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Chapter twenty-one

B y some miracle—driven by fear—I was on my feet quicker than he was, though he was close behind. The shock wave lasted only for a second, but I felt the wall of pressure absorb the oxygen around us like an inferno’s eclipse.

As if hell itself had reached up through the center of that temple, ripped out its heart, and sucked the life and air back into the earth.

I stumbled through the trees, down the rocky hill, toward the temple so close to the tavern where my friends—

My eyes burned. My pace increased.

My friends.

“Gemma!” I screamed, scrambling onto the cobblestone path.

Ash polluted the air. I coughed but sprinted through the airborne embers, not caring if they burned me. It would be a blessing from the gods if, just like the day Ezra and I had been there, the temple was empty at the time of the blast.

I watched in horror as flames roared inside the temple. Rainbow stained glass shattered and boulders of stone crumbled as heat expanded and cut down the majestic house of worship. Mothers grabbed their children from the streets and stumbled back from the collapsing splendor, screaming.

“Help!”

I turned toward the source of the scream.

“Please! My boy, my boy!” A short brown-haired woman kneeled in rock and shards of glass and ash as she cradled the limp form of a small boy.

I ran to them and knelt down on the boy’s other side. He was four, maybe five, with sandy-brown hair and freckles. Too sweet and innocent for this mess of a world. Collateral in a war fought by selfish people wanting power.

A strained whimper left my throat at the sight of a deep gash across the boy’s collarbone where he’d been licked by fire and struck with debris. It was deep—too deep, and near his throat. Blood pooled beneath him, the puddle growing.

The face of another little boy flashed in my mind.

I choked out a sob and impulsively lunged forward to cover the little boy’s wound with my hands. Through my tears, I begged the gods for mercy. Whatever they had to do, whatever parts of me they had to take, I begged for what I hadn’t been able to stop a year ago.

I begged for Ollie.

“Please,” I wept, squeezing my eyes shut. “Please, please, please—”

Dread gripped me by the throat, air was torn from my lungs, and for a moment, I was floating. Glimmering onyx swirled in every direction. Ropes of void-like darkness snaked around my wrists and ankles, holding me somewhere where gravity couldn’t exist.

Until I was dropped into the center of a twelve-spoked wheel.

Sharp pain burst up and through my ankles at the force of impact. I stumbled and winced, bracing myself with my palms on the ground, forcing myself to breathe in, out, as I opened my eyes to take in my surroundings .

Time stood still, and the Temple of the Selvaren surrounded me. Only now, Ezra wasn’t with me. Neither were the assailants that Gavin had slayed. And Gavin … I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him there, somewhere, anchoring me to the present.

But the temple had just crumbled, so… this had to be all in my head.

The hall of worship trembled around me, as did each colorful shrine, and I began to spin.

No, they did. Each spoke of the wheel was connected to one of the twelve gods, and while my feet remained plastered in the middle of a small silver circle, the wheel drove the room clockwise around me.

Faster and faster until the colors blurred into a violent, iridescent tempest.

Fear prickled the base of my spine. It was spinning too fast. The small silver disc I stood on couldn’t possibly hold.

It was going to crack, rip the wheel off its axis until each spoke was thrust outwards to impale and shatter the stained-glass shrine of each god.

And I would be launched up, away, back into the shadows of the suffocating purgatory that brought me here.

I looked down, searching for a way out, or at least a way to stop it.

My brow furrowed at the unnatural stillness beneath me.

Somehow, the small silver disc beneath my feet was still stationary, disturbed by nothing, not a single tremble.

I, too, was still, melded with the silver into one piece, one center, and I realized…

I was the axis. I anchored them.

The twelve gods spun, but if I remained, so would they.

Beyond, I heard the cry of the little boy’s mother as she pleaded for his life, and I remembered why I’d come here. Panic snaked its way through my veins. He didn’t have much time. I couldn’t see the tendril reaching out of his chest, but I could feel it.

His lifeline, begging for help. Begging for me.

Words dashed across my vision. I’d spent hours scouring The Book of the Selvaren for answers in that library. Fire, water, ice, night, wind, objects moved with the mind, and… healing. I pressed my hands to my ears, pressure crushing my temples as I strained for the right spoke.

The mother cried again for her son, and I screamed a final desperate plea to the gods that this little boy not die, even if I, the axis of the wheel, had to splinter to save him.

My right hand shot out and reached for green.

The temple disappeared, and a flash of emerald light illuminated the black of my closed eyelids. The scent of jasmine washed over me, then iron-rich blood and flesh as the boy’s wound burned and healed over.

When I opened my eyes, I realized not what I felt, but who .

Viridian, God of Healing and Regeneration.

I gasped and yanked my hands from the boy, frantically crawling back and away. Afraid of the power I didn’t know how to control, afraid of myself, of what I could do to him. Weakly, I stumbled into a warm wall of muscle. Familiar arms caught me.

“It’s okay, you won’t hurt him,” Gavin promised, his mouth close to my ear. Quiet, so only I could hear, as he secured a steel arm around my torso, drawing me into him. “You would never hurt him, Ella.” I felt his chest shudder. Not a cry, but a breathless laugh of relief.

I was afraid to look down at the little boy, but when I did, I saw what Gavin saw. The deep, fatal gash over the boy’s little neck was gone. He laid in a pool of blood, but the flowing had ceased.

Little gray eyes flickered open.

The mother wailed and wept beautiful tears of relief, embracing her son as he turned into her chest for comfort. My heart fissured at the sight and a sudden awareness that I’d never yearned for my own mother that way.

“Thank you!” she cried, her eyes tearful orbs of wild gratitude. “You… our—our Silver Angel, thank you .”

Words escaped me. Wracked by tremors, I merely nodded at the woman and leaned into Gavin, letting him help me to my feet. I wavered as I rose, sudden waves of nausea and dizziness inhibiting my balance. It felt like healing had taken something out of me.

Gavin wrapped his arm around me and all but carried me toward the tavern.

I looked around to see buildings singed by fire and struck with debris, townsfolk scrambling to put out the flames.

There appeared to be more casualties of shock and fear than of the destruction itself.

Only a few buildings stood close enough to be partially incinerated by the outward blast of fire.

Indeed, the front wall of the tavern had been blown out.

With it gone, I could see straight through the dust into the wreckage.

Tables and chairs were in pieces, debris strewn across the floor I’d danced on days ago.

Shattered glass from Damond’s chandeliers crunched beneath our feet.

Dust from the blast floated inside streams of dusky sunlight.

I looked down and saw a streak of blood trailing from the tavern’s threshold into the back room. As if someone had been wounded and dragged.

And then I heard a man screaming in agony.

Bursting through the door, I saw Caz on the floor, flat on his back, Gemma and Finn on each side of him. And his leg… his left leg was severed at the calf, connected only by thin tissue, most of it a bloody, shredded stump of flesh. Blood spurted out in time with his pulse.

I covered my mouth with my hands, swallowing the bile as it rose in my throat.

Finn remained remarkably focused as he fastened his own belt—a makeshift tourniquet—just below his brother’s severed knee. It was a relief when Finn pulled the tourniquet taut and Caz responded with a groan.

“He was just inside the temple, and a boulder—” Gemma swallowed, paling.

“A boulder fell on him. We were here, just on the other side of the street.” She gave me a quick glance before sliding a pile of books to elevate his bloody stump.

“We found him, we got him out in time before anything else could happen, but—”

“I’ll live,” Caz groaned in pain.

Sorrow and rage bit at my eyes like hellhounds, relieved only slightly by the sight of Damond and Ezra rushing in from other rooms, unscathed. Damond, with a canteen of water to cleanse the wound, and Ezra with a blanket to cover Caz.

My other four friends were fully intact, save for some scrapes and burns from stray cinders and rubble.

Gavin held my hand but stepped forward, face grim. “The leg. It’s—”

“I don’t think so,” muttered Damond, gripping Caz’s shoulder in one hand while opening the canteen of water with the other. “We can stop the bleeding, but the leg— he’ll likely lose it. There’s nothing the healer here in Tovick will be able to do for him. All we can do now is prevent infection.”

With his leg now elevated, Caz was sitting up partway with a bag of barley at his back for support.

But if I could save that little boy…

I rushed to Caz, stumbling through an unexpected weakness in my bones as I knelt beside him, gently placed my hands on his thigh, and prayed for him like I had the child.

Healing and regeneration—that bright emerald light.

For at least a minute I tried, ignoring the objections and questions from my confused friends.

I reached for the temple, for the wheel, even for the suffocating black I’d had to pass through to get there.

There was nothing.