now. Just another handful of seconds, and she’ll have broken through Morax’s hold.
I watch her progress like someone watching the Kentucky Derby and the horse they put all their money on as it races neck and neck with another. I’m silently urging her to close the distance and wrap her hand around the weapon, but the fact that she’s even gotten this close is incredible. It renews my hope that we’ll both be able to block Morax’s power and figure out a way to take him out.
All at once, Medley lets out a breath, and the next thing I know, she’s snapping her fingers around the wood and pulling her scythe toward her. My heart leaps.
“You did it!” I squeal with excitement and then immediately drop my volume, listening for signs that anyone is coming to check on my overzealous declaration.
Thankfully, I don’t hear footsteps making their way to us, so I turn my focus back to Medley and the beaming smile on her face.
“I did it,” she confirms, pride spilling out of her eyes and mixing with the relief I see in there too. “I can feel that it’ll get easier to do the more I do it, too. It’s like a muscle that needs to be exercised, but I just tackled the hardest part.”
I push my arms through the bars that separate us and pull Medley in for a hug. Hope and determination wash through me, and I hear Toreon congratulate Medley from the other side of me.
“We’re gonna get out,” she tells him in answer to his praise, and he chuckles and sits back, the chains around him clinking as he repositions himself so he can lean on the wall.
He’s gone back to not saying too much, but he doesn’t argue or go too Debbie Downer on us anymore, and I feel his eyes on me constantly. Something between us has changed and grown, and my insides flutter every time I see him looking in my direction. Which is a lot, because he’s taken a keen interest in what Medley and I have been working on for almost a week.
Tension is high in this little dungeon we occupy. Morax has never been gone for this long before, and we all know he can come bursting back through the doors any minute. Medley and I have been putting extreme pressure on ourselves to master what we can before that happens. I’ve been so anxious and nervous about figuring things out, but Medley breaking through Morax’s command to not touch her scythe is exactly the boon we needed.
“Okay, so even if you can’t resist his initial command, now you know you can break it after the fact,” I tell Medley as we pull away from each other, and she sets her scythe back down in the exact spot it was in.
“Right,” she agrees. “I can see what you were sayin’ about shuttin’ off certain parts of yourself too, and I think I’ll have that figured out quicker than green grass through a goose,” she says, and I laugh at the Medley-ism.
“We can do this. We might have to bide our time a little to make Morax think he has a complete hold over us, but then we’ll make him pay,” I whisper to her, still worried that somehow Morax can hear us scheming, that somehow he’ll know what we’ve been up to this whole time that he’s been gone.
Part of me hopes that someone already got to him. That this abnormally long absence is because he’s been caught and dealt with, but I doubt things would be that easy. I don’t have that kind of luck.
“We can’t let him know, no matter what. If he crosses the line with one of us, that person will deal with it, but we want him to think it’s a fluke. We need to make him as comfortable and confident in his hold as we can. Just like you said, we need him to let his guard down.” She agrees and I nod, my stomach churning at the thought of what crossing the line with one of us could entail.
“We need a code or something for I got this or I need your help.”
Medley’s gray eyes drop in thought as we both think through what kind of signal we could give each other.
“Maybe twitch our wings twice if we got this?”
I think about that for a moment. “But what if we’re on our wings and can’t move them?”