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They won’t take her from me, no one is taking her from me.
Almost there, Kat, I cry out, hoping she’s still alive. From the quick glances up above, her feet are dangling, seemingly lifeless in the spider’s bloody grasp.
Finally, I reach the bottom of the spider, a disgusting hole where the silk web comes out, and I reach out for Kat’s foot to let her know it’s me. She jerks it from my grasp involuntarily and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Until the spider throws back one of its legs, spearing me through my shoulder with a burst of blinding pain, pinning me against the wall.
The air leaves my lungs, the agony immense, and I’m trapped.
Who goes there? the spider without a head says in an inhuman voice. Who disturbs Goruun?
Jesus. This thing is Goruun?
But the thought starts to fade as pain begins to overtake me, blood running from the hole in my shoulder and dripping down, down into the cathedral below with sickening splats.
Hold on, Crane, Brom’s voice comes from somewhere and I’m starting to feel delirious. Where is he?
Save Kat, I plead with him tiredly. Forget about me.
Like I ever could, he says.
Suddenly there’s a thump from the roof above, and I look up to see fragments of it falling on top of us, and then the edge of an ax breaks through. Another swing and then Brom’s face appears above us.
“Remember me?” Brom says to the demon.
Then he crawls through the hole and lands on one of the wooden rafters, brandishing the ax and coming toward Goruun. Because the spider can’t see him, it flails around trying to face its attacker, and for a moment Kat comes closer to me.
She meets my eyes, looking dazed but alright otherwise.
Kat, I tell her. On the count of three we’ll light him up. He’ll let go of you before you catch fire.
She nods.
You hear that too, pretty boy? I say to Brom.
Loud and clear, sir, he says, and I can’t help but smile.
One, I count down.
Two.
Three.
With all the strength I have, I coax the fiery energy through me and set the bottom of the spider on fire, flames catching, and Kat moves around enough in its grasp to do the same to where the missing head should be.
Goruun screeches, letting go of Kat enough for her to wriggle out of his grasp, though at the same time it’s yanking its spider leg out from my wound, leaving both of us about to fall to our death. At the last minute I reach for the rafter, wrapping my good arm around it, and grabbing Kat before she falls.
I groan, pulling her up to me so she can hold on, the pain in my shoulder making me feel faint, and we watch as Goruun starts coming after Brom along the wooden rafter, its body on fire. Brom takes his ax, and as he balances on the beam, moving backward, starts slicing into the spider with merciless hacks of the blade.
The spider cries out, falling in bloody chunks onto the altar and the dead bodies below, but now the fire that was burning him is burning along the rafter, the flames coming toward us.
“Shit,” I swear and look up above at the hole Brom made in the roof. “That’s our only shot.”
I carefully lift Kat up to her feet on the beam, and I go to the hole, pulling myself out and onto the roof, then reaching back down and grabbing Kat and pulling her up alongside me.
“Brom!” I yell toward the hole. “Get out of there!”
But Brom doesn’t answer.
“Brom!” I scream again, Kat screaming along with me, and I lie flat on the roof, looking over the side into the burning cathedral. Brom is standing on the rafter as the flames creep toward him, cornered.
Damn you, pretty boy! I yell inside my head. Run through the fire and get out of there, now!
But Brom just shakes his head.
Holds my eyes for an agonizing moment.
Just as the rafter crumbles beneath him.
He falls through the flames, disappearing to the cathedral below.
“Brom!” I scream so loud that my eyes feel like they’re bleeding.
Kat is crying and sobbing beside me. “No, no, please no!”
And in the distance I hear people yelling.
“Professor Crane, Professor Crane!”
In a daze I get up and look over the edge of the roof to see the students gathered below, dawn begining to rise from the east.
“The building is going to collapse!” Paul yells up at me. “You need to get down from there!”
“Brom is inside the building!” I yell back. “You must save him!”
“We can do both!” yells Josephine and she runs inside the cathedral with a few other students.
“Jump off the roof, Professor Crane!” Paul yells up at us. “I have you. I have this. You taught me well!”
I don’t know what the hell I taught Paul at this point, and I can’t seem to move, I can’t seem to meet my fate, but Kat grabs my hand, gives me a small smile, despite the tears running down her face, and says, “You at least have to trust your own students. You’re the one who taught them.”
