Entwined, p.25
Entwined, page 25
Yeesh. “That’s pretty rough.”
But the prophecy given for Azar was, He who is last hatched among the deserters, the final remaining heir of the fire-king, shall redeem the blessed above and below, and shall cleanse them of their stain and drag them through the darkness and back into the light.
“If I’m being honest, his sounds pretty rough, too.”
He was supposed to save them. Hyperion’s voice is ragged, even in my head.
He sounds like he’s in real agony, but I don’t have time to think about consoling him. We’re diving now, right toward the cavern full of demons. “Has it occurred to you,” I shout, “that throwing me in the pit may be the very thing that dooms your people?”
We’re doomed already, he says. Without Azar to lead us, without Azar to guide the recovery of the heart, we’ll all slowly die. You’re our last remaining hope.
“I mean, that might be a little melodramatic. The whole world hasn’t been searched. There are plenty of places it could be.”
It’s here. I can sense it.
He can’t sense anything. He has no idea what the heart even is, but I don’t bother arguing with him. It’s like arguing with a brick wall.
If a brick wall wanted to kill me and had talons, fangs, and blew liquid napalm.
“We don’t even know whether the heart really is part of the barrier. Those horned people could have been lying.” Azar said this already, but I feel like it bears repeating.
Hyperion lands, the entire shelf of obsidian that forms the floor of the former cavern trembling from the force of his weight. I’ve considered that, but. . .He sets me down. If I’m wrong, all we’ve lost is one useless human.
“No!” Sammy’s not hanging over the lava, like Axel said he was. He is, however, in a cage, suspended from the remaining section of ceiling in the far corner. Coral and Jade are both in the same cage, their feet dangling through the bars. I have no idea where the dragons even got such a thing—unless the other humans helped them craft it.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Don’t worry.”
Why do humans feel compelled to say that when it’s clearly not true?
A strange sort of clanging sound draws my attention to Gordon and Rufus where they’re chained with massive metal collars, the chains bolted into the ground.
“Can’t they free themselves?” I tilt my head. “Earth dragons, right?”
They wouldn’t dare to defy me, Azar says. The chains are to remind them that I’ve ordered them to wait here, guarding the tiny humans until you’re brought to this place.
“What if I’d died?” I ask. “Would they have simply starved up there?”
Hyperion shrugs. You’re alive.
He’s right about that, I suppose.
We were feeding them, Rufus says. Prince Axel made sure of it.
Yes, the weak Prince of the Earth was willing to defy me to defend your tiny whelps, Hyperion says. That gave me hope that he thought you might be alive. Hyperion’s smile is terrifying. But now, it’s time for you to pay for their release.
“If I walk into the lava voluntarily, you’ll release them?”
Hardly, he says. If your sacrifice fails to free the heart, we’ll try them next. But if your death retrieves it, they’re free to go.
I unsheathe my swords and lunge for him then, unwilling to simply walk like a lamb to the slaughter, especially when he’s not even willing to release my siblings for it.
He’s unprepared for me to attack, apparently, because one of my blades strikes him right in his massive chest. . .and slides right in. A massive shiver runs through him, and then he bats me away with a paw the size of a semi-truck.
I’m not an untrained idiot, though. I know how to take a blow, even if it’s a million times stronger than the others I’ve endured. I duck and roll, losing the blade that’s now lodged in his chest, but I’m not significantly injured, at least. When I hit the far wall, I flip and stand, waving my remaining sword. “How’s it feel?” I ask. “Being the one getting stabbed for once?”
If I didn’t need you, I’d melt you into goo.
“But you do need me,” I say. “Did you really think I’d make it easy for you?”
His lip curls and he rushes toward me, but his left side, where the blade’s still lodged, moves slower. Markedly slower. It allows me to duck under a ledge and roll across to the other side. The horrible monster can’t roast me, not if he wants to serve me up as a snack to the bubbling lava.
I manage to evade him twice, rolling toward the ledge, in a calculated ploy. If he comes at me, hoping to bump me in, I could feint and shove him toward the lava instead. I’m not sure what it would do to a fire dragon, but I bet it’s not lovely being burned, even for them.
Only, he realizes what I’m doing and his brain cells finally engage. He has something that will push me the way he wants immediately. Something that doesn’t fight back.
He saunters backward.
My heart sinks, knowing I’m about to be forced to walk in the lava on my own after all.
He may not be willing to promise me he’ll spare my siblings, but the chance that they’ll be spared when my death frees the heart is better than watching him kill them in front of me.
How about I throw them in first? He’s smiling at me while he reaches for the cage. After all, I’m not out anything by doing that. If they don’t free the heart, they don’t free it.
No! Gordon yanks his chain out of the ground and slithers at mach speed toward Hyperion, sinking his teeth into the massive fire dragon’s leg. As if he’s stuck on the top of a steep precipice, Rufus looks stricken, the blood draining from his face, but he straightens.
Before Hyperion can incinerate Gordon, Rufus yanks his chain free and races toward Hyperion’s other side. He’s opening his mouth to strike when the fire dragon backhands him, sending Rufus careening toward the lava.
Axel bursts around the corner at the top of the path into the cavern, his sides heaving, and blocks Rufus’s body just before it slides over the edge. You’re angry with my blessed for defending my bonded? Your anger is misplaced. Release them and attack me.
I’m helping our people, Hyperion bellows. How are all of you too stupid to see it? If we can recover the heart at the loss of just one, irritating, unfaithful human, why would you fight me over that?
You laughed before, but it wasn’t a joke. Axel stands upright again. Since my hatching, I’ve hidden the truth—I have two affinities. I’ve been flame and earth blessed from the start, and only Euphrasia knew my secret. He pauses. Until I inadvertently bonded Liz. Why do you think an earth blessed was able to do the impossible?
Hyperion pauses. Then he blinks.
I kept the secret because I was afraid to expose the truth. The blessed don’t welcome weakness at any level, but to be a prince of flame who was also a prince of earth? Father would have put me down.
You were always weaker, Hyperion says. I defended you in spite of that.
So that you could be free from the curse of destroying our people, Axel says. Not for any other reason.
At first. Hyperion nods slowly. That was my reason at first, but in time, I became fond of you. You were weak, but you thought differently than the rest of us. Now I understand why. You were both strong and weak. You were bright and dark. You could fly the heights and burrow into the depths. You truly belonged to no place at all.
Axel doesn’t argue. He simply begs. Don’t do it.
It could be my eyes—they could be failing me. The waves of terrible heat from the lava at our backs washes over me constantly now, and I can hear them calling to me.
The demons have seen me, and they’re chanting.
Not hjartanu, not anymore. No, ever since seeing me, they’re chanting Gullveig again. For whatever distorted reason, they think I’m somehow connected to the Norse goddess who was burned thrice and rose again.
But whether I’m imagining things from distress, or whether I’m losing focus because of the tremendous heat, I could swear that I see a tear roll down Hyperion’s massive face. It drops and disappears into the dusty floor. Maybe it is my doom, to destroy our people. Hyperion’s voice is broken. But I can’t spare her, not even for you. Our people are dying, and she’s our only hope.
We have no idea whether that’s true, Axel says. We don’t know what we’re doing.
I went back to see Father after you died. Hyperion’s head bobs, and his body slumps. He told me that he had left the heart as part of a barrier. He told me—His head snaps up. I wish I could spare her. I wish I could hope for another way, but this is the only way.
His massive, powerful arms grab Gordon and unfurl him, and then he aims him at us and chucks him with all his strength.
Axel tries to duck, throwing one of his strong, golden limbs around me, but it’s no use. The force behind Hyperion’s throw is too great. Gordon plows into us, knocking me, Axel, and Rufus over the edge at the same time. My hands pinwheel, and my eyes meet Axel’s, just as we slam into the lava.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Liz
I think we all like to imagine that if we were placed in a situation where we were tortured, or forced to endure in miserable circumstances, we’d bear up under the strain. I recall a time when Sammy was quite small and he told me what he’d do if bad guys ever came for us.
He jutted out his bottom lip, and in his delayed, slurred speech, he told me how he’d punch and kick the bad guys to keep the rest of us safe. As an MMA fighter, I’ve always been the strong one. The fearless one—quite literally, in fact. I’ve fought past broken limbs. I’ve ignored a shattered nose. Twice.
I’m frankly lucky that I had good enough insurance for them to put me back together after the misery I’ve endured.
I thought that the dragon venom I survived months ago was the most exquisite pain I would ever experience, but this is different. This is pure flame and heat and it pulses through what feels like every atom of my body, dragging me down to an elemental level.
My nerves cry out in agony.
My lymphatic system shuts down.
My respiratory system screams in protest.
That’s when it gets worse, because somehow, the beasts have reached me. Great, horned creatures of muscle and sinew and fangs. I kick out at them, but they don’t slow, even when my heel knocks one in the jaw hard enough that I feel the crunch.
They snarl and snap, and when the first one’s mouth connects with my shoulder, clamping down, I realize that they mean to eat me. Panic breaks through the pain that’s been rendering me mostly inert, and I kick like a donkey, swinging with my arms, flailing with my legs.
But it’s useless.
There are dozens and dozens of them, converging on me in the boiling lava, and consuming the flesh that hasn’t yet burned. Finally, blessedly, my world, nothing but misery, and fire, and anguish, blinks into peaceful surrender.
And I wake up in a room of nothing but light. There aren’t beds or chairs or windows or doors. Everything’s white. Everything’s peace. Everything’s calm. I’m laying down, but not on anything I can see or feel. I sit up easily—nothing hurts, nothing even twinges, and I swing my legs over the edge of. . .well, of nothing at all.
I’m wearing a white caftan, and my arms and legs are mostly bare, but no part of me is so much as scraped, much less burned. I blink, and when I do, there’s a figure standing in the center of my view, starkly alone against the endless sea of white light, but walking slowly toward me.
I flinch at first, but as she draws nearer, I can see that she’s not at all what I expect. She’s absolutely lovely—tall, strong, bright, and stunning in her beauty. It’s as if someone set out to paint the strongest features humanity had ever known, but blended them effortlessly and in perfect balance.
She’s perfection in light.
Her bright golden hair streams around her shoulders, but as she shifts, I see darker colors, and even hints of the brightest red. Her hair is everything and nothing at all. It’s light in all of its shifting shades and glory. Her deep eyes are such a dark brown that they’re nearly black, but not in an absence-of-light-way. No, her eyes are the blue of the ocean depths, the verdant green of spring crops, the in-between hazel of a cat’s eyes, the rich grey of tempered steel, the deep loamy brown of the southern clay, the sparkling golden of champagne, and the startling richness of a raven’s wing, shifting as she moves.
When she speaks, it’s in the dragon’s tongue, which shouldn’t surprise me. I’m Freya, wife to Odin, heart of the barrier.
The heart’s a person? It feels right somehow, like I should have known that all along.
“I need you to come with me,” I say. “The dragons are all dying—or rather, they can’t have children. They’re slowly dying with no way to reproduce.”
This time, instead of speaking to my heart, she matches my vocal speech. “You’re the chosen sacrifice of your people, Elizabeth Chadwick, marked from birth to be granted entry to this place.”
I shake my head. “No. That can’t be right. I never have any idea what I’m doing, and most every choice I make turns out to be wrong.”
Her smile’s profoundly sorrowful. “No choice is right or wrong. Each decision we make carries a price and a consequence. But your choices will determine—”
“That can’t be!” I shake my head. “You don’t understand. I’m not representative of my people.” Tears begin to well up and then leak from my eyes. “I’m not the right person. I’m monstrous—even my own mother thinks so.”
“Your mother sees her darkest, strongest, most fearful traits in you. She’s afraid of her own reflection, not of you, child,” she says.
“Is Azar’s father, the dragon, really your husband?”
“I don’t know who Azar is.” Freya’s smile this time isn’t sad, it’s wistful. “But you’re focusing on things that don’t matter. It’s time for you to choose. Only our choices matter.” She waves her hand through the air, and the white room disappears. She disappears. Even I disappear in my white and light, and my soul’s slammed torturously into my body in another time, another possibility.
I’ve returned to the locker room to retrieve my water—my coach is in a rush for me to join him, where he’s waiting in the hallway. He’s angry I even came back in here, because we’re set to walk into the ring in the next few minutes. But I’m not the only one who’s not ready for this match. My opponent’s in here too.
Gisela Lopez is hunched over, her face in her hands. “I told you,” she whispers. “I’m going to win, Mom.”
The tinny sound of her phone’s speaker phone rings out loudly, easy to hear, even from where I’m standing across the room. “I begged you not to fight again. I told you it’s my last wish. Your sister needs you.”
“It’s not your last wish.” Gisela’s voice is iron. “I’m going to win the money tonight for the enrollment fee for the clinical trial. You’re not going to die yet. You can’t, Mom.”
I snatch my water bottle off the ledge and pivot, desperate to get away from what I just saw. She wants to use the fifty thousand dollars prize money to pay for her mother’s medical care? Ugh.
“What’s wrong?” When I reach him, Coach is frowning. “You look like someone squashed your kitten.”
I shake my head. “No, nothing like that.”
He drops a hand on each of my shoulders. “You’re here, Liz. This is what we’ve always wanted, what we’ve trained for you, and you can do this. You can destroy her. Remember what we practiced. Her kicks may be killer, but when you duck around them, she leaves herself open for the choke.”
We’ve gone over and over the tapes. He’s right.
I can do this.
When we walk out, the crowd goes insane. The media has been hyping this one as a scrappy underdog taking on the establishment. Gisela has been a fixture within the MMA for a while. She’s a solid fighter, but she has some gaps that result in her losing almost as much as she wins.
She’s flashy, with her insane round house, so the MMA keeps her around, but she’s always as likely to go down as she is to take down her opponent.
Today, she’s going down. When she walks out to mixed shouts, I realize that she knows it.
But she’s walking out anyway, her face desperate, because unlike me, she’s not fighting for position, prestige or glory. She’s fighting for her mom. Like me, there may not be much else she can do to make money. There may not be many options for her—I can’t help thinking about how powerless I would feel in her position, if I needed that money.
My coach is shouting. “Focus, Liz. You look for that opening, and you stay clear until you see it.”
I nod, and as she walks in, I put everything but the fight out of my mind. If I hadn’t walked in when I did, I would know nothing but the fight. I would only know what I’d prepared. I can’t save her mom. That’s her job.
But I do know.
If I lose this match, my MMA career may be over before it starts, but if she loses. . . I can’t even imagine losing my mother. It would wreck me. And her mom’s saying she has a sister to care for, too.
That makes me think of Jade, of Coral, and of Sammy.
What wouldn’t I do for them if Mom died?
I shake my head, and as she comes after me, I sink into the fight. Not thinking. Moving. Reacting. Closing the gap. Then I see it—my chance. She’s lining up to kick me, and it’s painfully obvious. She’s too slow. She’s old, at least, for this sport she is.
I can dodge her strike easily.
But I don’t. Her heel connects with my solar plexus and sends me sprawling on the mat. In that split second, everything slows. My coach’s face looks almost frozen in place, spit spewing at me as he shouts, his mouth twisted, his nostrils wide.
You must choose—the power to dominate, or the strength to endure.
The words that spread through my mind make no sense. Who’s speaking? Why did time slow down? What’s the power to dominate and the strength to endure?
