through the stone walls and traveled upward in an uneven pattern.
“What the hell is going on?” Taeral asked, his voice trembling.
Eva frowned and touched her chest. She stilled for a moment, then checked the lining of her suit and the contents of her backpack. She looked at me, one degree paler than usual. “I don’t have the Devil’s Weed on me anymore.”
“What?!” Amelia snapped and checked herself, as well. “Oh, crap, me neither.”
It soon dawned on us that all the Devil’s Weed we’d gathered had vanished somewhere between the pink water cave on Mortis and my family’s palace. How or why that had happened, we couldn’t tell… but it left us horribly vulnerable.
“The Hermessi are pummeling the palace,” Dad said, as sentry guards rushed into the room, ready to take the emperor and empress, my parents, to a safe place. “They know you’re here.”
Taeral cursed under his breath. “We need to go. Now.”
One of the ceiling lights came down, thirty yards to our left. It crashed onto the stone floor, drawing gasps and murmurs from the two dozen sentry guards that were nervously waiting for my parents to go with them.
We linked hands, but nothing happened. It prompted another string of R-rated words from Taeral. “They’re stopping me, somehow. I can’t teleport us!”
The horror unfolded before our very eyes, as solid chunks of the ceiling fell all around us. Pebbles and dust flew outward as Lumi cast out a protective shield that held us in one place, safe from the incoming rubble. The palace was close to collapsing, and I could hear the horrified screams of people outside the throne room, the rushed footsteps as they desperately tried to get away from the building before it came down. I feared some didn’t make it, as some of the voices were cut off too abruptly.
Riza stomped her foot. “Something’s different. We can’t leave!”
As soon as she said that, a curtain of fire spread across the throne room walls, consuming the paintings and the ornaments and the curtains hung by the windows. The wooden frames crackled, blackening as the flames obliterated them. In an instant, the throne room had turned into a furnace, the heat blazing inward and almost suffocating all of us. The guards formed a protective circle around us, but there wasn’t much else they could do. They cast barriers against the flames, but it didn’t do anything.
The only defense we had was Lumi’s magic, now reinforced by Acantha and Nethissis.
“They did this before, on Hellym. But they had a Reaper’s help back then,” Amelia murmured, her chest rising sharply with every tired breath. The fire was consuming all the oxygen in the throne room, making it harder for us to even breathe. “How can this be?”
“Their power,” Taeral said. “It’s gotten stronger.”
Fallon scowled at the burning walls. “There’s more than one Fire Hermessi in here. I can feel them.”
“That’s it!” Amelia gasped. “They’ve got power in numbers, this time. The greater their influence on the affected fae, the stronger they get.”
I didn’t like this one bit. It left everything to the whims of change. If, until now, we’d relied on one tool or ability to escape, it no longer mattered. The Hermessi’s power was evolving and adapting, proving increasingly difficult to resist or evade. Whatever we threw at them, they eventually found a way around it.
We were pretty much screwed, bombarded from all sides by multiple Hermessi. We couldn’t teleport or even head back to the pink water cave to get more Devil’s Weed. We couldn’t leave the throne room, for that matter, as fire had taken it over completely. I didn’t see a way out of this.
Fallon collapsed. I wanted to get to him, but Eva held me back. “Wait,” she whispered. “Look.”
His skin had a peculiar green sheen, which amplified with every grueling moment. A Hermessi had possessed him, and I couldn’t help but scoff.
“Pretty much the last thing we needed right now,” I mumbled.
We’d promised Fallon we’d protect him, yet here we were, again, helplessly watching as another Hermessi wormed its way into his body, smack in the middle of this fiery mess. And all I could think of was that this might be the unexpected end of us, and that I may not ever get to hold Eva or my parents or my sister in my arms ever again.
Eva
There was a sense of dread settling over us. I could see it on our faces. I could hear it in our ragged breaths and frantic heartbeats.