Page 138 of Burn of the Everflame

He turned for the stairs. “I’ll check with Alixe about the lookouts. Then I’ll find someone to replace me as your guard.”

“I don’t need a guard.”

He paused with his hand on the door. “What do you need, Diem?”

More time.

A way out.

You.

He huffed a harsh laugh at my silence. “Right. Space.” He closed the door behind him, leaving me standing alone in the rain.

I slumped over the railing, trying to pull air into my lungs that wasn’t full of falling water and misery. My stomach threatened to empty, as if my body was trying to expel the noxious poison of knowing how badly I’d hurt him. I stared at the base of the tower and waited to see him, some selfish part of me hoping he might storm back up and refuse to leave my side.

Something appeared—but it wasn’t Luther.

It was hardly anything at all. A shimmer here, a shadow there. An odd ripple in the air, almost as if the rain was bouncing off . . .

A shield.

Luther appeared in the exit, and my blood turned to ice.

I opened my mouth to scream a warning as the tower exploded in a cloud of stone and flame.

33

DIEM

My throat was full of mud.

More specifically, a thick slurry of rain and particles of shattered rock that had collected while I was unconscious. I was choking on it, lungs straining. I felt like I was drowning—not as a poignant metaphor, but in a very real, very cause-of-death kind of way.

I couldn’t move, either. One arm was bent at an angle behind me, the other pinned beneath what felt like an entire building—or what was left of one. My attempts to open my eyes brought a watery, red-tinged blur in my right eye and agonizing pain in my left.

“Find the Queen,” a man’s voice shouted. “I saw her in the tower before the bomb exploded.”

“She’s probably dead, like the other one.”

No.

No no no.

“We can’t take the risk. You four look through the rubble. If you find her alive, don’t kill her. Father Vance wants to do it himself.”

The rocks around me rattled as more explosions detonated in the distance. Faint shouting joined bootsteps and clanging swords along with a gryvern’s enraged roars. Hundreds of miles away in Lumnos, a different gryvern was absolutely losing her shit.

“It’s too dark,” a man complained. “I can’t see a thing through all this rain.”

“She could be under ten feet of rocks by now. Come on, Francis, let us join the others. I wanna kill some Descended.”

A long pause.

“I’ll stay here and keep looking. The two of you can go ahead.”

Eager whoops rang out as feet scrambled across the rocks. One of them passed over me, pushing a sharp edge further into my eye and sending warm liquid oozing down my cheek. I could barely feel the pain as my heartbeat grew weaker and the world drifted further away.

All I could think about was Luther—where he was, if he was hurt.