AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Not again.
The ember in her shoulder burned hot, but she couldn’t lift her hand to smother it, to shake it off.
Drowning. Drowning in the haze of smoke and sparks and heat filling her nostrils, filling her lungs.
She lost all sense of time. Of place. She collapsed to her backside, her body drawing into itself, her legs folding against her chest, her arms wrapping across her shins, her eyes closing tight.
Shutting down. Away. Away to the darkness. She couldn’t go through this again.
“Hell no, Torrie. No.” Roe slapped her face, grabbing her cheeks between his thumb and fingers and shaking her head. “I said no. You stay right here with me.”
The fury, the brutal order in his bellow shook through her head. His voice a far-off sound, but echoing through the darkness that had swallowed her mind.
He slapped her face again. Hard, soft, she couldn’t tell. “Get back here to me this instant, Tor.” Screaming. Screaming in her ear. Still far away.
But maybe. Maybe if she opened her eyes.
Her eyelids cracked open.
Roe was in front of her, his mouth moving crooked, angry—angry words that she couldn’t hear. A litany of them, tumbling from his askew mouth.
He shifted, heaving himself up onto the knee of his one leg that was still intact.
Why was he moving? The flames were coming. There were too many. He should be holding her. Holding her when they came.
Instead, his hands wrapped around her shoulders and he shook her, her whole body rocking under the power of it. “I can’t do this, Tor. I can’t. Not without you.” His words were screamed, she could see the cords along his neck straining, but he still sounded so far away. “I can’t get up. I need your help—you have to get up, Tor. Dammit, just get up, Tor. I need your bloody help. I need your legs.”
Help.
Help.
Help.
Roe needed her help.
In that instant, the world around her came crashing in, the explosions below, the cracking of wood, the snapping of beams. All of it rushed into her head, her hearing back. Her eyes opened. All of her senses firing.
Roe needed her help.
Her eyes wide, her hands grabbed his forearms.
“We need to get out of here, Tor.” He yelled over the inferno around them, his words staccatoed with coughs.
The thick haze of smoke was in front of him now. Between them.
That would not do.
“You can’t stand?” She found a way to make her tongue move and pulled herself closer to him.
“No. I need you as a crutch. There are windows on the back wall, but they have panes so we’ll need to crash through them.”
“Crash through them? We’ll die hitting the ground.”
“That is the sea side. We get through the glass, and we have a chance of landing in the water.” He grabbed her face between his hands. “We’ll get through it.”
She nodded and scrambled to her feet and grabbed his arms, helping him to stand on his still solid right leg, then steadied his balance.
She looked around, the smoke and the angry orange-red flames filling the air around her. “Where is it?”
