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The instant Bastion and Reynard crossed into the property, flames leapt up around its perimeter, trapping them inside and us outside. Fuck. They were at least ten feet high. The heat told me they weren’t an illusion.
Oddly, I felt no fear of the flames – we had a whole bunch of fire elementals on our side, and I was pretty sure this was a temporary setback, but Amber balked at them. I didn’t have time to worry about her.
I turned to Maxwell, but he and the others were already on it. The fire elementals held out their hands and summoned the fire. Once it landed on the palms of their hands, they extinguished it effortlessly. Unfortunately, once one flame was gone, another leapt up in its place. The heat was phenomenal.
‘It’s hell fire!’ one of the elementals called. Sure enough, the smell of sulphur permeated the air, acrid and thick.
I swore under my breath. This wasn’t a little campfire for the elementals to put out but a raging inferno, and every moment we were on the wrong side of it the children were at greater risk.
‘It’s too big to extinguish the whole thing. Create a corridor!’ Greg ordered the nearest elemental. ‘Hold it open whilst we run through.’
‘I’ll do it.’ Maxwell stepped forward, hands outstretched. ‘We’ll have to time it right – I can’t hold it open for very long. It’s too much.’
‘Come on!’ I ordered my team and we moved toward the edge of the flames. I looked back and saw the wolves hesitating and whining a few feet away.
‘NOW!’ I shouted.
NOW,Esme roared.
Battling their every instinct, the wolves leapt towards the flames. Maxwell widened his hands and the flames parted like the Dead Sea when Moses tackled it. In a moment, the corridor was created. Maxwell’s nostrils flared and his whole body was rigid with effort. ‘Hurry!’ he hollered.
We plunged forward with the other elementals by our sides. We’d just reached the other side when, at the last moment, a look of determination settled on Amber’s features. She had decided to join us.
She moved into the corridor. Behind her Maxwell, dripping with sweat, had started to lower his hands. Seeing her, he blistered our ears with swear words that I knew Reynard would approve of as he fought to re-capture the flames.
It was a losing battle. The tunnel behind Amber started to waver and collapse behind her, and fire roared toward her in a tsunami of flame. She glanced back and paused. ‘RUN!’ I screamed.
My call jolted her into action and she ran as fast as she could. I held my breath and prayed that she wouldn’t trip as she pounded though the inferno. I exhaled sharply as she made it through, just as the passageway collapsed behind her.
‘You’ve got a death wish,’ I blurted.
‘You need me,’ she explained. ‘I can’t counteract the runes from that far away.’
‘You could have pointed that outbeforewe all went through. Why didn’t you come through when we did?’
Her cheeks reddened. ‘I was … distracted,’ she admitted.
‘By what? The towering flames?’
‘Something like that.’ She straightened and brushed imaginary embers from her jacket. ‘Enough chitchat. We need to move.’
She wasn’t wrong. The ring of fire had been an effective alarm, and the occupants of the house must have been aware of our arrival. We might as well have taken a loudspeaker and shouted our intentions across The Green. But there was no time for recriminations; we needed to move.
Inside the ring of fire, the house looked eerily quiet and calm and I felt a stab of worry about Bastion and Reynard. This hadn’t quite gone as planned, and there was no sign of their planned diversion. If even Bastion could be captured or silenced, we were in big trouble.
Bastion had said that we’d know when he created a diversion, and that was the only signal we would get. With the flames announcing our presence, we had no option but to move forward, diversion or none.
Greg gestured for the teams to split into two. Maxwell and Liam’s group headed for the back exit as we approached the front. We moved silently, though that may well have been a case of locking the barn door once the horse had bolted.
As we crept up the steps to the front door, a blast rocked through the property. I swore loudly – it seemed that Bastion was still loose. The kids had better be all right or heads would roll.
‘That’s our signal,’ I called, somewhat unnecessarily. ‘Let’s go.’
Roscoe and his elementals flanked the remaining wolves, and we entered the property in the weirdest Noah’s Ark procession. Most of the team had been told to focus on eliminating the threat from the griffin and the ogre. Bastion had been confident that he could neutralise Charlize, leaving the majority of us to battle the one ogre. Ogres were tough, no doubt, but she would be no match for the sheer number of us coming after her. At least that was the plan.
We burst through the black front door and I peeled off left to the living room with Greg and Roscoe by my side. The others continued through the house to secure it and met up with the team that had entered through the rear of the property. There were no shouts, no signs we’d met resistance.
The door to the room that supposedly held the children was locked from the outside, and that made me even more furious. It was completely wrong to treat anyone like that, let alone children.
