Three.
With all the strength I have, I coax the fiery energy through me and set the bottom of the spider on fire, flames catching, and Kat moves around enough in its grasp to do the same to where the missing head should be.
Goruun screeches, letting go of Kat enough for her to wriggleout of his grasp, though at the same time he’s yanking his spider leg out from my wound, leaving both of us about to fall to our death.At the last minute I reach for the rafter, wrapping my good arm around it, and grabbing Kat before she falls.
I groan, pulling her up to me so she can hold on, the pain in my shoulder making me feel faint, and we watch as Goruun starts coming after Brom along the wooden rafter, its body on fire.Brom takes his ax, and as he balances on the beam, moving backward, he starts slicing into the spider with merciless hacks of the blade.
The spider cries out, falling in bloody chunks onto the altar and the dead bodies below, but now the fire that was burning him is burning along the rafter, the flames coming toward us.
“Shit,” I swear, and look up above at the hole Brom made in the roof.“That’s our only shot.”
I carefully lift Kat up to her feet on the beam, and I go to the hole, pulling myself out and onto the roof, then reaching back down and grabbing Kat and pulling her up alongside me.
“Brom!”I yell toward the hole.“Get out of there!”
But Brom doesn’t answer.
“Brom!”I scream again, Kat screaming along with me, and I lie flat on the roof, looking over the side into the burning cathedral.Brom is standing on the rafter as the flames creep toward him, cornered.
Damn you, pretty boy!I yell inside my head.Run through the fire and get out of there, now!
But Brom just shakes his head.
Holds my eyes for an agonizing moment.
Just as the rafter crumbles beneath him.
He falls through the flames, disappearing to the cathedral below.
“Brom!”I scream so loud that my eyes feel like they’re bleeding.
Kat is crying and sobbing beside me.“No, no, please no!”
And in the distance I hear people yelling.
“Professor Crane, Professor Crane!”
In a daze I get up and look over the edge of the roof to see the students gathered below, dawn beginning to rise from the east.
“The building is going to collapse!”Paul yells up at me.“You need to get down from there!”
“Brom is inside the building!”I yell back.“You must save him!”
“We can do both!”yells Josephine, and she runs inside the cathedral with a few other students.
“Jump off the roof, Professor Crane!”Paul yells up at us.“I have you.I have this.You taught me well!”
I don’t know what the hell I taught Paul at this point, and I can’t seem to move, I can’t seem to meet my fate, but Kat grabs my hand, gives me a small smile, despite the tears running down her face, and says, “You at least have to trust your own students.You’re the one who taught them.”
I nod, swallowing hard, and look over the edge again.
The vision of my tarot card comes into my head.
The Tower.
It was like this, but it wasn’t.
I saw the future, but I also didn’t.
