Without waiting another second, I launched from the elevator floor and through the second pair of doors on the ground level. My knees buckled, but at least I managed to land on my side in the subsequent fall. Painful, but far less so than a face splat.
I immediately caused the flames to develop around me again as I picked myself up and hurtled down this new corridor. I had to find an exit now. As quickly as I could. But not a main exit, which would be too well guarded. What I needed, ironically, was a fire exit.
As I ran, I shot flames up toward the ceiling, specifically toward the CCTV cameras. Footsteps pounded on the levels above me, as well as noises coming from a staircase about fifteen feet behind me. Another fire alarm went off, and I found myself once again caught in an indoor shower.
I hurtled to the end of the corridor and took a left turn. Stretched out before me was another long corridor, but at the end, I spotted the most welcome sight in hours. A single glass door. I sprinted to it and gripped the handle. It was locked. And this glass was clearly thick. Without anything near me that I could use to smash it, I had no hope of getting out this way any time soon.
I spotted a sign for another set of toilets. I lumbered toward the ladies’ room and stumbled inside just as footsteps began to stampede down the corridor behind me.
Thankfully the bathrooms were empty at this time… and there were windows, frosted ones, in most of the stalls. I hurried into one of the stalls and locked myself inside. Standing on the toilet seat, I realized how narrow the window was. Worryingly narrow. I wasn’t exactly chubby, but I feared that even my narrow frame might not fit through. I had no choice but to try. Moving the handle downward, I pushed open the window with my head. It was an epic struggle to climb up to the narrow window frame and slide my legs through without my hands—all while keeping my fire going—but desperation had a way of making a person do the impossible. I thrust my legs through the gap. My thighs compressed by either side of the frame, I managed to force them through—no doubt causing bruising in the process—followed by the rest of my body.
I’d been in such a panic to get out, I had barely even glanced at, or given thought, to where I would land. But my fall was as soft as I could have hoped for. I landed on the roof of a wide plastic trash container, the force of my body denting it. I quickly rolled off and leapt to the ground. I felt slightly dizzy. My eyes darted about. I was in a small compound, filled with trash containers. Although it was daytime, the sky was still gray and gloomy. At least the rain had stopped.
I ducked down behind the containers, running from one to another, staying hidden behind them until I reached a set of open gates at the end of the enclosure. Hurrying through them, I emerged in a large parking lot, bordered by a solid, high electric fence, topped with barbed wire.
I looked left and right, bewildered as to which way I should run next. I’d escaped from the building, but how did I escape this compound? The last thing I needed was to hang around here long enough for them to gather…
As a piercing screech filled the air, my worst fear was realized.
I gazed up toward the roof of the building I’d just exited and spotted three mutants taking flight. Riding atop of them were three hunters, one of whom had a head of sandy blond hair. Atticus.
That the chairman would come out himself was more of a shock than seeing the mutants themselves. It betrayed on an even deeper level how disturbed he was by the discovery of Georgina’s files—enough to make him distrust his army of trained hunters to chase me down, thus stepping down from his high throne to do the dirty work himself.
I leapt beneath a black truck as they began to rain bullets in my direction. Only, I realized as they bounced off the ground that they were not actually bullets. They were darts. Darts drugged with some kind of powerful sedative, no doubt.
This at least confirmed my conclusion that they did not wish to kill me. Yet. Not before Atticus had completed his interrogation.
I crawled from one vehicle’s underbelly to the next, trying to get closer to the outskirts of the parking lot. Then, with a dull thud and a nasty scraping of talons against concrete, the mutants landed.
Oh, no. This is not cool. This is really not cool.
The mutants closing in around me, I backed up as far as I dared to the humming fence.
I looked wildly around the compound, hoping to spot some kind of gap in the fence. I spotted the gates—the main exit—but they were all the way on the other side of the lot. I estimated about half a mile away. I would struggle even to run ten feet now that the mutants were so close to me, let alone make it all that way.
The flames billowing from my palms were the only barrier left now between the mutants and me. A barrier that the monsters weren’t afraid to test. Without warning, one of them thrust its hawk-like head forward, right through my wall of flames. Its beak stopped about five inches away from my nose before withdrawing from the heat. I practically swallowed my tongue.
As I sensed the mutant was about to encroach again, likely more boldly this time—perhaps even gripping me with its talons—an idea sparked in my brain. A crazy and suicidal idea. But an idea nonetheless. Right now, even a downright insane idea seemed better than just standing here helpless and letting myself be plucked up.
“Wait!” I yelled out, before doing the unthinkable. I relinquished my fire to a tiny spark in my right palm.
Atticus and his two companions, still seated atop the mutants, had their guns at the ready. Now that I was so close, I wondered why they didn’t just shoot the sedatives at me, stun me once and for all. But I suspected that I knew the answer to that; they couldn’t interrogate me if I was unconscious. They wanted answers, and they wanted them now. They would do all they could to reclaim me while I was conscious. I had to do all I could to work that to my advantage.
Atticus tilted his head to one side. “Wait for what?” he asked coolly.
Balling my right hand into a fist, I let out an exaggeratedly long, deep breath—something that wasn’t exactly hard to do considering that I felt exhausted. I looked directly at Atticus. “Okay! You can wire me up to your damn lie detector and I will answer your questions! J-Just…” I adopted a petrified expression and moved my eyes from one mutant to the other. “Just… keep those things away from me.”
Atticus frowned, then exchanged glances with his two companions. I half expected him to instruct them to slide to the ground, grab me and bundle me onto one of their mutants… but they were smarter than that. None of them dismounted the mutants. Instead, Atticus instructed the hunter to his right to move forward with his mutant. The next thing I knew, the creature’s talons had closed around my midriff and I was being lifted into the air.
I had a matter of seconds to pull off what could likely end up being suicide, but I knew that I was doomed anyway. Either I died attempting to escape, or I died a victim in the IBSI’s clutches. I knew which route I would prefer any day, and I knew which my father would’ve taken.
As the mutants ascended above the top of the solid fence, I didn’t even spare a moment’s attention to gaze out at what was on the other side. I immediately focused all my concentration on welling up a powerful, sudden burst of fire, directly beneath the mutant’s underbelly. The unexpected surge caused the creature to screech and jerk forward—straddling the boundary of the fence.
Its talons loosened due to the nasty surprise I had given it, and it wasn’t difficult to loosen them even further by shooting up another billow of flames. I worked so fast that neither of the three hunters could react before I freed myself from the mutant’s grasp completely… and began falling.
I fell backward, narrowly missing the barbed wire, and down toward a moat of murky, black water.
Grace
I’d thought that it was a moat on first glance, but as the black water engulfed me, a strong current pulled me downward and along. I’d fallen into a river that ran past the IBSI’s base. A river whose bed I was certain would become my deathbed.
I kicked and s
truggled to reach the surface, even as the river continued swallowing me deeper. I had the power to manipulate water, but not water of this volume and strength. I was only half-fae, after all. I opened my eyes in an attempt to gauge how much distance had already been created between myself and the surface. I clamped them shut after an instant. An agonizing stinging erupted in my eyeballs. Stinging that water should never cause.
There was something wrong with this river. Something seriously wrong.
I couldn’t even bring myself to fear the mutants and hunters anymore. The river was pulling me down and along at such a pace, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d already lost track of me by now. I didn’t think they’d planted any tracking device on me while I’d been there… I hadn’t noticed and couldn’t think of when they could have done it. I’d been conscious the whole time.
The strain of holding my breath was starting to take its toll on my lungs. How much longer did I have before they collapsed? How much time had passed already?
My feet banged against rocks as they scraped across what I could only assume was the riverbed. My cheeks, bloated like a puffer fish, felt close to bursting. I was horrifyingly tempted to open my mouth and draw in water. My brain was beginning to pound.
It would be a lot easier to just give in to my fate by now. But the fighter within me was still alive, in spite of my rapidly dimming mental faculties.
There’s got to be something I can cling on to. The edge of the river. The bank. I need to push myself toward the bank.
I propelled myself with all the strength that remained in my legs toward where I figured the bank must be. Slowly but steadily, I inched myself away from the center of the rapids. I guessed that I must be drawing near the edge about now—the river hadn’t looked all that wide during the few seconds I’d had to glimpse it in my fall. I was just preparing myself to flip around and begin using my hands to feel for some crag, perhaps even a protruding tree root, that I could gain a grip on… when my head banged against something hard.
Too hard.
Although I was so sure that I’d managed to reach within inches of the bank, my body wouldn’t allow me to continue. A heavy fog descended on my brain, and all went black… blacker than the water surrounding me.
Derek
After returning to the small uninhabited islet that held the portal to the ogres’ realm, all of us gathered as many weapons as we could carry. Then, leaving Kyle with Nightshade, we piled in through the gate and returned to the ogres’ beach.
Here, our dragons shifted and we climbed atop their backs. The witches cast an invisibility spell over all of us and then we launched into the air. As we rose above the towering walls that encircled the ogres’ kingdom, I gazed over it, glimpsing their mountainous residences. And then my eyes moved beyond, to the mountain range in the distance, where we had previously spotted IBSI’s base glinting in the sunlight. The buildings did not glint this time, for the sky was overcast today. They were not difficult to find again, however. The dragons gathered speed.
“Weren’t there vehicles outside last time?” Sofia asked, her voice loud in my ear as she sat behind me, gripping my waist.
I paused, furrowing my brows. The empty parking lot caught my attention for the first time. “I’m sure that there were,” I muttered.
“Perhaps they’re out,” Xavier suggested, riding with my sister on the dragon next to us.
“Out where?” I wondered.
“There must be some inside,” Rose said. “They wouldn’t all just abandon base at once, surely…”
“I wouldn’t think so,” I said. Though, that being said, by now they must have received communication about what we had done to their people in The Woodlands. Perhaps, just perhaps they had already abandoned their base here as a precaution. If that really was the case then our visit to this realm would be far shorter than we had intended.
We reached the base and hovered directly over it.
“Ben and I will go down and see what’s up,” Lucas said, gliding off the dragon he’d been riding, along with Ben. I nodded and watched as my brother and son left our protective covering. They drifted down to the ground, where they disappeared into one of the buildings.
We waited tensely for their return, even as we continued to ponder whether the hunters truly would have simply left.
About twenty minutes later, Lucas and Ben returned.
“Nobody was around at all,” Lucas said, looking surprised.
“Not a single person?” Sofia asked, disbelieving.
“Not that we could find,” Ben replied. “We even checked the toilets.”
“Hm,” I muttered. “Curious. Curious, indeed.”
“We ought to check with the ogres themselves,” Vivienne suggested. “They should know better than us what’s been going on around here.”
“I agree,” I said, nodding to my twin. “Dragons,” I spoke up. “Most of you I believe are familiar with this realm and its inhabitants.” Familiar, to say the least. This realm was the dragons’ favorite stopover for food. I doubted that there was a single dragon within The Hearthlands who hadn’t visited this place at some point to grab a snack. “How do you suggest we approach them?” I was going to suggest perhaps Lucas and Ben, or one of our witches, swooping down to search for somebody to interrogate when Jeriad replied as though he’d read my thoughts.
“They don’t respond well to witches or subtle beings, in my experience.”
“I can vouch for that,” Mona said darkly, reminding me that she had spent a span of time in this realm, too, when she’d been on the run from Rhys.
“On the other hand,” Jeriad went on, “us dragons have a way of getting through to them fairly quickly…”
I rolled my eyes, hoping that this wasn’t some kind of covert excuse for a snack. “All right, Jeriad,” I conceded. “You know I trust your judgment.” Even when it does become clouded by your appetite.
There were murmurs of agreement from other dragons, and then they all took a dive, soaring us down amidst the mountains, toward the ominous-looking palace that I believed was the home of the ogre royal family.
Of course, we were making the assumption that they still lived here and that they hadn’t already been wiped out by the hunters. But would the IBSI really want to wipe out the ogres? I doubted it. There would be nothing left here to control if they did. Just a piece of land. As had obviously been their primary objective in The Woodlands, they were here to manipulate and lord over rather than eradicate.
I couldn’t help but steal a glance at my daughter as we came within a few feet of the ground. She’d had some rather nasty experiences in this realm after being kidnapped by Anselm Raskid, the ogre prince at the time. Perhaps he was the king now. Rose was brave to be willing to come here again after that trauma.
Still invisible, we touched down in a clearing before a pair of thick oaken doors whose surface was lined with metal spikes. Not exactly the type of door that you could knock on, though I was certain that the dragons had no intention of knocking.
With a mighty swish of his tail, Jeriad whacked the door. The spikes had no effect whatsoever on his armored hide. But the doors were damaged after a single strike, enough for him to push them open with ease. Through them was some kind of dark hallway that was certainly too small for a dragon to walk down unless they shifted into their humanoid forms.
But again, I was certain that the dragons had no intention of doing that.
Jeriad let out a mighty roar, and the other dragons followed suit, until the noise they were generating actually became painful to my sensitive ears.
“Come out, ogres!” Jeriad bellowed. “Lest you desire for us to come in!”
We waited with bated breath. But there came no response.
“We wish to speak with only one of you,” Jeriad roared again. “And then we shall leave you alone!”
Lucas rolled his eyes and sauntered to the entrance. “You seriously think that is going to lure one out?” he muttered. “If anyth
ing, it’s going to make them hell-bent on staying inside and hiding. Which they should do, if even a speck of brain matter lurks within their bulbous heads…” He cast a glance at me. “I’m going to have a look around.”
Without waiting for my response, or even for Ben or Kailyn’s offer to accompany him, he disappeared through the dark entrance.
“I hope your brother knows what he’s doing,” Jeriad said, eyeing me.
I scowled. “I can assure you that he doesn’t.”
Lucas
I was by no means an expert on ogres—I hardly knew anything about them except for what I had gleaned from Bella and Brett, the lumbering, yet good-natured couple living with us back in The Shade. But I had enough common sense to suspect that the dragons’ approach was rather moronic, to say the least. Common sense that seemed to have escaped my dear baby brother in that moment… Yes, Derek would always be my younger brother, even if he had spent some years as a human while Ben and River were kids to catch up with my age physically. (I had spent more years alive than him—in one form or another—and there was no argument that he could come up with to change this fact.)
The tunnel was long and dark as it wound round and around in dizzyingly sharp turns. This was the first time I had ever set foot inside the ogres’ residential area, let alone the royal palace. I guessed that I had to reach the other end of the tunnel soon, but for now, I didn’t bother assuming my subtle form. I would see and hear if any of the big oafs came blundering my way along this narrow tunnel.