She waited through a shallow breath, but even that was too long, so she dropped to the ground and planted one hand flat on the forest floor, the other holding onto Kaz. She dug her fingers in, pushing past decaying leaves and wriggling down into damp soil, feeling for something that her mind told her was there, just not clarifyingwhatshe was meant to find.
Eyes locked on the shadows, there was another blur of movement, the muffled screech of a cat, and finally her fingertips grazed something smooth that jumped up into her grip. The world around her sharpened, the sounds inside the cloud of darkness louder, and she knew Damien was there, alive, because she could feel his blood spatter across the forest floor. With an urgent thrum in her chest and a jolt down through her arm, the ground around her hand pulsed, and the earth cracked in a jagged line as it ran away from her, headed for the shadow.
There was a sound like splintering wood followed by two loud thuds, an animalistic cry, and the surprised yelp of a man. The cloud of darkness dispersed, sun breaking down through the trees above, and Amma sprung back to her feet. “Damien!”
He was on his back, covered in vines, utterly bewildered. Only a few paces away was the beast, similarly covered, similarly stuck, but it would likely only last a moment with its immense size, a black tail lashing through the air, its only free limb.
Damien’s dagger rent through enough of the vines to free his upper half. There was blood on his face as he sat up, but his eyes were wide, and he pointed at Amma with the blade. “Did you just—”
“No!” she said too quickly then sucked her teeth. “Well, maybe.”
The big cat let out a hiss, more of that horrible, orange liquid spraying through a band of tendrils and freeing a paw to slash. Damien jerked himself away, tripping out of the mess of vines that had been looped around the rest of him. He called up another shadow, backing toward Amma as the beast struggled to escape her earthen snare.
When he came closer, Amma saw he had wounds down his back that were not his own doing, the fabric of his tunic hiding the worst of it. “Go,” he called to her over his shoulder. “This thing is strong.”
“But you’re bleed…” Amma’s vision blurred. She took a step backward, legs heavy, foot slipping on a stone. Kaz scrambled out of her arms as she fell, try as she might to stay aloft.
Up against her back, the earth wasn’t as hard as it should have been, but all of the breath was knocked from her anyway. She tried to push up off of it, but her own weight was too much. Her palms slid in the hot soil, too hot, burning, and the treetops overhead spun. She was sinking, being dragged downward, a whisper in her ear to give in, to rest, to stay.
Then the earth was no longer at her back, and Amma was scooped up against Damien’s chest as he ran. She could see nothing, only flashes of light behind her eyelids, but she could feel the heavy breaths he took and wetness falling on her.
A voice broke into her muddled senses, not Damien’s, but not the screeching of the big cat either. This was human, and it called out so loudly the forest itself seemed to perk up and listen. With it, Amma felt Damien skid to a stop, his arms tightening around her. He said something, his voice muffled but vibrating through his chest and into hers.
And then, a tree.
Amma was sitting at the base of it, and she was…fine? She didn’t know how she got there, but she wasn’t worried about that—she wasn’t worried about anything. Her gaze ran up the trunk’s length, though where it crested, she couldn’t tell. The tree went on and on, somewhere well above the rest of the forest’s canopy. Staring harder into the sky, the vision blurred, but she finally saw its leaves, pink and red.
Weak, starved, exhausted, Amma’s limbs went impossibly heavy as everything melted back into darkness around her. Even the rise and fall of her chest was labored. The ground was beneath her again, holding her, but the ground wasn’t Damien, and with that realization, Amma panicked. She tried to jolt upright, forcing her eyes open, but only made it halfway, mumbling out a weak cry and collapsing backward again. Something soft caught her head before it slammed into the earth.
“You were not ready,” a voice said, not at all happy with her.
Tanned skin and black hair in long, thick braids hovered overhead. Features sharpened, drawn down into that disappointment Amma had sensed, thin lips curved into a frown, nostrils flaring. But the woman’s hands were on Amma’s arm, rubbing her bicep, and lightness flooded the limb, a significant improvement over the rest of them.
“Where is—” Amma’s voice caught as she rolled her head to the side to look for Damien, and her gaze instead fell on a huge, wet nose. Hot air chuffed over her face as whiskers twitched, the muzzle of the giant of a cat inches away. Amma froze, golden eyes on her, but instead of being narrowed and threatening, the pupils were huge and crossed as it watched her with a kitteny intrigue.
“You are lucky,” the woman said with a biting laugh. “If Soot didn’t just want to play, you would have been dinner.”
The creature called Soot rolled her head against the earth, flattening an ear, the other sliced through, the blood on it drying. She lay on her stomach, claws retracted so that only soft paws curled before her—paws as big as Amma’s head. Damien had been injured by those hidden talons, and Amma slid her elbow back to push upward, strength returned from the woman’s touch and needing to find him.
About ten paces off from Amma’s feet sat Damien, legs and arms crossed, looking about as irritable as she’d ever seen him, which was quite a bit. He was glaring at the other woman, blood still spattered over his face, leaves in his hair, and a tear in his tunic, though there were no dripping wounds. Peeking out from behind him, Kaz had his own black eyes trained on the big cat.
Then Damien’s gaze flicked to her, and his face softened. He dropped the petulant pose, pushing up onto his knees. “Amma, are you—”
Before he could come closer, the woman threw out an arm. “No. Stay. Don’t touch her.”
He shot her a nasty look, but froze.
Amma expected arcana to fly any moment as Soot too sat up with a trill, but no magic came. “What’s going on?”
“Infernal creatures are tainted,” she said, turning from Damien again and tending to Amma’s leg like she had her arm. “You manifested more than you were prepared for, and now you are weak. If he tries to drain you, you will die.”
“I don’t drain creatures,” Damien growled, eyes lidded heavily with annoyance. “You’re thinking of ubi infernals.”
The woman huffed, not bothering to look at him. “Well, excuse my precaution, but after you wounded Soot—”
“She attacked us first,” he cut in.
“Regardless, you used such a dark spell that I can only assume you are an incubus or worse, pretending to be human.” She tapped Amma’s thigh and then dug into a pouch tied at her hip. “The planes leak sometimes and awful things come out. You must be very careful.”
