“What’s that?” Last snapped.
I shoved the vial between Luvic’s lips and tilted the contents into his mouth. Some of it slid over his lips and dribbled down his chin, but most of it slid down his throat.
“What is it?” Last asked again.
I shook my head. “It’s for emergencies.”
The cricket jumped from my purse and back onto Luvic’s chest. Then his back arched, his eyes flew open, and he screamed.
As his roar ripped through the hall, the ground erupted, the stone cracked wide, and Jacob shot out on a wave of fire.
Luvic jolted upright as if he’d been pumped full of adrenaline. He gasped, clutching his chest.
“Get it . . . out!” He scraped at the spear. His brown eyes flashed orange, and he snarled, “Now!”
The hall was a battlefield. After Jacob had flown out on a volcano of fire, the two old Clarks had sprung after him. The old men—Celia and Ragnor—were blasting their way through the conjurers. Jacob, as far as I could tell, had decided his sole purpose in life was to cause chaos.
Celia and Ragnor had shot a hole in the wall and were fighting their way to it. Jacob had conjured an army of flying metal pigeons. They were diving through the hall, shooting streams of fire. He looked like a mad conductor, waving a baton for his orchestra of psychotic flaming birds. To everyone in the room, I imagine it looked like he was attacking indiscriminately, but the pigeons dove away from Celia and Ragnor at the last moment, and they completely steered clear of Luvic and me.
I yanked free the knots of the spear in Luvic’s chest. The spear disappeared, and he fell over, shuddering violently.
I leaned over, grasping his shoulder, “Are you all ri?—?”
He clutched my dress and pulled me so close my nose pressed to his. “What did you give me?” he said through gritted teeth.
My eyes widened.
“Mari. What?”
His face was quickly filling with a red heat, and his eyes glowed—not jackaltooth-orange, but with fire.
“The ‘take in event of emergency’ vial,” I said.
He shuddered, his muscles spasming and growing. He swore, his jaw bulging.
“Luvic?”
“Get them out of here?—”
He shook, seizing violently. Then Luvic whimpered, and a bright flame shot free from the hole in his chest. The fire solidified into three hideous creatures made of claws and flame and smoke. They twisted around Luvic, snakelike and terrifying. They turned their flat triangular heads toward me and pierced me with burning eyes.
I shrank away as their flames lashed my skin. These weren’t illusion. They were something horrible and frighteningly old. They smelled like fire devouring rotting flesh, hot and putrid.
Long, whiplike cuts bled on my arms. Luvic’s skin sprouted thin red lashes. These were the cuts I’d seen on Harry. This was what he’d been attacked by. It wasn’t Finn who’d cut gouges into the walls and streaked fire through the tunnels—it was these . . . things.
That must have been what Harry meant when he’d said a monster had killed him. And when he’d said “liar,” he was blaming me for the monster. Harry had said Finn had attacked. Had Finn killed it? And if so, how?
“What do I do?” I whispered.
When Luvic didn’t answer, I looked down. The brown of his irises was gone, and instead, his eyes were balls of flame. He stared unseeing at the ceiling, his muscles taut.
I shook his shoulders. “Luvic?”
No response.
The fire creatures sniffed the air, their forms crackling. One of them moved toward me, its long snout twisting into an eerie semblance of a smile. I braced myself, preparing for its lunge.
Then a flock of pigeons dove at it, tearing through the flame.
