Page 101 of A Serpent in the Garden

My body wasn’t mine any longer; the flames bowed before me as if I were their liege lord, shuddering away from the frost in my blood as I made to run.

What are you doing? I shrieked inside the cell in my mind that Remy had just vacated.

He’s going to get you killed.

I can’t get back home without him! You can’t blink me anywhere in here—

I can make you run—

He broke off as the smoke cleared, revealing a thick, clotted crowd of humans advancing slowly, dreamlike, their eyes blind and blank and staring. They shuffled through pools of molten celestial blood that stained their hems, but the bodies of the angels in children’s skin had somehow disappeared.

Remy tightened my fist on the blade he’d stolen from Finn. I felt the burn as the steel went cold as ice. He would have to hack his way through them, so tightly packed were the bodies; men and women and children, lurid flashes from every which way as the light beamed off the golden sunbursts on their breasts—

My throat went oily, and I had never sounded so demonic as I ordered them aside.

They only moved closer, a pale curtain of horror, immune to lulling. White everywhere. I would drown in it or else have to murder a few of them to make what I knew would be a doomed bid for escape.

Sudden heat and an eerie whistle of wind at my back, as if a flaming blade was slicing through the air, terrifyingly close—

And then something seized me from behind, the earth beneath my feet vanishing.

Gravity quailed. My stomach flailed. My vision swam, a red and orange haze. When it cleared and my feet slammed into the ground, flames had taken shape all around me again. We were back inside Finn’s flames and his hands were clamped on my shoulders. He glared down at me, embers misting about his sweaty face. “She stays with me,” he shouted. “You’re going to get her killed or yourself damned.” His arm was about my rib cage again and he spun me around to Luceric’s writhing body.

“Don’t worry about the seraphim,” Finn called out to Valic beside him over the roar of the flames and all the keening. “Just kill him, do it now before more come, I don’t know how much longer I can hold them off.”

A dark shape overtook Luceric, knocking him back. Valic’s arm was a lethal blur. The seraphim looked like living torches as their faces took sharper shape behind Finn’s fraying flames. The air was full of smoke and shrieks and ash, and one might have assumed I’d have something better to think about than my bloodrose, but I saw its petals in my mind’s eye for the first time in days as the sword points grew close enough to burn me with their kiss.

Stop it, Des, I’m not going to let you die.

And I didn’t want to see that naked stem before I breathed my last, so I looked at the sky instead, hoping to discover some shred of brilliant blue. I found little but a roof of flame and low dark clouds that caught the color of the fire, red and orange and gold swirling amongst the black. The heavens were spangled with embers.

It was beautiful, in its way. A very eerie beauty. I had the sudden impression of being somehow past it all, like I was on a raft floating out into an endless sea. I was already gone, in all practical sense; I ought to bow my head to fate. If I were smart, I would, though some small part of me resisted, arguing that death would always find me in the end, but that didn’t mean I had to curtsy and scrape to it.

I tightened my hand around the blade, the only weapon I had with which to protect myself, just as the seething mass of seraphim sliced through Finn’s flames. Ducking to avoid being speared like a fish, I tried to drag Finn down with me, but he didn’t budge.

In the past week, I had lived more than I ever had back in Monde’s End. I could at least take that with me, wherever my eternity led me.

I covered my face with my hand, smearing my eyes with stinging sweat and soot, trying, rather unsuccessfully, to accept the possibility of my death, even as I drew back the blade—

And then I felt light-headed, self-immolated with burning ice, half-dragged back into Remy’s cell and more afraid than I’d ever been in my life. When a burst of fresh air made my head cease swimming, I peered through the gaps of my fingers and felt something snatch my elbow.

Silence, smoke billowing toward the bright midday sky. Shards of glass sparkled in Finn’s dark hair and he was smiling like he’d never been so proud, yanking me to my feet. “See?”

Glass glittering in the grass, shiny epileptic flashes from every angle. Finn’s flames reduced to half-mast around us, though a few upright seraphim had taken advantage of the receding fire. They looked weakened, woozy. Bits of glass peppered the grotesquely curved contortions of their snakelike bodies, buried deep in their arms, their legs, their chests. The moment before Finn blasted a gout of fire at one with glass in its eye, I realized the ruined iris had turned a curious shade of blue.

It wasn’t glass but ice, and it was everywhere, shattered about Valic as he dragged a blade across Luceric’s throat, foot-long shards of it spearing fallen seraphim into the earth. I stared, dumbstruck, as if so much heat had cooked my faculties. Sweat rolled down my face.

White mounds all around us in a circle behind the fallen seraphim, as if the humans had been knocked over by a massive wind. Hands clawed the air. Some were lifting themselves onto their elbows; some were whipping their heads around in uncomprehending horror, as if wondering how they’d gotten there.

“It’s not just ice.” Finn had my face in his hands, forcing me to look at him. “That was the least of it. You blew them back. You knocked down my fire. Didn’t I tell you for years you ought to be training with your mother?”

The humans were screaming now, tripping over their hems, elbows pumping, running out of their sandals to flee.

I looked away from Finn. How could Luceric even stir with all the wounds he’d taken? His robes glowed with his own blood. His throat was in ruins, the handle of a knife humming in his chest, but still he mustered a few feeble twitches, surrounded in smoking ash from the remnants of his wings. Flames gleamed on the slices of ice strewn across his almost-corpse. His wrists were slender blackened twigs of bone where the fiery chains had been.

They had to put him beyond all hope of repair, Remy said flatly. It involves some overkill.

“There might be a second wave incoming.” Finn’s hand fumbled for mine. “We’ve got to go.”