Page 35

Chapter 35

S omehow, I forgot the house was burning down.

Despite every conclusion I had drawn since we broke up, he still loved me, and it was going to get him killed.

I stared up at him, my vision a little blurry as I soaked in the sensation of his touch. It might be the last time I would get to enjoy it. Regardless, I couldn't let him stay here, because although I had tried to convince myself otherwise for months now, I loved him too.

"What the hell are you two doing?" Priya appeared in the doorway, instantly covering her face with her sleeve as the smoke hit her. "This place is going down. We've got to go!"

I was too stunned to explain to her what was going on. I was going to die in this place, and so was Asher, if he didn't leave.

Asher looked at Priya over his shoulder. "The house won't let her leave, Pri."

Priya's face dropped, expressionless. The air thickened with another layer of smoke and I coughed into my sleeve.

"Priya, you need to take him right now," I said. "There's no point in the both of us..." I couldn't bring myself to say the words 'to die'. I had barely realised how much I took each day for granted, expecting to go to bed and wake up again the next day to do it all again. But all of a sudden, my future was a vast expanse of black water that I was going to sink into and never surface from.

Only it wouldn't feel that seamless. Not if I was going to burn alive.

My next breath hitched in my throat, coated with soot as Asher wrapped his arm around my waist and hoisted me up over his shoulder.

"Get everyone out of here. We'll find another way out," Asher told Priya, making his way down the corridor.

"Asher, no!" I bellowed, and beat my fists onto his back. I couldn't take it. For all the hate and fury I had toward him in the past six months, the idea that he would die with me was worse than the thought of dying alone.

Priya's horrified face got smaller and smaller as Asher hurried down the corridor with me, but then Hecate darted between Priya's legs and dashed toward us.

"Hec!" I screamed her name. No way was this happening. "Don't you dare!"

But she didn't even slow down.

Asher kicked open the basement door and we descended the stairs, with Hecate hot on our heels. I held my sleeve to my mouth again as the air continued to thicken with smoke. When he reached the bottom, he put me back on my feet, allowing me to grab him by his shirt and shake him. Dragging his face to mine, our noses touched but I was too angry to even indulge the idea of kissing him.

"Do you have a freaking death wish?" I asked, annunciating every word slowly.

"Do you ?"

"This place is going to burn down with me in it. I don't have a choice. You do!"

Asher pulled back, extending my arms, and he grabbed my hands from his shirt to encase them in his. He tucked them both under his chin and gazed at me with big, shining eyes that would have made me melt if the rising temperatures weren't already doing the job for him.

"No, I don't," he muttered. "Now, are you going to help me find both of us a way out of here or not?"

I searched his eyes, and for a moment I was flung back into our past; where his tenderness filled every moment, and the joy of merely being his orbit fuelled me no matter how bad my day was going. And my day was going really freaking badly at that moment.

The still unconscious forms of Thornton and Paul lay a short way from us. Looked like they were going down with the ship too, whether they liked it or not.

"Make that all of us," I said, as Hecate paced up and down the far basement wall, pressing her paw to it every so often. "I can't get out of here unless there's a breach in the enchantments they've hidden in the walls and unless you've brought some drilling equipment, I don't see how we're going to do that."

Asher lowered our hands and tugged me toward the wall where Hecate paced. She jumped up on my shoulder and licked my cheek.

"I can't break the enchantments, they're too strong," she said. "If there weren’t so many, I could do something, but there's a network connected through the walls in the entire house. It's too much."

The distant sound of crackling wood and the groaning of beams made my heart race faster.

"There's no way you can just crack one of them?" Asher asked. "We only need a small-"

"I'm telling you, it's too well reinforced." Hecate batted his hair with her paw.

"Is there any way we can hide?" I asked. "Find somewhere that we can protect ourselves?" Saying it out loud made it sound even stupider than in my head. Desperate times meant dredging up every idea, even from the very bottom of the barrel.

"There's this little thing called oxygen and we're gonna need it-"

"I get it, Hec." I scowled at her. She was right. No matter where we hid in this place, if the fire didn't find us, the smoke would.

I pressed my palm to my forehead and closed my eyes. All my thoughts were clouded with the imminent danger and the utter devastation that Asher and Hecate had chosen to go down with me. I couldn't let them die like this. Even if my time was up, theirs wasn't.

Asher's hand squeezed mine so tightly that it started to tingle. He could feel it, too. The blanket of death that was getting closer and closer to smothering us all and bundling us into its grasp. If only I had Hecate's power, then maybe I could...

My eyes snapped open. What if I could ? The thought of absorbing Hecate's power temporarily had never crossed my mind. Spirit creatures were sacred, kleptomaniacs or not, and as such, they were protected. If anyone had tried to take the power of a grimalkin or any other spirit creature, it wouldn't exactly have gone down in scientific literature.

I dropped Asher's hand and lifted Hecate off our shoulders, holding her out in front of me while she mewled in protest.

"Let me take your power," I said. "Let me try to break the enchantments."

"But you've never done that before. I don't know anyone who has. What if it goes wrong?"

I pulled my most deadpan face. "We're in a burning building, Hec. I don't think that going wrong is our worst problem right now." I coughed again and tried to cover my mouth with my upper arm. "Will you let me do it?"

Asher looked between the two of us but I could see the cogs turning behind his eyes. He was trying to think of another plan. Any other plan. But after a solid moment, he had nothing to offer. Neither did Hecate, it seemed.

"It's too dangerous, Bea! My power isn't meant for humans anyway, but-"

"We don't have time to debate this, Hec. Will you let me?"

"You're going to get hurt."

"We're going to die if I don't try this anyway. Hec, please."

Hecate mewled but stopped halfway through for a series of sneezes.

"All right, but...please be careful. It's easy to overload yourself with my power."

That was good news. We needed an overload of power if this was going to work. Although I could all but hear the seconds ticking away, I took as deep a breath as I dared, my throat tingling with the urge to cough, and absorbed Hecate's power.

I bent my head and screwed up my face. It felt like fear and mischief wrapped in a layer of self-assurance, but the moment her power inked through me, I could detect the enchantments in the walls. Hecate was right; an entire network of enchantments ran through the entire house, the crystals that made them connected with powerful threads of magic. I reached out with her power to really get a feel for what we were dealing with.

I put Hecate down on the floor and stepped to the wall, but an even thicker mouthful of smoke entered my lungs and I hacked into the arm of my cardigan. Asher coughed too, and when I looked up toward the stairs, I couldn't see the door anymore. The groaning of the house grew louder. We had minutes until the smoke made it too hard to breathe and even less time if the house came down around us.

I pressed my hands to the wall and prepared to concentrate, but a sensation at my back had me double taking. Asher pressed himself to my back and his breath tickled my ear. I swallowed hard as his hands rested on my hips.

"You've got this," he muttered.

And just like that, all my confidence flooded to the surface and wrapped my core in a protective layer. I wanted to go down a rabbit hole of asking the whys and the hows, but none of us had time for that.

Instead, I focused on the power from the enchantments. I pushed at the threads connecting the crystals in the walls, and they bent and twisted but never snapped. No, that was no way to approach this. I had to destroy one link in the network and maybe then we could squeeze out through a window or something. Even if the Bishops had boarded up the small basement ones near the ceiling.

I pushed all the power toward the crystal in the wall; Hecate's power scratching against the walls of me inside, like sandpaper on a piece of wood. But it still worked, even if it hurt. Hecate clambered up Asher's back and perched on both our shoulders, keeping low.

I gritted my teeth, suppressing another cough brewing in my throat. Immersing myself in the power completely, I thrust it into the crystal. I could feel it react to the power, flickering in and out, but the magic threads emanating from it didn't budge. The sandpaper turned into sharp fork prongs as I pushed the power even harder.

"Bea..."

"It's okay, Hec."

It didn't feel okay. Not even a little bit. As the fork prongs turned into knives that sliced me from the inside as I pushed the limits of Hecate's power. But it made sense to me. I was never supposed to get out of this house tonight. Not alive, anyway. But there was no reason Asher and Hecate would have to go down with me.

"Asher, make her stop. She'll kill herself!"

When Asher's hands tightened on my hips, everything devolved into slow motion. I could feel his intention to rip me away from the wall and stop me using Hecate's power. But what would that achieve? We would just die all together in this basement from the smoke before the house came down around us.

That was not happening. Not to them.

I screamed as the knives ripped at me, the power surging into the crystal, but the sharpness disappeared as the wall exploded. Asher, Hecate, and I flew backwards in a hail of concrete and stone pieces, and Hecate flew toward the stairs, landing on her feet and skidding to a stop. Asher and I slammed into the ground, and my world darkened as he rolled onto me, containing me in a secure bubble of his body as the debris rained down.

My thoughts were like the smoke in the air; thick and all-consuming but impossible to catch. I blinked, but a red sheen had covered my vision, as if I was looking through solar protection glasses.

Before I knew what was happening, I was being lifted off the ground and Asher looked down at me with concern. His lips moved but I couldn't hear him, and even if I could, I was too consumed by the breeze and light that cascaded in from the giant hole that had blown in the wall. The hole was just a jagged circle of blinding light and all I could do was smile at it before I lost consciousness completely.