Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,25

crew crows about turbulence, and I manage to scramble off my knees and toward the prince. “Lucien! What are you doing?”

He won’t turn to face me, but his hands on the railing are already pitch-black up to the wrists. The wind whips his hair back and forth, erratic. I know that wind. The wind before teleportation.

“Don’t!” I shout over the howling. “Lucien, it’s too far away; you’ll hurt yourself again—”

“Again?” Malachite catches my arm as the ship gives another heave.

“He’s—” I gesture wildly at the prince’s back. “His right eye, it’s gone! Using magic beyond your physical limit is— He’s going to teleport down there—”

Malachite snarls a beneather swear and launches himself forward, grabbing the railing and Lucien’s shoulder all at once.

“Luc, look at me—”

And he does. He tilts his dark-haired head over to his bodyguard, his friend, and the hawk-eyes I know so well are eclipsed, no whites to be seen. Black and only black, deep and endless.

“There’s no time.” Lucien’s voice comes out even, still as water. “We go.”

“Mal!” I reach for his hand, grabbing Fione’s and pulling her toward Lucien. Fione’s moment of confusion, Malachite’s tense brow of realization, and then the feeling of being pulled inexorably somewhere, in one arrow-direction by the guts, the sounds of the howling wind and the uneasy crew and the creaking airship evaporating into total silence. Blue sky, white sky, and then black. Nothing but black.

With the faintest pop, color flicks on again—crimson flames licking old wood buildings. Sound crashes down on my ears all at once: screaming, crying, hysterical shouting, and the crackly eating noises of fire. A village. We all stagger forward into a village on fire, Lucien clutching his left hand to his chest and panting.

“Luc!” Malachite turns to him. “What’s wrong?”

“Help…them.” He points with his right hand at the village. “Go.”

“Lucien—” Fione starts forward.

“Go!” His roar is louder than the fire for a moment and his eyes, now normal again, flicker over to me, wordless and pleading.

go, the hunger echoes him faintly. But he’s put no magic behind it. It’s not a command. It’s a wish. A desperate request.

“C’mon!” I snag Malachite by the chainmail. “We’re pros at this by now, right? You check the buildings still standing, Sir Fireproof. Fione—let’s gather the survivors and get them to a safe place.”

Lucien’s eyes soften in gratitude. Malachite tries to argue for one second, sees the look between the prince and me, and makes the decision to dash into the blazing walls of fire. I take off downwind, and Fione trots after me, keeping up surprisingly easily considering she just spent the last couple halves retching.

“Not a fan of the sky, huh?” I shout back, passing her my handkerchief to cover her nose and mouth.

“Certain parts of me aren’t keen on the sky, apparently. The polymaths say every day we should try to learn something new about ourselves.”

Her dry joke gets me, but only for as long as it takes for me to see a little crowd of huddled children by the remains of the town well, smeared with ash and fear. I gather them up with promises of their parents, and Fione offers a few of the more dazed-looking ones water from her skin.

“What happened?” Fione asks a child gently. They gulp water greedily, and lower the skin only to point wordlessly at the ground.

There, in the perfect ashen detail of the dirt, is a massive scratch mark. Four lacerations deep and long in the earth, punctuated by a titanic paw impression, white fur and scales scattered about.

Valkerax.

It might still be around. Lucien—I can’t be worried about Lucien. Not now. He teleported us from an airship who knows how many miles in the air to the ground. To a village somewhere in Cavanos. All four of us. By himself. It took three witches to teleport just me from Nightsinger’s house to the Bone Road. And after Varia teleported herself and me to the Tollmont-Kilstead mountains, she was so exhausted I had to carry her the rest of the way to the Bone Tree.

He’s hurt himself. He had to, to do this.

I shake my head, gold hair sticking to sweat. I can’t think about that now. He wants me here, doing this. Not worrying about him. But I can’t help it. If he keeps going like this—if he keeps trying to help people with his magic without regard for himself, he’ll…

The children follow behind Fione and me like exhausted ducklings, too scared to even cry or complain. The only