Page 7 of Wings of Destruction

She digs in her heels, and the stool upturns. “I’m not going anywhere!”

“Please, Lanai—” I pull.

She pulls back.

“Don’t try your hand at manners now,” she interrupts. “Too little, too late. You’re not taking my house.”

I draw her up close and bend until our noses practically touch. She smells of caked on floral perfume water and the ripeness of fermented vegetables.

“There’s a war out there. Normally, if you wanted to stay here and be burned to a crisp by dragon fire, I’d let you.” I swallow, my throat lumped with stones. “But my mother told me to get you out and that’s what I’ll do.”

Lanai pauses. “I think I’d hear about a war, Morgan.”

My heart hammers in my ears like spikes. “Trust me. We’ve got to go. We have a lot more houses to get to. My mother’s orders were to take the elderly and the children to safety.”

I won’t fail.

I can’t fail, not when this is my duty, away from the fighting. Away from my family.

The acrid taste in my mouth is as potent as ever. I pry Lanai to her door, the old woman kicking and screaming with surprising sprightliness for someone approaching a hundred years old.

“Stop manhandling me! Mark my words, your mother will hear about your barbarous behavior, young lady.” Wrinkled fists beat ineffectively against my hand gripping her wrist. “You’re not getting off with a warning this time. You and your foul temper!”

I haul in a sharp breath and lift my gaze to the sky, blinking at the light after the gloom of the parlor. “Stop fighting me.”

Impending doom is a song in my blood. From this vantage point through the trees, I catch a glimpse of glittering scales before the snake disappears. Basilisks are fearsome creatures.

A unicorn thunders after the basilisk, and the two clash together.

The sight seems to give Lanai pause. Her fists freeze midair and her lips tremble out of their usual pursed position.

“Oh. My.” Lanai’s eyes widen.

Now isn’t the time to gloat even though I want to. I want to point out that my behavior might be barbarous but so is hers. Instead, I drop her wrist.

“Right. Now follow me.”

She’s the first I find, but she won’t be the last. A few doors down, a young mother and her babies have taken cover underneath one of the beds. The children are too small to have moved easily.

“Morgan Whyte, that you?” The young woman peers up at me.

I windmill my arm to get them to move. “Celeste, we’ve got to go. Now.”

She scrambles to her feet, the tips of her shoes catching in the material and forcing her into a stumble. The baby on her hip gives a single plaintive wail loud enough to alert the General’s troops to our location.

“Brian told me to stay hidden,” she says in a whoosh, reaching behind her for her toddler son. “He said to wait until the fighting was over before coming out.”

If that’s the case, then she did a terrible job of picking a hiding place. I press my lips together.

She stops only long enough to take her son on the opposite hip, balancing out their combined weights.

“It’s not safe here anymore,” I tell her. “The battle will creep from the field any time now.”

Celeste shuffles after me. It takes another five houses before Lanai stops complaining. The two of them stick close together as we search through the village for stragglers. It’s slow going with the crowd around us. In addition to them, we find several other young mothers and their children along with two sets of elderly parents.

Our small group grows. A girl of five years helps me usher those who can’t fight toward the hill in the distance. It’s the best place for us to go. Hopefully any hydra or ground troops will get lost in the trees.

They don’t know the forest like we do.