by Jenna Black
We had to move out of sight of the windows before I felt safe enough to start creeping closer to the driveway, and I had no idea how we were going to get across that driveway without being shot or electrocuted by lightning. However, that was a problem I’d worry about when the time came. I wished I knew what was going on inside the house. I could hear yelling and occasional bursts of gunfire, but Anderson and his reinforcements obviously hadn’t taken out the most dangerous Liberi yet. The salt water in the air had now gathered itself into a waterspout that was starting to tear into the vegetation at the far side of the driveway, where I presumed some of our people were still taking cover.
I thought Violet and I had drifted far enough backward into the greenery that we would be practically invisible to anyone from the house, but apparently I was mistaken. A bolt of lightning came to ground much too close for comfort, the force of its impact sending both of us sprawling. My ears rang and my head felt a little woozy, but it hadn’t been a direct hit and all my body parts seemed to be attached.
The lightning had cut an impressive swath through the foliage, and the fire was now close enough to reveal our location to hostile eyes. I grabbed Violet to help her up, and we both plunged into the cover of the surrounding jungle just as a second lightning bolt blasted by.
“Keep moving!” I gasped at Violet, but she wasn’t inclined to stay still any more than I was.
We’d never have been able to go more than a few feet into the densest vegetation if Violet weren’t able to coax the plant life out of our way. Impressive that she could manage it while under this kind of stress.
I kept waiting for a third lightning bolt to hit nearby, but it didn’t. A serious sense of urgency made me want to keep moving as far and as fast as possible, but since the immediate threat seemed to have been removed, I slowed down and tried to get my bearings. To get back to the fight, we had to angle back to the right.
“Hold up,” I said, coming to a stop so abruptly Violet practically plowed into me from behind. “There’s no reason to keep running away. We just have to head back and find a better position.” I expected Violet to argue, since she wanted no part of the battle to begin with. Instead, she looked in the direction I was pointing, a crease of intense concentration forming between her brows, followed by a look of alarm.
“The plants aren’t responding to me,” she said.
I had the instant suspicion that she was lying, trying to trick me into fleeing—which is basically what she’d wanted to do all along. The plants in the direction we’d been running were still moving, clearing a path for us. Violet followed the line of my gaze and barked something out in a language I didn’t recognize. I suspected it was a curse of some sort.
“I’m not doing that,” she said.
That was so not what I wanted to hear. If Violet wasn’t doing it, then there was only one other obvious suspect. What if we’d been wrong, and Niobe had never been in the house?
I’d lost track of how many shots I’d fired, but I decided now might be a good time to change the mag even if it wasn’t empty yet. Not that I had any reason to think a bullet could hurt Niobe, but it was the only weapon I had. Maybe I understood why the hapless gunmen had continued to fire on Sita once she had made it quite clear bullets weren’t doing any good.
“Can you make a path in some other direction?” I asked. I wanted to get back to the others, but not as much as I wanted to not be following a path Niobe had created for us.
Violet concentrated a moment, then shook her head. “It’s not working. Niobe was always better at this than the rest of us.”
“My kingdom for a machete,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. I guess we’re going to have to force our way through.” I reached out to shove a tree branch out of the way, and a vine clinging to that tree suddenly whipped out and wrapped itself around my wrist. I yanked free easily enough, but clearly forcing our way through the foliage would be no easy task.
“We have to try,” Violet said as if reading my thoughts. Even in the darkness, I could see how pale and frightened she was. “You are not capable of defending us against Niobe.”
I knew that. Hello, puny human here. Not going to come out ahead in a fight against a goddess. Getting cut off from the herd and being forced to face Niobe with just the two of us had not been part of the plan.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and bellowed out Anderson’s name, but I had no reason to believe anyone could hear me. The gunfire had started up again with renewed vigor, and I worried I was going to have permanent hearing loss from the constant supersonic cracks the lightning bolts made.
My reward for yelling was another lightning bolt tossed in our general direction. We were deep enough into the trees that its force dissipated before it got to us, but it left me disinclined to shout again.
Violet cursed, and I realized I could see her better than I had a few minutes ago. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the fire was advancing on us at an alarming pace. It aimed at us like a missile, trees catching fire one by one in a straight line of the sort never seen in nature.
We were being pushed ahead, and we had no choice but to let it happen.
TWENTY-ONE
We tried several more times to veer off the path Niobe was creating for us, but she wasn’t about to let it happen. The plants resisted Violet’s every attempt to control them, and the fire continued its inexorable pursuit. The sounds of battle grew more distant, though the lightning was still earsplittingly loud. I wondered how all of my friends were doing, and most important of all, I wondered if Jamaal was going to be okay. I had to assume it was a Liberi who shot him and not a mortal Descendant. And I tried not to think about him dead or just barely alive, lying helplessly in the path of the fire.
Jamaal had already died three times during his immortal life—once from being shot to death, once from being hanged, and once from being beheaded—the last two at Anderson’s orders when Jamaal’s death magic had led to a tragic loss of control. It wasn’t fair that he had to go through it yet again, and I would happily shoot Niobe for chasing me away from his side when he needed my help.
Not that shooting Niobe would do a hell of a lot of good, and that, of course, was where the difficulty lay. In theory, her sister goddess should be equally powerful and able to put up a fight—defending me instead of vice versa—but Violet did not strike me as a pillar of strength, and her inability to forge us a new path through the plant life did not bode well.
Somehow, I had to find a way to get reinforcements to our side. Specifically, Anderson, the only one among us who had the strength to defeat Niobe in a fight as well as the power to kill her. I’d objected before to the idea of killing her, worried that her surviving sisters might decide they had to avenge her, but right now I was thinking it might be the lesser of two evils. A selfish way of thinking, perhaps, but I was not eager to die, and whatever I might think of Violet, I felt at least partially responsible for her. I’d promised to protect her—a textbook definition of hubris, now that I thought about it—and keeping my promises was important to me.
I had no clue where Anderson was or what he was currently doing. He might still be inside the house, futilely searching for Niobe. Yelling again was unlikely to get me anything but another lightning bolt, and it wasn’t like I had a flare gun I could shoot into the air for help.
I almost came to another abrupt halt when the obvious answer practically slapped me in the face. Running headlong down the barely cleared path while being pursued by a line of fire with a will of its own made getting my phone out of my back pocket an awkward proposition. The bulky body armor Logan had insisted we all wear made it impossible.
“Hold on a sec!” I said to Violet, halting her with a hand on her shoulder.
“Are you crazy?” she asked, pointing at the fire and then trying to yank me back into a run.
“Wait!” I yelled as I tore at the Velcro on the body armor, trying to get enough mobility to get to my back po
cket. I resolutely refused to follow Violet’s pointing finger, because if I could see how close the fire was getting, I was afraid I’d panic and start running again. I’d been dead the last time my body was burned, and going through that while alive was not on my bucket list.
I was rushing too much to get the body armor off completely, but I at least managed to loosen it enough so that I could get into my back pocket. As soon as I had the phone in hand, I looked over my shoulder and saw the fire was practically nipping at our heels. Waves of heat rolled off it, preparing the way.
Violet yanked on my arm again, and this time I had to agree that running was a great idea, no matter what unknown terror we were running toward.
Adrenaline and exertion had left me with shaky hands, and even having Anderson on speed dial, it was hard for me to find the coordination to turn the phone on and make the call while running for my life. I prayed Anderson wasn’t in the middle of hand-to-hand combat. And that he could hear his phone ring over the gunshots, lightning bolts, crackling fire, and howling wind.
I held the phone to my face, panting so hard I was wondering if I’d have enough air in my lungs to speak if I managed to get through to him. The fire was getting closer, gaining on us no matter how fast we ran. The air felt more like scorching desert than tropical jungle, and the fire spat occasional sparks and cinders like fireworks.
I heard Anderson’s phone ring once, twice, then a third time. Just before the fourth ring, his voice came on the line, snapping an abrupt, “What?”
He had to know I wouldn’t make a phone call in the middle of an apocalyptic battle if it weren’t damned important, but he sounded irritated as hell anyway. I’d tell him that he was being a jerk when I had a moment to spare.
My first attempt at forming words failed, my throat too parched from the heat and the run to function properly. I cleared my throat and swallowed hard, hoping to find some moisture, and I think my second attempt to speak would have succeeded, only I didn’t get the chance.
Something darted out of the foliage beside me and wrapped itself around my ankle, yanking hard. I pitched forward and instinctively put my hands out to try to stop my fall.
The phone flew out of my sweaty palm and landed facedown on the ground just out of reach. I could hear the faint hum of Anderson’s voice, but the speaker was facing away from me and I couldn’t make out any words. I tried to throw myself toward the phone, but the vine that had wrapped around my ankle held firm.
“Violet!” I shouted as I tried in vain to get to my feet. “Help!”
She had so far shown no sign that she had the ability to countermand her sister’s power, but at least she could lend me some extra body weight to try to rip the vine out of the ground. The fire was so close now the heat was almost unbearable. I sat up and clawed at the vine that held me captive, terror coursing through me as my likelihood of burning to death increased.
I didn’t really expect Violet to help. She was not the type to risk her own skin for someone else. Especially not someone like me, an annoying human who had variously insulted her, bullied her, and guilt-tripped her. But maybe she was made of sterner stuff than I gave her credit for. Instead of leaving me to save her own ass, she whirled around and stumbled back toward the fire.
Violet fell to her hands and knees beside me and grabbed the offending vine with both hands. She gave a violent yank, and the thing all but disintegrated in her hands. I’d forgotten that she was a hell of a lot stronger than I was.
She didn’t wait for me to climb to my feet, instead flinging my arm over her shoulder and half dragging me. I thought she was just doing that in a frantic effort to get away from the fire, but when I tried to get my feet under me and support my own weight, my ankle buckled and I would have gone back down without her help. I had too much adrenaline in my system to feel much in the way of pain, but clearly that vine had done some damage—or I’d hurt myself in my effort to pull free.
Violet kept my arm slung over her shoulders, keeping me upright while we both lurched into an awkward, limping run. A whimper of fear rose from my throat, because there was no way we were going to outrun the fire at this pace. I’d have told Violet to leave me and save herself, only it turned out I wasn’t as noble as all that.
The wind changed, bringing with it a choking cloud of smoke that made both of us cough. I had no idea how far we’d run or even what direction we’d run in. It seemed that we shouldn’t have been able to go this far without running into one of the neighboring houses or falling off the cliff, but for all I knew Niobe had us running in circles. We were incapable of running in any direction she didn’t want us to go. If she’d wanted us to burn to death, all she’d have had to do was stop making that clear path ahead of us. I wished I thought her failure to do so was a good sign.
Just when I thought it was all over, that the fire was upon us and we couldn’t possibly survive, the single line of flames split into two, each line swerving around us and suddenly outpacing us. Ahead, the trees and bushes and vines all pulled away, shrinking back into the surrounding jungle and forming a wide, barren clearing bordered by fire.
At the far side of the clearing stood a woman. About six feet tall with glorious auburn hair warmly lit by the fire, she wore a long white gown belted at the waist and draped over one shoulder, looking very much like a figure that should be gracing the Parthenon, or at least the Ancient Greece exhibit at the National Museum. Her eyes glowed white, and in her hands she clasped an enormous bronze sword I probably wouldn’t even be able to lift.
Violet and I came to a halt as the fire continued to outpace us, creating perfectly carved arcs on both sides of us and curving inward to form a solid wall behind Niobe.
We were trapped in a seething circle of fire with a seriously pissed-off, sword-wielding goddess. It was time for the endgame, and from where I was standing, it didn’t look good for the home team.
TWENTY-TWO
Niobe took a few graceful, gliding steps closer. It looked like her feet weren’t even touching the ground, though I assumed that was just an illusion. Thanks to the wall of fire, the artificially created clearing was about the temperature of your average pizza oven. Niobe would have looked a little more human if she had the grace to sweat in the heat, but it might as well have been a temperate spring day for all the discomfort she showed.
Violet was a different story. Her hair was disheveled and her clothing torn from our long run, and her makeup was melting in the perspiration that dripped down her face. I desperately wanted to get out of the goddamn body armor—it certainly wouldn’t do me any good at a time like this—but getting all the Velcro loose would require taking my eyes off Niobe, and that didn’t strike me as the best idea in the world.
“I am very disappointed in you, Sister,” Niobe said, and no one would ever mistake that resonant voice for something human. She might be wearing a human mask over her godly form, but she wasn’t exactly making an effort to pass.
Beside me, Violet stood up straighter and lifted her chin. I knew how scared she had to be, how scared she’d been earlier, but she did an admirable job of hiding it.
“I’m the one who’s disappointed,” Violet responded. “You know I would be happy to dance with you on Kane’s grave, but the cost is too high.”
Niobe gave a snort of disdain. “You have been living among the animals too long if you think the cost is too high.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
It took me a second to grasp her implication, and when I did, I winced. Goddesses do not think like humans, I reminded myself for the bazillionth time. Of course in their worldview the inconvenience of being forever trapped on the Earth was of greater consequence than the extinction of all human life.
Neither goddess seemed to be paying attention to me at the moment, so I drew my gun, knowing a bullet would be about as effective against Niobe as a spitball.
“Don’t even think about it,” Violet muttered, barely moving her lips. “She’s angry enough
already.”
I doubted it was possible to make Niobe any angrier than she already was, but since I had no reason to think shooting her would improve the situation, I kept the gun down by my side. I was reluctant to let Niobe out of my sight, but I kept stealing glances all around me in search of a way out.
The wall of fire that surrounded us was solid and thick, and from what I could see, there was no hope of getting through it without being burned to a crisp. It didn’t seem like I had much choice but to rely on Violet to get us out of this. Relying on others has never been my favorite thing, and I racked my brain for some way I could take action and save the day. Unfortunately, it was pretty hard to come up with anything when the enemy was a freaking goddess.
“Have you forgotten what Kane did?” Niobe asked. “Fourteen precious, innocent children he took from me! A true and loyal sister would be willing to sacrifice her own desires to avenge them.”
Interesting how her definition of loyalty didn’t seem to include any responsibilities on her part. Like, say, not murdering sisters who didn’t see things her way. Maybe Niobe’s problem wasn’t so much that she was angry but that she was batshit crazy. I’ve never met anyone with taste in women as epically bad as Anderson’s. If he had a thing for crazy women, couldn’t he have at least stuck to ones who weren’t homicidal?
“I would love nothing better than to see Kane dead,” Violet said. “I loved my nieces and nephews, and I love you. But I want to have a future. And I want you to have a future, and Iris and Lily and Poppy. We all deserve better than to be forced to live on a barren world for all eternity.”
Niobe waved the objection off as if it were completely beneath her notice. “We will have each other, and that is enough. And more than anything, my children deserve the justice they have so long been denied. It saddens me to find you can’t see that.”
She didn’t sound sad, and she certainly didn’t look it. The glow in her eyes intensified, and though there was no missing her fury, I was sure I saw more than a hint of glee as well. Niobe had so far been unable to hurt Anderson, but she was clearly taking pleasure out of finding other targets for her rage. That did not encourage me to hope for a peaceful resolution to the current conflict.