The water fell, cool and heavy. Impact was painful. It knocked the wind out of Hawk, left her gasping and choking on water. There was a great hiss, a rush of steam, and the embers were reduced down to smoldering red. No flame. No torture.

  For now.

  Hawk, caught as she was in the middle of the clot of people, began fighting for her way out. “Run!” She told the crowd around her. “You need to run! Before the flame comes back! We should run!” Her throat felt hoarse and dry from smoke. Screaming was painful. The crush of the crowd began to reduce. They were spreading. Widening out. She could run now, almost. Certainly she could elbow her way through the crowd.

  She was almost to the edge when she realized she had lost the Shadow. And she couldn’t exactly call out his name. It’d be like screaming a prayer to Lucifer in the middle of church. She looked, frantically, for any sign of him. But he’d put on the same garb as the people around him. The world was a sea of very damp beige and steam, and that was troubling because the steam meant the time to run was running out.

  Fuck it, She thought. Let the church have an aneurysm. “Shadow!” She called out. “Shadow!”

  Someone must have thought she shouted a warning, because other voices took up her call, hysterical and panicked. And now the crush began to run, people breaking from the tight-packed herd to bolt for the Temple. Fear of Argon wasn’t enough to drive them across that barren ground, but Shadow got them going almost from the word “go”.

  “Hawk!” She heard his voice, calling for her. “Where are you?”

  She was jostled right and left by panicked, fleeing people. One of them knocked the wind out of her and she fell. It was the worst thing she could do in this situation, because immediately four other people fell down on top of her. The crowd, unseeing and unfeeling, simply climbed over the pile of people, putting still more weight on Hawk. She couldn’t breathe. Oh god help her, any god, anywhere, because she was pressed so tightly against the hot ground she couldn’t inhale. She began to see stars and dark spots opened like oil-slick roses. If she could just take a breath—if she could only scream…

  Harsh words. Harsh movements. And suddenly a welcome voice shouting, “Flee!” and the crowd stopped climbing over the people piled on top of her. It felt like rather more than four, now. And then it felt less, and less, and less, as someone—she knew who—began hurling bodies off the pile to get to her. She could breathe again, and could crawl away from the pile, dragging herself out from under the worst of it. The steam was almost dead now, the embers beneath her once more hot enough to burn. Oh, god, she was out of time. And she couldn’t stop coughing, despite it suddenly hurting like fire. I’ve broken ribs. The crush broke my ribs.

  Hands on her. “Hawk. Hawk, look at me. Hawk.” He lifted her off the ground, checking her over for life. She was delirious with oxygen deprivation, she thought. She didn’t hesitate, not even for the pain, but threw her arms around him, sobbing on his shoulder. She would never let go, her air-sick mind screamed. Not now. Not ever.

  “Thank you,” she sobbed.

  “Thank me by running,” Shadow said. “Can you?”

  She nodded.

  “Then let’s go,” he said, and they did begin to run. Human speed, human feet, but they ran just the same. He could easily outpace the crowd around them, but she could not. Running with her busted side hurt with every step, but the rising heat and ebbing steam drove her on. Better to ache with a broken rib than die in Argon’s fire. So he paced beside her, holding her up, helping her run. She would have been more grateful if she weren’t in so much pain.

  Horns were starting to sound throughout the army, and a voice that should have been too distant to hear roared “Shadow!” as they reached the halfway point across the field. Argon knew his enemy was here.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  “Can you make more water?” She shouted.

  “I didn’t make the first lot!” He shouted back. “That was Illyris. She’s here!”

  Oh. Great. Hawk tried to be enthusiastic about being rescued by a romantic rival, knowing that rivalry was mostly in her own head. She did not enthuse. Illyris had not struck her as someone with many redeeming qualities. Like being catty about the woman who just saved your life? That kind of redemption? She tried to smother the thought. She was running for her life! Surely that excluded her from mental accountability.

  They were almost at the spire. A solid chunk of the crowd was already there, and they were being admitted immediately. Soldiers shouting go! Go! Go! Go! While medics pulled off the worst of the injured for immediate treatment. Hawk chose that moment to glance behind her, and to her horror she saw bodies lying still and prone on the heating ground.

  The first flame burst from the ground near the dead.

  They were almost out of time.

  “The water’s evaporating!” She said.

  “Yes. That’s what happens when you pour it on embers. Don’t look back. Just run.” He said.

  They were there. They’d reached the spire. She climbed over the first of the cool, glowing crystal rocks and hands helped her up. “Go! Go! Go!” A soldier said, releasing her to help Shadow up, and then the next person, and the next, and she had to keep moving if she didn’t want to fall once more beneath desperate feet. A medic reached for her next, and she said, “I can keep going. Help the next one,” even while she held her side in agony.

  And then a horrible sound behind them, screaming that did not ebb. She stepped out of the main stream of people and moved for the side of the spire, where she could look down and back at the rain-soaked field. Only the water had finally burned away, and the whole of the field was now aflame. And people were trapped in it.

  They writhed, screaming, as it caught in their clothes, their hair, their flesh. Fully half the crowd was still down there, choosing what to do, and so they died in their uncertainty. Limbs charred to black in seconds, chests burned to bone and shriveled flesh as clothes burned off and hair turned to brittle ash. Heads and faces were left alone the longest, as if Argon had chosen to let them experience their own deaths as long as possible. And then the flame came and the skull visage burst forth from charred skin, eyes turned to embers inside their sockets, and thoughts boiled away. Blackened figures stood where the flame had caught them, some arms extended as if begging for help.

  I just avoided that. Barely, she thought.

  And the agony in her side seemed to say, by even less than that.

  And that was when the figures in the flame began to move once more.

  Fire-charred limbs cracked their joints free. Hands fell to sides. Feet took a braced stance, as if they were preparing to run. And of course they were. Of course Argon would use them as his vanguard. That had been the plan all along, after all. Hawk watched in horror as the first, nearest flame-wreathed figures attacked the soldiers at the base. One of them grabbed hold of a sleeve and pulled the guard in, despite the bullet holes suddenly filling its carcass. The soldier fell to the ember-ground and began to scream and writhe as the flame took hold. And there was no way to get more soldiers in to defend the spire. Not with the surviving refugees still running up its paths to the Temple.

  Hawk turned to the Shadow. “Can you do something?”

  He looked down at her, then kissed her. Once and hard, with unforgiving mouth and need in his tongue. She answered this kiss with her own passion, her own longing for him. She wanted every harshly lean line of him, and had to settle right now for the taste of his mouth.

  “Promise me you will not linger.” He whispered. “Promise me you will not trade your life to watch me take theirs.”

  “I’ll go.” She said.

  He nodded and let go of her. He stepped to the side of the path, well out of anyone’s reach…and then plummeted off to the ground below. He landed in the fire, which immediately leapt up to consume him…only to alight harmlessly across his skin. His clothes were burned immediately, leaving him quite naked on the plain of battle. The flame-wraiths that once had been men threw themselves upon him, creating a mound of burned bone and charred flesh, with no sign of the man beneath them.

  Then, out of the mound with a great roar, came the many-eyed, many-toothed Shadowcat, his alternate form brilliant in the firelight. She could see every tone of gold, shades of blue and blush of orange in the scaled body. Oh, it was glorious, and it crunched into the dead refugees, breaking their misused bodies and sending them to rest, all with one shake of its great mane.

  And Hawk, remembering her promise, turned away. It hurt. Both from her broken ribs and her aching heart. But she had promised, hadn’t she? She was not going to watch. She turned her back to her beloved yet again and, because of her promise, began making her slow and painful way back up the spire.