“Caim!” Corson yelled. “Get him out here. Both of you get out of here!”
“We can’t leave you here!” Caim shouted back.
“You have to go. If we don’t make it out of here, someone has to tell Kobal what happened. Someone has to keep fighting!”
Caim glanced around the room that had become a bloody, body-strewn battlefield. His expression softened when he looked at Raphael. With Raphael so severely wounded, there was nothing the golden angel could do here, and getting themselves killed wouldn’t help win this war.
“We will continue the fight,” Caim said.
Caim’s rainbow-flecked ebony eyes were troubled as he lifted Raphael and looked to us. “When you are free of here, we will meet you outside the forest. Return to the last place where we camped. Take care, my friends.”
Caim spread his wings and took to the air, but instead of flying toward the ceiling, he went straight for the door. Calamut branches speared the sky in an attempt to stop his exit, but he dodged them and the swinging arms of the nuckals before disappearing out the door.
I hoped he somehow, miraculously, made it through the rest of the forest. But then, I hoped the same thing for all of us. However, their chances were looking a lot better than ours right now.
Chapter Twelve
Wrath
The calamuts tookout more of the nuckals, but they destroyed just as many innocent bystanders as they did those freaks. I shoved Bale behind me when a nuckal took a swipe at her. It didn’t matter that she would try to chop off my head as soon as we were out of this place; in this battle, we were united.
Craetons and palitons brawled side by side as they tried to avoid death by nuckal and calamut. I wasn’t so lost in the fight that I couldn’t see this was the way it could be between us if we could put aside our pride and forgive past slights. However, far too many demons were too engrossed in their hatred to let it go. I was one of them.
I would use the palitons to escape this, and they would use me, but when it was over, we would be on opposite sides again.
I hacked and cut my way through more of the calamuts that kept coming as we edged toward the exit. Despite little more than half the patrons remaining alive, screams continued to reverberate through the room.
The fresh blood spraying the walls and floor made it slippery, and Corson’s Chosen went down. Bracing his legs apart, he grasped her arm and hauled her to her feet.
“This way!” Shax shouted.
He scrambled across a tabletop and toward the wall the calamuts had repeatedly broken through. Curling his hands around the bricks, he pulled away some of the jagged pieces. A calamut limb shot toward him, but Corson severed it before it impaled his friend.
Sheathing her sword, Bale leapt onto the table and scrambled across the top of it before dropping into the booth beside Shax. The two of them tossed aside the bricks they pulled from the wall.
When the hole was big enough to fit through, they turned back to the room. “Hurry!” Bale urged.
“Jolie, Dana, Darcy!” Corson’s Chosen shouted as she waved her arm. Three humans lifted their heads from where they cowered under a table. “This way!”
A girl with golden-brown hair scrambled out from underneath the table and raced toward them. She darted around a tree branch that slammed into the ground and threw herself forward to roll across the floor.
She bounced to her feet and zigzagged in and out of the dead, embedded calamuts, and nuckals. For a human, she was fast and agile, but I still expected something to kill her at any second.
Somehow, the woman managed to make it alive, and when she reached Corson’s Chosen, Corson took her hand and helped her onto the table. The human scrambled across the surface and threw herself out of the hole with little concern of what lay on the other side.
“Dana! Darcy!” Corson’s Chosen shouted again. “Come on!”
The other two humans, who remained under the table, shrank away from the stomping hooves of a nuckal. When his Chosen stepped toward them, Corson halted her.
“We have to go, Wren,” he said.
“We can’t leave them here,” she protested and tried to shake her arm free.
“Iwill get them.”
“I’m not letting you go alone.”
I almost killed them for being stupid enough to consider risking their lives over a couple of idiot humans who were too scared to save themselves. Then I recalled Bale, perched on the booth with her hand stretched toward Corson. I didn’t know if I would let her go alone either.
