Everything about her was a temporary cure—her smell, her saliva, her wetness when we had sex. She stopped me from turning into a pyre, and I just had to hope the kiss would be enough to prevent me from burning Ashfall Cliff to the ground while we were apart.
Her eyes glazed as I let her go. “Go with him.”
“What?” Her eyebrows flew up. “But...where are you going?”
“Look after her.” I pushed her gently toward Dillon. “Protect her with your life. If you don’t, I’ll take yours. And there won’t be enough left of you to fill an urn once I’m through.”
Before either of them could argue, I left.
* * * * *
I stalked into my father’s office with Whisper, heading straight to the shelf where he stored every map of Brimstone’s geothermal sites and reactors.
Old and new, working and decommissioned, I spread the maps across the desk and pinned them under my palms. The Gaoligong Ranges stared back with neat contour lines and elevations, hiding what truly lurked within.
Volcanic power.
The same power that dwelled in me.
The edge of the parchment curled with smoke as every droplet of my burning blood fixated on the east.
To the mountains that swallowed souls.
To where Lao Li heard the wind screaming...
Chapter Sixty
“AGAIN.”
“Ugh, you can’t be serious.” I groaned and flopped onto the ground beneath the gnarled tree growing in the centre of Lucien’s courtyard. My eyes strayed to the closed gates. The gates Dillon had locked—keeping us trapped and hidden behind the stone wall.
Dusk had fallen.
Dillon had physically hauled me back ten times already—stopping me from racing through Ashfall Cliff to find Lucien.
Wherever he was, he was burning.
Ifelthim.
That bond around my heart sizzled and tugged.
He needed me just like I needed him, but...Dillon had taken Lucien’s command to protect me far too literally.
“You can’t keep distracting me like this, you know.” I calculated my odds of bolting to the gates before Dillon could get up from where he’d sprawled on a rattan lounger.
“If you don’t want me lurking around and getting in your way, then prove to me that you can protect yourself.” Wolfing down the tray of fried wontons, meat bao buns, and custard tartsthat Auntie Mei had delivered, he pointed at the dead piece of grass where I’d been ‘training’.
The grass was dead because I’d killed it by accident.
“Again.”
“I hate you.”
“Don’t care,” he mumbled around a mouthful. “Do it.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
Licking his fingers, he leaned forward and watched me haul my very heavy, very exhausted, very grumpy body off the ground.
