down on the controls and dipped to come in lower than the ledge. He saw the outline of Larissa’s body in his peripheral vision, and as he passed by, she was gone.
The plane juddered with a thump, and the controls wrenched out of his hands. Once again, he tried to wrestle it back, flipping the controls side to side. The propellers droned in complaint and he scraped a wingtip against the side of the volcano. The horizon dipped in his vision, then switched to cloudy blue sky, mottled with a smoky ash cloud. He wanted to look behind, hoping to find Larissa sitting neatly in the passenger seat, but deathly afraid to find it empty. If she had indeed caused that thump, she might have toppled straight off the other side and plummeted down into the jagged rocks below. A vision danced in his mind—her body laid out, battered and broken and then consumed by the flow of lava. He squeezed his eyes shut and refused to look back.
The plane still fought; controlling it was not the sort of skill one could master on the first attempt, or perhaps the hundredth. Just as Cid managed to get it straightened out and flying steady, the horizon neatly levelling across the windshield, a new concern flooded over him. He heard it first—the unmistakable sound of something metallic rattling around, as though it were a small metal ball being swirled around a dish. A ball bearing? It didn’t matter what had broken; all that mattered was it didn’t sound right. He felt a strange shuddering in the controls.
Cid turned to look out at the right wing, making an effort to keep his arms fixed and not let the turning of his head affect the course of the plane. He could see the wingtip, scraped and scratched, small shards of metal peeled back. It was almost artistic. The damage did not look significant enough to cause the shuddering. Something else caught his eye, and he turned back further to see a pair of hands clinging to the seat rim. In his ecstatic thrill of seeing her—or at least her hands—he almost dropped the controls to help haul her into the plane. His ecstasy was short lived when he saw the propeller visibly wobble at a jaunty angle.
“Fuck. Time to land.”
He glanced down at the controls, looking for something—anything—which might give some sort of hint as to how to land. Dirigibles were nice and easy in comparison. To slow down, one shovelled less coal, and to land, one vented the gas. Slow, gentle, and easy. This contraption whizzed through the air at an incredible speed with no obvious method of slowing it down, nor landing. As the shuddering increased, he couldn’t ponder on it any longer. He pushed the controls down gently and the plane responded, dipping towards the ground. They’d flown over the thick jungle, somewhere he certainly didn’t want to land. His mind rushed with calculations, trajectory, speed, altitude, crosswinds, the fact that Larissa was gripping on at a dangerous angle. The foliage below thinned, and he spotted the pirate airship wreck in the distance.
“We’re going to make it,” he yelled over his shoulder, not sure if Larissa could hear him over the whirring propellers and the engine. He angled down again, flying over the last treetop, scooting past the airship, lining up to land in the sand. A large clunk sounded, and the propeller broke free, whizzing over Cid’s head. The plane tipped, the controls useless, and Cid could do nothing more as he watched the sandy ground swelling in his vision, turning at an odd angle.
The world vanished into a cacophony of noise and sand and agony. The noise echoed throughout his brain. Something stuck in his leg. The sky above disappeared in a cloud of sand, which slowly dissipated around him. H
e coughed, sending another stinging bolt of pain through his body. They’d come to a stop at an angle, the right wingtip buried deep in the sand up to the housing for the missing propeller. Cid groaned as he realised Larissa had been hanging off that side.
“Larissa...” He choked again, the coughing making his lungs sting.
“You bloody madman, Cid.” He heard her voice from somewhere behind, and his eyes started leaking. He clunked his head against the headrest and tried to stop himself from sobbing like a child. His attempts failed.
“Why...why did you take off like that?”
He heard her getting closer now and felt the plane moving as she clambered aboard. “It wasn’t intentional.” He felt his face draw into a grimace that had nothing to do with the pain.
“Tell me,” she said, appearing at his shoulder, “how, in the name of all the Gods, did you manage to unintentionally take off?” She reached over and pushed the clip on the belt he’d used to strap himself in. He would have done it himself, except even the slightest movement elicited an indescribable amount of pain.
“I was...tinkering, trying to work out how to fly this bloody thing. I guess I pushed the wrong button.” He grunted again as he tried to move his leg, then let out a long, exasperated groan as he realised something metallic stuck through his leg, pinning him in place. Larissa leaned forward to look at the obstruction. Cid saw a large gash in the side of her head, oozing blood, and her arm looked like it hung at a funny angle.
“Gods, Larissa, you need to tend to yourself,” he whispered.
“It’s okay. It’ll heal in a moment. Although I’m not sure how quickly this will work out.” She wobbled her arm around; it was clearly broken. How she wasn’t laid out screaming in agony, he’d never know. “I need to get you out of there. It’s going to hurt.” She turned to look at him, her cool, blue-grey eyes covered by a curly lock of blond hair tainted red with blood.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Cid said as the tears flowed from his face freely. He gave up trying to hide it. “I was wrong.”
“About what?” She frowned at him.
“About you. You’re truly the most amazing young woman I’ve ever met.”
The concern on Larissa’s brow melted away as she smiled at him, and his heart melted at seeing that smile. She leaned close and kissed his forehead.
“Bloody hell, all these years without a kiss from a woman, and now I’ve got them pawing all over me.”
Larissa snorted and planted rough, playful kisses all over his face.
“Bloody hell, woman. Stop, will you—ah, get off!”
She leant back, laughing. The flow of blood on her head had stopped, and the wound healed up right before his eyes. She flicked her arm and curled it around a few times; the odd angle in her forearm had gone. It had healed.
“Good,” she said, rubbing her arm. “Your turn.”
CHAPTER TWO
Holt knew the moment the mine cart started moving it was a bad idea. He’d been so caught up with the prospect of finally enacting vengeance on the man responsible for all the chaos that it blinded him to all else. As the cart pulled away, following the rails over the gaps leading to jagged rocks far beneath, he spotted the timer embedded in the wall. Then, before his brain had the chance to figure out what the timer meant, the cart had taken a bend around a rock and plummeted down at a sharp angle, making the chance to turn back in time impossible.
He tucked himself down low, narrowly avoiding a jutting rock that passed by. He kept his eyes forward, focused on the track as it twisted and turned ahead, ready to balance out his position within the cart to counter the turns. Though his mind looked forward, his heart ached far behind. Would Larissa leave as he expected her to? Even as he contemplated the notion of her climbing aboard the flying machine with Cid, he knew it wouldn’t be so simple. She was too determined. He chanced a glance behind, expecting somehow to see her following after him. Instead, he found nothing but empty track and remembered he’d taken the last mine cart.
As the cart curled around yet another bend, the speed almost enough to throw the whole thing off balance and send him plummeting down, he grabbed for the brake. The steamy cavern heat made his skin tingle, and the prospect of finding Covelle—otherwise known as Professor Markus—at the other end of wherever he was headed with a hundred or so hired sharp shooters made him regret his choice to follow even more. The fact that Covelle had other means of transport at his disposal either meant there were others down here with him, or he was a hoarder with a penchant for vehicles.
Just as he squeezed the brake to slow the relentless speed, an explosion rocked the entire cave to its core. The rails shuddered as the shock tremored throughout. He felt his lungs catch when the air pressure inside the cave shifted, followed by a massive release of heat. Holt released the brake and shoved himself forwards, trying to regain speed. His ears popped and his head ached, and a rushing sound whooshed past him. It was all he could do to curl up in the corner and await whatever miserable death was to follow.
He stared up at the cave ceiling rushing past as it cracked and splintered right above him. His stomach dropped as though the cart had left the tracks and had become airborn, descending hundreds of feet. The last image flittering through his mind was a horrific vision of Larissa’s body being consumed by a river of liquid magma, and then it was gone as his mind regressed into darkness.
. . .
Larissa stuck her head in the plane and looked over the shard of metal poking through Cid’s leg. He did a good job of hiding the excruciating pain he must have been feeling. Her own experiences with pain were becoming increasingly bizarre. She tried not to think that she should probably be dead, or at the least, permanently disabled from the way she’d fallen to the ground as the plane crashed. Dealing with Cid’s predicament was far more important.
She chanced a glance behind them toward the volcano to catch a glimpse of the spewing cloud of ash and the rolling river of lava as it worked down the mountainside. Then she had to turn away again. Focusing on what could have been only made her tearful. An image of Holt flashed through her mind, and she had to brush it aside with all her will. She had Cid, at least, and wasn’t about to let him die too.
“I’m going to have to pull the metal out with a twist to get it out of your leg,” she said.
“Fuck sake,” Cid muttered. “Sorry.”
“It’s quite all right. Swear all you want. I think this is an appropriate circumstance.”
“Fine. Do it quickly, will you? Do you have something to wrap it up after to stop the blood?”
She looked herself over, then looked around the plane. There was some kind of package stuffed in the foot well beneath the pilot’s seat, but she couldn’t spare the time to dig around inside. Cid was losing blood at an alarming rate, his skin already turning pale. She gripped at the hem of her dress, or what was left of the underskirt, and ripped a wide strip from the bottom. The warm, humid air curled around her bare legs in the hot breeze. Cid looked like he wanted to make some kind of comment—he was probably worried about having her show too much flesh for his sake—but his focus shifted and his eyelids drooped. There was no more time for lingering.
She launched into the plane once more, dangling over the edge on her belly, wedging her left foot into the door handle and her right on the bent wing, bracing herself. With one almighty heave, she ripped the shard of metal back, causing Cid to cry out in pain. The shard lodged at one end, leaving her no choice but to try to shift his leg out from the other end of the protrusion.
“Is it done?” Cid asked, his voice too soft for her liking. She was just contemplating whether to attempt the manoeuvre quickly or slowly when he spoke. It spurred her into action, pushing aside the grimness of the task, and with a firm but careful hand, she pushed his leg free from the metal intrusion. Dark blood splattered the metallic hull. She reached out for the strip of material intended for binding the wound only to see it flapping away in the distance, carried by a hot breeze
.
She looked up at Cid. He was out cold, presumably passed out from the pain.
“I’m not going to lose you too,” she shouted at him. She wrapped her hands around his wound and focused on it with all her mind and body, hoping beyond hope the Cleric’s declaration that she could heal might be his last, useful gift in life. Her hands grew hot as she imagined the wound, ignoring the rush of hot blood as it seeped through her fingers, turning her grip slippery. Piece by piece, she drew the flesh together in her mind, unsure if the mere thought of fixing was having any effect at all. It wasn’t until her hands reached burning point that she let go of his leg.
Underneath, the skin was pearly white with a long, scarred mark. No scab to be seen, even the blood had cleaned away, though her hands were still covered in it. The only thing missing was a smattering of reddish-brown leg hair that should have matched the rest of his long, hairy legs.
“Gods,” Cid whispered, having awakened.
“I agree. How do you feel? Does anything else hurt?”
“Everything else hurts,” Cid snorted, “but not enough to want your groping, burning hands all over me.”
“Fair enough. Think you can get out?”
“And go where? We’re in the middle of the desert.”
“We’re not far from the pirate airship,” she said, squinting at the upturned bulk of wood in the distance.
“The dead piece of junk lying on its side in the sand? What’s the good in going there?”
“Beats sitting in this dead piece of junk lying on its side in the sand,” Larissa said, looking between the two crashed transports. “Marginally.”
“All right, then. Let’s go...”
Instead of moving, Cid remained pinned in place, growing glassy-eyed as he stared off into the distance.
“Cid?”
“Gods,” he mumbled. “Can it really be that simple?”
“Cid?”
“I have an idea...let’s go.”