Source Fire: A Young Adult Fantasy (Arcturus Academy Book 5) Page 22

  With no premeditation about how I should deal with the mage of god-like proportions streaking across the soggy field, my fire, which had been crouched and snarling like an angry canine, ignited with so much heat that my eardrums popped and my eyes felt like twin blast-furnaces. My form swept with fire and I let its fury and power propel me. I didn’t care where.

  The box vanished in an instant, reduced to ash. I didn’t bother preserving it, the way Tomio had done. I’d become a meteor, leaving showers of sparks and blackened foliage in my wake, making the puddles I skimmed hiss and steam. I felt uncatchable, unstoppable, like a raging locomotive.

  Until I was struck from behind with alchemy. If I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t brace for it, and if I couldn’t prepare, it raked over my nerve endings like razor-sharp claws. My fire now recognized and absorbed alchemical-fire, though not without mistakes. Redheat and boron-laced flames singed and burned. I changed directions, trying to stay far enough ahead to come up with a plan, and looking around so I wasn’t taken off guard.

  Tomio. Was he alive?

  Thoughts of him kept me from abandoning the area. I strained for a glimpse of him, but my vision had become evanescent. A glance over my shoulder revealed Nero as a mere outline of black filled with swirls of color and gashes of light, barely recognizable as human in shape. He spread both arms out as he flew after me, as though floating on a wave of fire, spewing up sparks behind him like a rooster’s tail. A looming nightmare, he halted abruptly and fell away.

  I stopped. My fire cooled and dwindled. My heart and lungs labored inside my volcanized insides. Trickles of heat washed through my body as I scanned the fields, assuming Nero had let off his pursuit because he realized I did not have an orb in my possession. Between searching glances for Nero, I scanned the area where Tomio had fallen. But he no longer lay where I’d last seen him.

  A lance of pain shot through my lower back, like some monster with wide jaws and jagged teeth had clamped into me. I cried out and twisted to see what devilry this was, coming down to one knee and straining to see my wound.

  The skin across the back of my waist and my right hip appeared to be made of coal and ash, not black, in the manner of the shells, but a deep plum color, threaded through with seams the bloody hue of a freshly sliced beet. It felt like I’d been splashed with chemicals—which spread as I watched—eating into my spine and pelvis with an acid agony that drew pained whimpers from my throat.

  “Where are the orbs?” hissed a bodiless voice, chains scraping over gravel.

  I beheld the world through prisms of welling tears. Every nerve channeled lightning and my pulse was jagged. I wondered if I might pass out. The ground came up to meet me and I landed on my elbows, feeling no pain other than that spreading across my back, more caustic than lye, moving like a living thing trying to claw its way through me. I curled forward in on myself, writhing in an effort to get away from the pain.

  “Here, you cock-eyed, finger-pricked loser!” A taunting voice yelled from somewhere beyond my blurry sight.

  I kept myself balanced on my elbows and knees, because I was scared that if my back touched even a blade of grass I would break apart and drift away on the wind. This was how I would die. The poison—now above my waist too—felt like scalpels carving through muscle and tendon as it journeyed up toward my shoulder blades and down toward the backs of my legs. It would break apart my entire being, render me to dust.

  Struggling up to my hands, I lifted my head to look around. As though seen through warped glass, I recognized Ryan’s form. He stood at some distance in the knee-length grass. He hefted an orb, tossing it up and down like it was a tennis ball he intended to serve. His other hand was hidden behind his back. Even in my brain-numbing pain, I knew what he held hidden. I felt the edges of a smile flicker at the corners of my mouth, even as my cheeks were wet from my watering eyes.

  Come on, Ryan. If he could get close enough, be fast enough, he could use the dagger.

  And then I saw something truly remarkable, something that made me forget for an instant that my body was being eaten away. It played out in glorious slow-motion.

  Nero’s form ignited and shot forward, heading straight for Ryan, who cocked back an arm and threw the orb as hard as he could—really hurled it. The orb arched through the sky, flickering with reflected moonlight.

  Either unable to stop his momentum or intent on killing Ryan for his insolence, Nero did not change course. The two of them became blurs of firelight. Twisting and writhing and spitting like a nest of brightly colored, pissed-off snakes.

  A beautiful illumination of an entirely different brand emerged from the earth like a fountain. Hair flying, skin glowing, her form moving like liquid mercury, Georjayna emerged from the ground, arms outstretched. Wrapping lit fingers neatly around the orb, she arced in a graceful breach, like a dolphin, and disappeared underground again, along with the artifact.

  In the next moment I felt hands clutch at my shoulder. A panicked curse word hissed past my ear. Tomio had his hands on me now, inspecting my back.

  I tried to look over my shoulder and focus on his face, filled as I was with relief and pride and wonder. “You’re alive! Did you see her? Georjie?”

  “What did he do to you?” His voice was pained and full of cold rage.

  I tried to explain that some blend of chemicals—so artfully concocted that I could not determine the ingredients or ratios—was eating its way through me, an inch at a time, but the words came out slurred and jumbled. My neck was aching from trying to see what was happening.

  Somewhere beyond us, a fire-fight of obscene proportions was taking place. Rainbow flashes of light reflecting everywhere, like maniacal, super-charged fireworks. Against the backdrop of these beautiful bursts, the head and neck of my beautiful fae friend appeared. She was soothing to my vision, like a cool cloth against a fevered forehead.

  Hardly conscious now, I felt them lower me to my side so I lay along the ground. I heard Georjie exchange words with Tomio and felt her magic seep into me, spreading cool, questing relief where it touched. It soaked into my side from the ground, up through my thighs and into the back of my legs. It curled over my waist, and around my back and shoulders like a hug. It swept up my pelvis, into my spine and across my back. Where it met Nero’s alchemy, it slowed, prowling forward like a cautious cat, nosing its way up to a mystery. Then it touched, and pulled back a few times, as if unsure how to proceed. It felt just like the way a feline bumps their nose against food before deciding whether or not to eat it. This seemed wonderful and deeply charming to me for some reason.

  “It’s like a cat,” I said. I sounded like a frog. A sick one. And that made me laugh, which hurt my entire torso, which then made me moan.

  Tomio said something about it affecting my mind, and I heard Georjie say something about searching the area for what she needed.

  An altogether different sensation followed the first. Blazing the same trail through my body, came an entirely different compound. Where the first was soothing and slick, like aloe juice over a sunburn, the second moved through me like it was made of cactus. A prickling sensation, not entirely unpleasant, but not pleasant either, clawed its way to the site of injury, where a battle of ineffable proportions raged. It rendered me utterly speechless and senseless for what seemed like time immemorial. I drifted in and out of awareness on a current of sensation that was both agonizing and reconstructive, but always intense. There was no escaping it.

  I wondered where Targa was, briefly, before my mind was fully distracted by physical sensation. As fibers were knit back together and chemical compounds resisted neutralization, I lay there, as impotent and helpless as an infant. I thought it would never end.

  But it did end.

  When I came to my senses, Georjie was nowhere to be seen. Tomio held me like I was a baby, peering intently into my face for signs of wakefulness. I couldn’t remember being rolled onto my back, but now I could see the sky.

  “You’re going to be alri
ght,” he said. “It’s nearly all gone.”

  My back tingled but no longer pained me; I flexed my spine and felt my joints respond and lubricate. I felt stiff and tender, but the feeling of crawling acid was gone.

  The light show was still going on as Tomio helped me to my feet, so I couldn’t have been out of it for long. I became aware that I was almost naked. Only ruined fireproof underwear clung to my body in ragged, frayed scraps. Someone had draped a blanket over me, so I clutched it.

  “Where’s Targa?” Surely, I’d asked this a thousand times already. Or had I only thought it? I struggled to separate what was real from the twilight of pain.

  “I don’t know. She’s got the other orb.” Tomio wrapped an arm protectively around me. His eyes were on Ryan and Nero, continuing to blast fire—Ryan with intent to kill, Nero easily defending himself. Ryan had yet to get the blade in contact with Nero, the mage was simply too fast. One could hardly make out human outlines within all that blazing light.

  I imagined I could hear Tomio’s thoughts. He was torn between leaving my side and leaping into the fray.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked, turning an ear to the sea.

  Tomio cocked his head.

  It was a familiar sound, though at first I couldn’t place where I’d heard it. It was the sound of a great volume of water moving very fast in this direction. Yet we still had yet to lay our eyes on our siren.

  Tomio stiffened, then pointed. “There.”

  She was a small pale figure in the distance, in a gap between us and the ocean, standing on a gentle swell of ground. She appeared to be in meditation, with her head down and her hands held open, palms forward, at her sides. Her back was to the ocean, and the ocean was coming to her. The sound of menacing, rushing water grew until even Nero and Ryan heard it and stopped to listen, panting and staring, crouched to spring.

  A tidal wave, that’s why the sound was familiar. Targa had once prevented a tidal wave from destroying Saltford, now she was making one.

  By the time the water she’d drawn was visible, it was so loud it shook the earth beneath our feet. And it was not just a tidal wave, it was a battering ram. It rose up behind Targa, like the head of a mythical sea creature emerging from a primordial sea. It shot up and up into the sky, frothing and boiling and roaring like a dragon. It arced high and seemed almost to pause and tip its nose down to look at us mere ants.

  Eyes stretched wide, I looked to Ryan and Nero, heads craned back to see what was coming, faces aghast. I screamed for Ryan to get out of the way. In the same instant I noticed something that turned my blood cold: the ghost-steel blade had somehow made the switch from Ryan’s possession to Nero’s.

  Targa’s hands were high now, like a conductor’s, then she dropped them like someone starting a race. The creature she’d conjured from seawater, dove straight for the two magi, icicles of huge proportions visible at its furious leading edge, gnashing and snarling.

  My fire burst to life and I streaked straight for Ryan, screaming from a throat filled with enough heat to melt iron. Nero’s form flickered from solid to blackfire. The knife seemed to hover of its own accord, then streaked to make a white laceration across a backdrop of fantastic color, like a slash in the universe.

  I struck Ryan as his body ignited. We tumbled like tar-soaked flaming projectiles shot from a medieval catapult. The world behind us exploded with an impact of ice and water that blasted us further afield like half-drowned rodents. Our flames extinguished with a loud hiss, we tumbled and rolled, limbs flailing to grip at something—anything—stable. We came to a sodden, bruised stop in a dip filled with brambles and long, fibrous grasses. I rolled onto my back, sucking in air and looking up at the peaceful night sky. All went quiet for several long breaths as we recovered ourselves.

  Ryan coughed and gave a groan, but it sounded amused. “She’s more of a blunt instrument than I was expecting, that friend of yours.” He followed that with more coughs.

  I found my feet and rose unsteadily, clawing wet hair from my face and looking for Ryan. We’d slid to a stop in a pool of shadows.

  He moaned somewhere off to my left.

  “I’m not sure why she hasn’t called him off with her siren voice.” I swung around looking for him in the disorienting darkness, moving toward the sound of his voice.

  “She tried,” he said, giving another groan of pain. “As long as he’s blackfire, her voice has no effect. The bugger must have figured out what she is, clever bastard. He’s never once fully taken his flesh form. That’s why she dumped the ocean on him. She’s trying to put him out. But how did he figure out what she is so quickly? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  His words were a wet glove slapped across my face. No one knew about the conversation Nero and I had had, what he’d wrung from my mind.

  Ryan’s groan, more pained this time, brought me back. I found him, a sodden lump with hot, bare skin. I felt his back and shoulder. My eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness. “Are you okay?”

  I was desperate to get back. Had Targa’s trick managed to hurt Nero, or quench his blackfire? We couldn’t see them from our dip in the earth, and no sounds were coming to my ears.

  “I think I’m finished, Cagney,” Ryan said, with a gurgle in his voice that hadn’t been there a second ago. “The steel… the ghost—”

  Shaking water off my hand, I lit and lifted a hand-torch, holding it up so I could look him over. It wasn’t difficult to find his wound. All that remained of his clothing was a pair of fireproof boxer shorts, which was more than what I had left to cover myself. Had there been time, sunlight, and less distractions, I would have felt embarrassed. The gash along Ryan’s ribs was bleeding profusely. His blood was stark against his pale skin and staining the grass around us. It looked black in the firelight.

  I made a snap decision not to pick Ryan up and carry him. Not only would it have hurt immensely, I couldn’t bear to see more blood gush from the wound, which looked deep and angry. I helped Ryan place his hand against his side in a way that minimized the bleeding, since he couldn’t see the wound very well for himself, and told him to try cauterizing it while I went to get Georjie.

  “Already tried that,” he said through gritted teeth. “It won’t cauterize. It’s the steel. It feels like someone shoved a shard of ice into my ribs.”

  I ran then. Using fire to speed me along, but finding the ground slippery and treacherous, I crested the shallow hill. Chunks of ice lay in the grass. It looked like there’d been a collision of glaciers. Movement pulled my gaze toward the sea.

  Targa’s small pale figure sprinted toward the cliff edge, one fist clenched around what could only be an orb. The way her ghostly soles flashed white yanked me straight back to the dream I’d had weeks ago at the academy. She flew over the dark landscape, heading for the even darker sea, her stride as sure as a thoroughbred’s and as smooth as a jungle cat’s. Her hair flew out behind her, a magnificent mane of ink and starlight.

  But closing fast was a line of caustic fire, surging and writhing malevolently in shades of acid green and neon orange. Nero’s figure was not moving, he didn’t need to, his fire was doing the chasing for him. He stood facing the running siren, arms straight out and flickering with blackfire, like a flaming cross.

  It was apparent watching the siren run and the chemical fire closing the gap that she might not make it to the cliff edge before the flames overtook her, and I was too far away to do much of anything to help.

  A thin white shape in the grass caught my eye, a brighter white than the icicles melting in the grass.

  The blade.

  Thoughts of Ryan dissolved as distant as an echo now, I shot like a cannon ball loosed, blazing across the landscape. Scooping up the blade by its handle, I flipped it and caught it by the blade. Icy pain stabbed into the flesh of my fingers, and I clenched my teeth against it, knowing I couldn’t throw a blade by its handle. Firing along my arm and back, my fingers scorching, I threw the blade as hard as I could manage, wishi
ng but hardly daring to hope it would find its mark.

  In near disbelief, I watched as the blade struck Nero’s shadowy side, just underneath his left arm. His form briefly indented and his spine seemed to curve sideways in reflex. A gap opened in his blackfire where flesh was visible, like his fire magic had been chased back by the presence of the blade, leaving a vulnerable opening.

  There was a sound like a scream echoing through a canyon.

  Then the screech of metal being torn in two.

  A car alarm blared from the distant parking lot.

  Startled and confused, I looked toward the campground when I heard a tree branch snap, then another, and another. Something was charging through the bush. I whipped my focus back to Targa in time to see her leap.

  She jumped from the cliff edge, propelled by powerful siren legs, then hovered in the air for a moment, a delicate form against the backdrop of an endless black sky and blanket of stars. I sucked in a breath, unable to tear away, even as I heard nearer trees snapping and breaking to my right.

  She stopped falling, hung suspended and then flew in the other direction; straight up, and going fast.

  It appeared as though some giant had snagged her by the hand and yanked her several meters upward. Then she stopped dead, dangling by the hand clenched around the orb. She looked up. I was too far away to see her face, but could read in her body language that she was trying to figure out why the orb was hanging in mid-air, dangling her like a doll from a hook. Her legs swung as she tugged on the orb, her long hair flying in the wind. She craned her neck and bounced in an effort to dislodge the orb.

  Finally, she released the orb and fell, plummeting out of sight.

  Like it had been waiting for her to let go, the orb flew through the air parallel to the ground, toward Nero. But it didn’t just fly… it shot.

  I was close enough to Nero to make out his profile. He still had his arms out to the side, but his torso had a weird bent shape. He faced the oncoming projectile and put his arms out for it, as though to catch it. I could only watch as the orb—moving so fast now that it was almost impossible to see—came straight for him. He looked like he’d called it, but it was moving far too quickly now to stop in his hand.