Page 40 of Devil’s Doom (Jaga and the Devil #2)

Chapter forty

Ashes

“Fun’s over,” Woland growls, bracing with both hands on the ground. “Get to work.”

I head cautiously down the slope, Lech and two chochols, my guard, surrounding me from three sides. Already, I see people to treat. A mamuna sports a deep gash on her arm. A chochol limps toward me while a strzyga and two upirs launch themselves at a dragon getting ready to attack him.

“Here. I’m a healer,” I call out, so the wounded know where to find me.

On both my sides, healers stretch along the fence, sticking to the edges of the fray. Here and there, digging stops, but a large cluster of workers at the center works frantically, strzygas and kobolds holding the dragons at bay. I see Draga again, her long knives flashing in the moonlight, red with blood.

The limping chochol makes it to me, and I get down on my knees, grabbing his ankle in both hands. Twisted. I twist it back, and he howls with pain, but my magic is already fixing the damage. It takes a minute, and the chochol rushes back to his abandoned shovel. I run ahead, steering clear of the dragons, and grab the bleeding mamuna.

“It will only take a second,” I grunt when she refuses to follow me.

I treat her, and a strzyga floats an unconscious chochol my way. His head looks squashed, eyes glassy when I lift his eyelids. I check his pulse. Dead.

One of my guards pulls the body away while I treat a wound, a broken arm, a concussion. Magic pours out of me, and I forget Nienad’s teachings about conserving it. My only goal is to heal, heal, heal—so our warriors can go back to fighting, so we have a chance of winning.

I have no idea how long Nienad needs to do his part, but we must keep Perun’s forces occupied until he’s done.

“Look out!”

I duck on instinct. A throwing knife disappears in the dark, and I look up to see a grinning, half-transformed dragon charging at us. Lech jumps in front of me, and the chochols guarding me pull me back, but not before I send an invisible rope to tangle between the dragon’s legs.

He wobbles, losing his balance, and that’s enough. Lech sinks a blade in the dragon’s throat, and then his fangs in the side of his neck. He drinks greedily while the beast still moves, but I can tell he’s fading.

“Lech! We need you!”

A chochol falls at my feet, bleeding from a gash down her face. Her beak is almost severed, and I cringe, unsure how to heal her. I know enough about chochols to treat common maladies, but this is beyond my skills. I finally settle on reattaching her beak as best I can, but I already know she won’t be able to speak.

She’s breathing, though. For now, that must be enough.

Lech jumps to my side, laughing like a madman. My chochol guards help a limping kobold find me, and I treat his paw, shredded with dragon claws.

Fire bursts to my right, uncomfortably close. Lech rushes off to fight the dragon, and I lose sight of him. Smoke rises all around me, more fires burning, and there are screams and the clang of weapons. Someone howls, the sound filled with so much pain, my heart stutters. Whoever they are, I can’t reach them.

“Ow!”

I stumble against a body at my feet, and a hand, slick with blood, grabs my ankle. I drop to my knees by an upir, his chest torn open, lungs struggling to take in air.

“I’ll stabilize you but you won’t fight any more tonight,” I grit out, closing my eyes to focus on fixing the worst damage.

All I need to do is make sure the wounds stop bleeding and his heart and lungs keep working. I feel into the shredded organs, pushing away the sounds of battle, locking myself away in my mind.

I’m almost done. I just need a moment longer, to make sure he hasn’t lost too much blood, and…

My body is yanked back, and I open my eyes with a gasp. The upir I was treating is lost in the smoke, and the metallic scent of blood envelops me as someone breathes harshly, wheezing in my ear. I struggle to get free, glimpsing a flash of silver scales. A dragon.

“No!” I scream, kicking.

The dragon tugs me back, clawed hands holding my shoulder and arm. I try to twist to face him, sheer panic clouding my judgment. The claws dig in, and I feel his foul, blood-scented breath on my cheek.

Oh, gods. He’ll bite right through my neck.

The pressure vanishes, and I fall to the ground, losing my breath. When I look up, the dragon stands above me, looking down with a startled expression.

A clawed, bloodied hand sticks out of his stomach. It pulls sharply back and up, jerking the dragon. I breathe too fast, releasing small moans of fear on every frantic exhale. The dragon coughs once, growing rigid. He falls to his knees, slowly toppling to his side. Behind him, Woland bites into a huge, dark red heart, his eyes on me. He chews just twice. His throat works as he swallows. I forget to breathe.

“Are you hurt?”

His voice is cold, eyes calculating as they take in every inch of me. The blood coating his forearm and palm unsticks from his skin, hovering in the air as it coalesces, then floats into his mouth. The heart jerks, as if still alive, as he squeezes it.

“I… No.”

I keep staring until a loud shout nearby jolts me back to my feet. Woland gives me a nod and turns, vanishing in a cloud of smoke. Lech runs up to my side, blood trickling down his temple. His arm is torn and bleeding.

“There you are!” he shouts, laughing as if he’s not hurt. “Treat me and let’s go!”

I pour magic into him, fixing the damage, fast, fast, fast , and we run off into the smoke. Bodies litter the ground at my feet, some gasping from pain, some dead. I fall to my knees, treating one patient after another, but I no longer heal them. All I focus on is keeping them alive. When my hands begin to tremble, I fish a charged, peeled egg out of the satchel at my belt, and finish it in three bites.

The gaping hole in my chest grows a bit less empty, and I treat another patient, already groping with bloodied hands for another egg.

A ragged cry of pain makes me look up from an unconscious upir, my heart wrenching. I swallow an egg and push another into my mouth, getting up so fast, the world whirls around me like a torrent of darkness, fire, and smoke.

“Draga!” I scream, running blindly into the fighting. “Draga!”

Claws slice toward my face, and I send a powerful cutting spell at the hand before it reaches me, detaching it from the dragon. My chest hollows again, and I swallow another egg as I run, peering into the smoke ahead. Behind me, Lech growls. My chochol guard is lost.

“Draga!”

I find her bleeding next to one of the deep, now abandoned, holes under the fence. The fence here flickers, barely working, and a cube-shaped stone on the bottom of the hole is cracked, probably why the magic here is so weak.

Draga turns slowly onto her back, groaning from pain, and I realize what’s wrong.

Her arm is gone.

“Where is it?” I ask through clenched teeth, looking frantically around.

“Don’t. Know,” she says, each word a bite. She’s in agony.

“Lech! Lech, find her arm!”

But he’s not with me. I look around, but the smoke is thick, the grass red from blood and dirty with loose earth. I can’t see anything.

“Just. Bleeding. Heal. I’ll fight.”

I shake my head. Draga doesn’t get it—I won’t be able to reattach her arm later if I heal this wound. Still, I press my hands to her shoulder, telling her body to stop bleeding here, gently clotting up the flow, even as my eyes search frantically for a muscular, beautifully sculpted brown arm.

It’s no use. I’ll never find it.

Fuck.

“You’ll be all right,” I gasp out the lie, pouring magic I don’t have into my trainer and friend, who was so kind to me, so generous with her knowledge and smiles, who accepted me when everyone else called me names. “Just hang on!”

I heal the wound, sealing her skin. Half of my eggs are gone, and I swallow more in a rush, getting just enough magic to help Draga’s struggling heart. She lost a lot of blood, and I push her body to replenish it until I know she’s stable.

She won’t die, but I doubt she’ll ever fight again.

Exhausted by the strain of magical healing and blood loss, Draga loses consciousness. I get up on wobbling legs, looking around. My vision swims from magical depletion too deep to be fixed with the last three eggs in my satchel. I’m lightheaded and strangely weightless, my body detached, my soul beating against the cage of my ribs and wanting to fly.

Something’s wrong with my head. My eyes go in and out of focus, and everything is so slow and muffled.

When a ball of fire rushes past my arm, the heat kissing my skin, I turn slowly and watch as it soars right through the struggling barrier of the fence.

I wonder if I can cross here. Maybe the fence is weak enough to let me through. And yet… Yet… No, this is the wrong place to cross. I was supposed to go to Nawie… Long ago… Wasn’t I? But why?

Isn’t my place here?

Woland loves me. Doesn’t he? I swallow thickly when I remember him as I saw him last, a heart he ripped out of a dragon in his hand, his teeth tearing into the steaming, hard muscle. His eyes were so cold and impersonal as he looked at me.

Isn’t he the devil and a liar? Is he even capable of love? I turn in place, losing myself in the smoke and the screams. The fence flickers, growing fainter.

I could cross. I could vanish. He’d never find me.

“What are you doing?”

Lutowa grabs my arm, pulling me away from the hole. I realize with a jolt I teetered right on the edge of it, loose earth scattering down the rough slope onto the broken stone. She pulls me away from the fence, up a hill, past bodies, past fighters, past screaming, bleeding, suffering people.

I see an upir with his guts spilling out, and I yank my hand out of her grip. Before I manage to kneel at his side, Lutowa grabs me with a growl.

“No. The master wants you by his side. It’s time.”

I shake my head, trying to turn to go back to the upir. His red hair is darker than Lech’s, his face different, and yet, he reminds me of him. Lech isn’t my friend anymore, but I can’t let him die.

“Because he has to hold you to transport you, and he refuses to go without you. Come on!”

I blink behind me as she drags me away, but smoke covers the upir’s body, and I lose sight of him. Lutowa pulls me fiercely through the crowd until a familiar rumble of a voice greets us.

“Perfect. Thank you.”

Claws that stink of blood close around my shoulder, and darkness descends around us, thick and restful. Plaintive moans of pain mix with ragged breathing until the smoke disperses, the familiar light globes flickering around us.

Sounds of suffering fill the rebel cavern. Woland looks around as rebels who stayed behind rush to mingle among the wounded, bearing medicine, drink, and eggs. He still holds my shoulder, and when I try to pull away to help treat patients, he growls and tugs me back.

“Are you hurt anywhere?”

I spot Draga nearby, her eyes open and staring at the ceiling, tears flowing down her temples. I try to rush to her side, desperate to comfort her, but Woland growls and grabs my hair, yanking hard to make me look at him. Pain explodes in my scalp.

“Jaga. Are you hurt?”

I grunt as I try to slide out of his grasp. “Let go, I’m needed.”

“You did what you could.” His eyes flicker to the far side of the cavern, and he nods once. “Nienad is back. He’ll take care of them.”

“But Draga,” I gasp out, desperately trying to loosen his cruel fingers tangled in my hair. “Draga lost an arm. I have to see her, I have to…”

“There’s nothing you can do for her now.”

I want to protest, but his shadows wrap around us both, and the chorus of moaning, screaming, sobbing voices grows quiet. We’re back in our chamber, fire crackling in the fireplace. Woland still holds me tightly. I smell smoke and blood, and it’s as if my nostrils are coated with that scent from the inside. I fear I’ll always smell it from now on.

Around me, the chamber looks strange, the familiar things growing out of proportion. I startle when a log falls in the fireplace, sending sparkles into the air. Woland still holds my hair, guiding my face up to look at him.

“I lost you for two minutes. I sensed you, and then, you were suddenly gone,” he says, his voice grave, as if admitting a horrible crime. “I can’t let you leave right now. Not even to go to your friends.”

His expression is hidden behind his neutral mask that I know so well and hate. My confused, still stuttering heart gives a powerful beat, and I finally understand the battle is over. We’re safe. It’s done.

My legs shake, and my throat burns. I’m parched. The back of my mouth is coated with the same grimy scent as my nose. The scent of burning and death.

“You ate a dragon heart.” I blurt out the first thing that comes to my mind. He is unhurt, but his clothes are torn and filthy with soot, his hands bloodied. One claw is broken. Ashes coat his antlers.

“He tried to hurt you.” Woland’s voice is tightly controlled, not quite bored, but not revealing any other emotion, either.

I wonder what he’s hiding under the mask. Why does he hold himself so rigidly?

“How many did we lose?” I ask, trying to provoke him to let go of that control, because he makes me feel uneasy and like he’s lying, only, I don’t know about what.

When my knees buckle, the relief of the battle being over permeating my bones, I stumble toward a bench and sit, not caring how filthy I am. Woland follows me, sitting down on his throne. His shoulders are tight, claws restless as he taps them against his thigh.

“I don’t know yet,” he says, still cool and detached. He seems not to care about his people at all. “You still haven’t answered my question. Are you hurt anywhere?”

I shake my head. “Just tired. Depleted. I… I need to go back and see Draga.”

Woland’s mask cracks for just a moment, something brutal and hot flickering in his eyes. He looks mad, unhinged with fury, and I flinch away. His nostrils flare as he takes a deep breath, wrestling his expression back under control.

“If you cared about your friends at all, you would have let me claim you so we’d win,” he says in a low, bloodcurdling voice. This is Woland the beast, the one who terrified me at Kupala Night and forced me to look at his face until my eyes bled.

I shudder, shocked that he brings this up now.

“W-what? But you said…”

I trail off, because I forgot what it was he said. That he loves me, maybe. That he no longer cares about winning. Those words won’t go through my throat now, because they suddenly feel mocking and impossible.

Woland closes his eyes, his head falling back. His throat is bared, and his hands clench into tight fists.

“Forgive me,” he says, his eyes still closed. “Nienad failed. I’m disappointed, that’s all.”

“Oh.”

When his eyes flash open, there is something in them, something cold and predatory. I suddenly remember my barrier and yank it up, cushioning my gaze against a possible invasion. But Woland remains silent, and I feel no magic burrowing in my mind. He simply looks at me for a long moment, then releases a heavy breath.

“You’re right. We should check on your friend. Come on.”

I stumble and almost fall as I step over the bench. Woland doesn’t help me. His mask is even more rigid, jaw even tighter than before, and I can’t shake the feeling he’s furious with me. Yet—why? Because I didn’t let him claim me? He didn’t demand it this time. I thought I was free to choose.

I don’t understand him.

When his hand falls on my shoulder, it’s gentle, and when he transports us back to the cavern, and I lose my balance, he wraps a steady arm around me. When I look questioningly into his eyes, they are no longer clouded, but warm. His hand lingers on my waist, and he leans in even as we’re back among the wounded, surrounded by sounds of pain and loss.

“Careful, all right?” he says, his voice kind, until it disperses the strange sensations from our chamber. “Let me know if you feel weak, and I’ll take you back.”

As he turns away, walking straight up to Nienad, I stare after him for a moment longer, trying to force my foggy, exhausted mind to understand what’s wrong.

But then, a moan of pain nearby calls my attention back to the real world, where I can make a difference. I force Woland out of my mind, go over to a table laden with charged eggs, and fill myself up with magic to heal.