He leaps from ravine to ravine, choosing the outcrops with the narrowest distance between them. He becomes a blur of flames, the air around him feeding his fire.
He’ll be fucking naked by the time he arrives at the southern plain.
I’m fully aware that Azul takes the most circuitous route, circling back multiple times to make sure we don’t fly too far away from Maxim. I imagine the Ember King scowling about it as he runs.
Meanwhile, the vampyrs stay in the west, but I consider them carefully. They’re regrouping. The way they gather in a controlled murmuration like a flock of birds tells me that many of them have fed. They’re stronger than they were before.
If I weren’t holding my mother, I’d take them on.
Well, I won’t be holding her forever.
Just at that moment, a little of the hide slips away from the top of her head.
Her light burns across my shoulder, but I don’t flinch.
I acceptthe pain. The least I deserve.
I dare to press my face closer to hers, the briefest contact with the top of her head before I lean back again.
Finally, Azul begins our descent, soaring toward the southern plain, landing lightly on what would have previously been the bloodlands’ southernmost point.
I scan the darkness farther and farther south.
Just as Maxim claimed, the dark column I’m perceiving extends all the way into the Ember Kingdom. Even with my sharp eyesight, I can’t see so far as the towers that sit along that border, but I don’t doubt the devastation that lies in that direction.
I slide slowly from Azul’s back, holding my mother carefully.
It takes Maxim long moments to catch up, but he finally appears on the mountain ridge behind us, throwing himself from the edge and landing at a crouch, a small explosion of flames around him.
He slows as he approaches, butt naked, as I expected.
“Clothes,” he snaps at me. “You’ll find them under the first layer of the hide.”
“No point,” I say. “You’ll burn them up.”
He paces back and forth. “Well, I don’t feel right carrying your mother while I’m fucking naked.”
He has a point.
“Take a breath. Walk it off. Whatever the fuck you have to do. If I hand clothing to you right now?—”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll burn them up.”
Backing away from me, he smacks his fist against his heart, as if that would make a difference. “Fucking fire.”
The gritty earth melts beneath his feet, and a trail of lava extends from the mountain behind him, marking his path.
My forehead creases as he moves back and forth. “How do you sleep?”
“Badly,” he retorts. Then, more quietly, “Alone, obviously.”
Well, that’s an admission.
Not that I’m surprised, now that I think about it. I never really considered what life would be like with perpetual fire. “I guess, once you got older, you didn’t get to hug your mother, either.”
He comes to a stop, his face turned away and his voice more strained than I was expecting. “I don’t know who she is.”
My brow crinkles. “Why not?”
