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A fair enough way to pay a shred of penance before I died.
Is this what thePharalaki had been following me around for?
Was it a sign that I would die soon?
Just as I moved to race forward, Nakoa’s hand gripped my arm.
“Mareina, there’s no way… You’ll die with him if you go in there.”
The words were laughable. Little did he know that not only did I wish for death daily but that he would be sparing his own if I did.
“Either you join me, or you get out of my way.”
Ripping my arm out of his hold, I approached the house,willinga barrier around me.
I push-kicked the fiery door open. Outside winds rushed in, whispering its mal-intent. The flames bade its command, roaring higher.
As ifAkashherself had laid the path, somehow, the stairs weremostlyintact. I rushed forward, Nakoa right behind me. The second-floor landing was almost entirely devoured. A heavy wood beam split and collapsed in the center that I used as a lily pad to leap to the second set of stairs. Nakoa, right behind me, was barely visible through the smoke surrounding his own barrier.
My booted foot plunged through a step just before the third-floor landing, causing part of it to cave in. Nakoa leapt forward, yanking me up with him onto a slightly more secure part of the landing.
We both tumbled forward into the hallway. It had yet to be touched by flames but was bound to collapse into the lower levels at any moment. I kicked open the first door to find the elderly man already unconscious on the floor, perhaps even dead, from the smoke.
I could have laughed. Was this Mors’ way of mocking me? Not even in dying would I be able to find some sort of redemption?
I rushed forward, curling his frail body into my arms and my barrier. Nakoa waited at the doorway, tension carving his face as I swiftly joined him, and we raced down the hallway to return to the stairs landing, which was now little more than fiery splinters.
Nakoa swore behind me. “This place is going to?—
An ominous crack rent the air as fractured webs split the walls. Nakoa’s arms lashed out as he leapt backwards, towing both me and the unconscious human against his chest just before the entire staircase gave way. A support beam from above us gave way, along with a portion of the roof, threatening to crush us beneath it. Before it could, Nakoa caught it above his head. The fire roared around us, and our barriers threatened to give way.
“The window. Quickly,” he growled, straining from beneath the weight of the beam and the parts of the roof it was attached to.
Guilt weighed like a fucking boulder in my gut as a fire, one that had nothing to do with the one threatening to devour us, tore through something in the center of my chest. I was supposed to kill this male. So why the hell did I feel so viscerally averse to the idea of leaving him here to die?
“Mareina!”
I forced myself to move down the hallway and back into the bedroom, hesitating briefly at the sight of Nakoa bearing the weight of a fucking roof.
Gods damn it.
I tore the sheets off the bed, tying them together, and then around the male’s chest and shoved the windows open. I looked down to see his wife and their wards, surely too young to be their own children, looking up at us with hopeful, wide, watery eyes. I propped his body precariously on the edge of the window and began lowering him to the ground. I knew the sheet likely wouldn’t reach the entire way to the ground, but that was just too damn bad. The male would survive a few falling a few feet.
Nakoa, however, probably wouldn’t survive being crushed by a house and consumed by a fire… And Zuriehaddemanded I bring her his body.
The elderly male’s body hit the ground with a discomforting thud, and I rushed back to Nakoa, now bent on one knee and rushed to his side, kneeling beside him to alleviate some of the weight. His dark eyes widened with shock.
“Do you have a death wish,lohane thili?”He ground out.
“More than you know.”
As ifAkash,or perhapsMors,had heard my prayers, the floor caved in, and Nakoa and I plummeted through the second floor and landed in the center of what may have once been a kitchen. Flames consumed us, our disintegrating barriers.
Nakoa and I wheezed, scrambling to our feet. Our eyes locked with a door only a handful of feet away. We hobbled toward it on mending bones. He threw the weight of his body against it, and it gave way instantly.
My broken ankle decided to give away at that precise moment, and I went tumbling to the ground beside him.
“Reckless… Reckless, female,”he rasped between coughs.
