Endure - Sara B. Larson Page 0,80
fire, the window shattered, and Akio leaped into the room.
The Summoner’s head swiveled toward Akio, and a malicious grin lit his face. He turned his palm toward Akio, sending the stream of flames at my only ally.
“Akio!” I screamed, but he threw himself to the floor, rolling quickly toward the bed. The Summoner had forgotten about the fire behind him when he attacked Akio, and when I glanced at him, he’d stepped backward toward the flames. His robes caught fire, and he spun around in shock.
Akio took the moment of distraction to leap up from the ground and in the blink of an eye slashed a curved sword at my bindings, narrowly missing my head, but freeing my hands. My arms dropped to either side of my face, pain shooting through my body as blood rushed back down to my fingers.
The moment my arms were free, Akio sprang past me toward The Summoner, knocking him to the ground.
Ignoring the agony in my arms and hands, I forced myself to sit up and frantically pulled at the ropes on my ankles with my numb fingers as Akio and The Summoner rolled across the floor, both of their robes burning now. Akio had lost his sword. It lay next to the bed, reflecting the hungry flames that were now moving toward me. I heard a howl of pain but didn’t let myself pause to look and see what was happening. Instead, I leaned over the bed, grabbed the sword, and, sitting back up, slashed my feet free.
I snatched up the device The Summoner had used to bleed me in my left hand and clutched the sword in my right as I jumped up from the bed, leaping over the growing fire to see The Summoner lying on his back, gripping Akio by the throat. Akio’s body was convulsing. I ran toward them, but just before I would have swiped the sword across The Summoner’s throat, he threw Akio toward me, sending us both tumbling to the ground, too close to the flames that were spreading around the room. The sword fell out of my tingling, still half-numb hand, leaving me with only the metal tube to defend myself as I scrambled back to my feet.
Akio lay unmoving on the ground, but The Summoner stood at the end of the now-burning bed, his palm stretched toward me.
“You must bleed first,” he said, his voice burning my ears like the flames that filled the room with unbearable heat and a thick, cloying smoke. “Then you will die.” He lifted his hand, but before he could do anything to me, Akio suddenly moved toward him, wrapping his arms around The Summoner’s legs and knocking him to the ground again.
I didn’t have time to wonder if he’d been pretending to be unconscious or how he’d been able to recover so quickly. It was my only chance to kill The Summoner and escape.
I rushed toward them just as The Summoner rolled away from Akio and lifted his hand. I screamed Akio’s name as I lifted the device above my head and leaped toward The Summoner. The jet of fire burst from his hand to hit Akio in the same moment that he turned and saw me throwing myself toward him, slicing the sharp metal through the air toward his throat. He threw out his other hand, and it felt as though I’d been slammed by one of Deron’s hardest hits, straight to the chest, throwing me back onto the ground again.
“Kill him!” I heard Akio’s agonized scream as I rolled to my knees and forced myself to my feet only to have The Summoner grab me from behind and bring the sword up to my throat. I stiffened.
“Now you shall bleed,” he said as he pushed me toward the fire that consumed half of the room, the smoke chugging into the air, choking me. As soon as I breathed it in, I realized his voice had changed, and it was Damian who said, “And then you will die.”
Panic seized me, but I forced it down. It’s his blood, I realized. The smoke from the flames that had burned up his blood was causing me to hallucinate, like the cloud Manu had created. The demons must have given their blood extra power. It’s not Damian, I told myself. It’s not Damian.
He held me so tightly, expecting me to fight back, that he wasn’t prepared for when I let my body slump forward, my entire weight suddenly pulling on