Firewalker (41 page)

“It's easy,” I say. “I just need for everyone to join hands and stand around me in a tight group.”

They take some encouraging, but all that is required of them is to huddle and they are lambs. They huddle naturally.

“Bare hands, everyone,” I say, stripping the makeshift mittens off the ones around me. Some don't have hands, and I amend my order. “I need you all to be touching one another's bare skin in some way. We need to create a circuit of people. Anyone who is left out of the circuit will be left behind.”

They understand and obey. I stand in the middle of them, smelling their rank bodies and their rotten breath. They are dead already, I remind myself. At least this way they will only suffer for a few seconds longer.

I've never drained this many, and I have no idea if the energy in their weakened state will be enough to fuel my worldjump, but desperation has a way of silencing doubt. The last person I touch is the boy. His eyes are round with disappointment and he tries to shake me off. I don't let him. If I am to eat this sin, I must clean the plate.

“Thank you,” I whisper, and then drain the very life from their bodies.

And I reach through the darkness between the worlds, back to my home. The home I must save in order to pay this grisly debt …

*   *   *

The sun rose, and Lily found that more than half of her braves had saddled their horses and were preparing to leave her.

“We joined her to fight the Woven, not stand there and stare at them while they circle us,” Dana snapped at Caleb while she cinched her saddle around her horse.

“You're a coward. You're afraid of the Hive,” he spat back at her.

“As you should be,” she countered unabashedly. “Even one sting from a Worker can kill—but they don't always kill you. No. Sometimes they just sting you so you can't move. That's when the Sisters come to carry you off, still alive.”

“That's just something grown-ups tell little children to frighten them,” Caleb scoffed.

“Is it? You know for sure?” Dana asked. “I've heard that they do. And we don't know what they do with the ones they take, because no one that's been taken by the Hive is ever heard from again.”

“Oh, come on! What's next, Dana, a ghost story?” Caleb's face twisted with disgust. “You know, maybe Lily's right. Maybe the Woven aren't as bad as I thought. At least they can count on one another to work as a team.”

Dana wheeled her horse to charge at Caleb, and Lily stepped in between, forcing Dana to pull her horse up short.

“Enough. Let them go, Caleb,” Lily said, looking over every one of the braves who were about to leave her. They couldn't meet her eyes. They hadn't sworn themselves to Lily, and she couldn't accuse them of oath breaking, but they all knew that's what it was.

“Stop them, Lily,” Caleb said in an urgent and low tone. “We can't make it with just a handful of us.”

“Listen, Caleb,” she said, placing a hand on his wide bicep to calm him. “What I'm trying to do can't be done if I'm surrounded by people who don't believe in me. Let them go.”

The rest of Dana's braves mounted up and started to ride off. None of them stopped, and only Dana looked back.

I'm sorry, Lily. I can't go any farther,
Dana said in mindspeak.

She was waiting for some kind of absolution. Lily didn't give it because she couldn't lie in mindspeak.

“Don't let the Workers sting you,” Dana shouted. “I hear that they don't always decide to kill, but when they do, I know for a fact that they only have to sting you once.” She looked directly at Caleb. “
That
I've seen for myself.”

Dana turned back around and focused on the road ahead of her.

Caleb heaved a breath. “This will leave only fifteen of us,” he said. “Fifteen to get all the way to your California.”

“One of those fifteen is Lily,” her Tristan said defiantly. He raised his voice. “You think you can make it back to the cities without a witch?” He raised his voice even louder so that those already riding away could hear. “You'll all be dead in a week without her!”

“Tristan,” Lily said, reaching out to take him by the arm. He shook her off and stormed away.

“That went well,” she muttered to herself, rolling her eyes.

“Give him some time,” Caleb said.

“What else can I do? He's pretty much the only one left who believes in me. Even you don't believe in what I'm trying to do,” Lily said.

She wasn't accusing Caleb, just stating a fact. Caleb had made it clear that he didn't agree with Lily about the Woven. As far as he was concerned, they were worse than animals and there was no way they'd ever be able to coexist with the Outlanders.

“I don't need to believe you in order to follow you,” Caleb replied.

Lily gave him a baffled look as she turned his words over in her head. “Nope, that actually makes no sense, Caleb.”

He laughed and looked down at his hands, thinking of a better way to put it. “You could have made those braves stay. You could have
forced
them by taking control of their minds and bodies, but you didn't even think of doing that, did you?”

“Of course not,” Lily whispered, remembering how it felt to be paralyzed and thrown in a cage—and remembering that there were still things she wasn't willing to do. “It's wrong.”

“The witch I had before I left the Citadel? She used to possess me for
fun
. Just to prove she had power over me,” Caleb said. “Alaric has power in those bombs, and he hid them from us so he could use them without putting it to a vote. You're the best leader I've ever had.” He paused before adding one more thing. “And you're nothing like Lillian.”

Some door that had been shut tight unlocked in Lily, and she leaned her forehead against Caleb's chest. “Why can't Rowan see that?” Lily replied, a sob escaping from her mid-sentence.

Caleb took it in stride. He let her lean into him, crying tears that seemed to scrape her raw as they came out. He said soothing things that didn't impart any wisdom or change what Lily felt, but that comforted her nonetheless. He talked about how much he missed Elias and Lily only cried harder. So many had been lost in this war, and she knew the dying wasn't done yet. When Lily finally heaved her last sigh, Caleb looked at her and frowned in thought.

“Not that I'm trying to bring up Rowan and get you crying again,” he began cautiously, “but something's always bothered me about how we left things with him.”

“Me too,” Lily said ironically as she dabbed at her leaky eyes.

“No, what I mean is
how
we got away with you.” Caleb picked up a stick and started drawing in the dirt around the fire. “So it was me, Tristan, and
your
Tristan who went to Rowan's tent to get your willstones back. Rowan's tent was in the middle of camp.” He drew an X in the middle of a circle. “We woke Rowan up trying to get your willstones from around his neck and he knocked my Tristan unconscious before he was even out of bed. I jumped in and we went at it. Then Rowan knocked me out.”

“Yeah. I remember seeing your face,” Lily said apologetically.

“We'll get to that in a second,” he replied. “I wake up ten minutes later next to my Tristan, who wakes up just after me. The thing is, we're
here
with horses tied up right next to us.” Caleb made another X on the outside of the circle of Alaric's camp. “Even if your Tristan had beaten Rowan in two or three punches, how the hell could he have carried us out here by himself in ten minutes? You were unconscious. You couldn't have fueled him, so he would have had to pick me up, carry me, then go back for the other Tristan and carry him.”

“Can someone do that in ten minutes?” Lily asked.

“Not alone,” Caleb said. “And another thing? Your Tristan didn't have a scratch on him.”

“Yeah, I figured he didn't fight at all,” Lily said, grimacing. “He obviously doesn't want to say what happened, so I didn't want to ask him in case it's embarrassing.”

Caleb frowned and leaned back. “Maybe you're right.” He swiped his foot across his crude drawing, erasing it. “Maybe it's best if we just let it go. He got you out. I guess it doesn't matter how.”

Caleb left Lily sitting next to the fire. She still felt shaky and strangely elated from crying.

“Hey, Lily? Sorry I blew up like that,” her Tristan said, coming up behind her. Lily turned to face him, still wiping her nose, and he saw her tear-streaked face. “What happened?” he asked, his expression darkening. “What did Caleb say to you?”

“Nothing upsetting. I had a good cry, not a bad one,” Lily said, giving him a teary smile. She took Tristan's hand and pulled herself up by it. “There were some things I needed to let go of.”

He kept her hand in his. “What? What did you let go of?” he asked hopefully.

“That I'm not like Lillian,” she said. “I may agree with her, but I'm not going to do things the way she did.”

“Good,” Tristan said quietly. He looked disappointed, and Lily knew why. He was hoping she'd let go of Rowan.

Lily stretched up on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. The smell of him was so familiar and comforting. His hands on the small of her back eased her closer until she could feel the solid shape of him on the other side of her clothes. For the first time in months she remembered what it was like to kiss him, and how once, long ago and a universe away, it had felt when he'd moved against her and said her name. Lily let her lips rest against his skin longer than a friend would, and then spun around and left him.

But Lily didn't get the chance to decide how she felt about him. Just days later, her tribe left Pack territory and encountered the Hive.

 

CHAPTER

15

Lily heard the Hive long before she saw them.

It started as an anxious static in the air. The remaining braves slowed their horses and shared puzzled looks. Although still faint, the vastness of the sound was almost like a waterfall in the distance—low, steady, and enormously powerful. Then the sound grew until the buzzing shook the little bones in Lily's head. The horses shied and stamped their feet as Lily and her braves craned their necks in all directions across the rippling grass of the plains, trying to find the source of the buzz. It seemed to come from everywhere.

“Look!” Caleb shouted, pointing at a smudge of pewter-colored fog on the horizon.

“That can't be,” Una mumbled. She tugged on her spooked horse's reins and squinted. The darkness grew, creeping across the blue dome of the wide sky in a line. No lightning touched down. No funnel cloud announced a tornado. The unnatural fog flew against the wind. “It
is
the Hive,” she breathed, awe and fear immobilizing her face.

Lily felt hands around her waist, snatching her off her horse. “Fire,” her Tristan said in her ear as he placed her numb body on the ground. “You need to build a fire.”

There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The gentle breeze sighed through the grass, turning it over and flashing the light side of the blades against the dark in teasing ripples. Its placid beauty taunted them. There wasn't a tree, a rock, or a river in sight. The open plain left them as exposed as if they were in a raft on a becalmed ocean.

“What do I burn? There's no wood,” Lily said, holding her hands out uselessly.

“Burn the grass,” Caleb ordered as he dismounted. “Light it all on fire if you have to.” He turned to the remaining braves and addressed them. “Everyone get off your horses and set them loose. They'll only slow you down in this fight, and they'll probably just die under you anyway.”

Juliet steadied Lily's hands while she struck at her flint. “Calm down.”

Lily looked up at her sister, and her voice came out wispy and weak. “I think I've killed us all.”

“We're not dead yet. Breakfast! Hurry and help,” she said, yanking up what hunks of yellowing grass the sea of green around them offered, and laying them in a pile in front of Lily. Breakfast unsheathed his dagger and started hacking his way through bundles of grass.

“Here,” Breakfast said, handing Juliet an extra knife. His face was grim and his mouth set in a line.

“We'll keep gathering as much fuel as we can, and you keep giving us strength, okay?” Juliet said. Her big brown eyes were level and bracing. Lily nodded, focusing her panic into purpose.

“Stay upwind of the fire. I don't have any way to contain it,” she said, and then turned her attention to the blaze already building at her feet.

Lily connected herself to the fourteen willstones awaiting her power. She drew in a breath, and the wind followed. The buzzing of the nearing Hive was drowned out by Lily's shrieking witch wind. Licks of fire caught in the underbrush and the blaze spread out astonishingly fast. She gathered the heat—taking it, changing it, and then feeding it into the unlocked willstones of her braves.

A column of witch wind threw her into the air with a clap of thunder. Lily felt the physical sensations of all her braves as they raced toward the Hive ahead of the wildfire, but brightest and clearest among them was her Tristan. She let her mind nudge against his and he welcomed her in, opening himself to her so she could share his body. She felt his muscle and skin wrap around her. His hands flexed, and Lily felt the grip of his knives in them. They both reveled in the Gift, sharing the thrill with each other as Lily beat back the temptation to take him over completely. She wilted under the urge that ran through her like lust, and for just a moment she felt Tristan shy away from her with fear.

Please, Lily. Don't.

I swear, I won't.

Lily calmed herself and waited for the craving to pass. The only other person she'd shared this depth of sensation with had been Rowan, and Lily realized that by choosing Tristan to shelter her consciousness during the battle she had made him her new head mechanic. He seized the honor by pulling ahead of the other braves and leading the charge against the Hive.