The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (47 page)

Oh.

Oh, the carriage was on fire.

Well. That made sense.

Olivia was slapping his face. “
Christopher
!” she screamed at him. He focused on her. Her features were blackened and her hands were touching his brow and temples, coming away covered in blood. He stared with horrified fascination at the red all over her fingers. Was that
his
blood? It was so red. She grabbed his cheeks in her bloody hands, her hands and his blood. “
Christopher!
” she repeated. “
Wake! Up!
”

Gods, he realized with a start, and panic coursed through him like water down a trench, the carriage was on
fire
.

She must had seen clarity strike him because she patted his cheek once, a pat that was more a slap. “Good,” she said. “Good, stay with me.” Their roles had shifted now. Her daze from before was completely gone, and now his head was bleeding. “We need to push the ceiling,” she said. She spoke so quickly he could barely make out her words, climbing up to a crouch. “We need to unbalance the carriage and push it back on its side.”

“No,” he said, and coughed from somewhere deeper than he knew he had. The air was so hot and thick and it tasted like wood. His throat burned. “The floor weighs more. The seats. We should push―”

“
Do what I bloody tell you to
!” Olivia screeched into his face, and
that
moved him to obedience. He copied her stance, leaning his weight against the ceiling. “Rock it,” she said, doing so, and he echoed her. “Yes,” she said. “With me,” she said. They rocked and the carriage rocked and Chris swallowed his coughs and held his breath. Tears streamed down his face and mingled with the blood. His eyes felt like they were going to pop, and they stung with grit. “Harder. With
me
.” The carriage rocked more and more, and Chris could smell something like burned hair. He hoped it wasn’t his. Gods, how was he going to look without his hair? “
Push
.”

The carriage screeched, the metal frame protesting their movements, and then it fell forward. They both crashed against the ceiling―the floor―and lay there panting, sucking in big breaths of poisonous smoke for just one moment before Olivia was seizing his wrist and pulling him towards the gaping hole of the open, burning doorway, out into the world.

They emerged from their tiny hell into a hell much greater. Everything was seen cracked and doubled, and with a curse, Chris reached up and pulled his shattered eyeglasses off his face, throwing them to one side. Useless. Flames were in all directions, and the gutted front of a building was before them. The horses looked like spitted pigs, and when Chris saw the body of the driver, his stomach lurched and he only kept it by reminding himself that any time he spent vomiting would not be spent breathing. He sucked in air, inhaling dust from the scorched ground he hovered over, and the heat was still intense enough to burn his mouth and throat and lungs, but there was no more smoke. That billowed up into the air, making a beacon to announce the inferno all around them to all of Darrington.

They couldn’t stop, he realized, sucking in air and trying to steady his mind enough to lock onto one complete thought. The fire would spread and they were in the heart of the storm. He reached for Olivia and found her reaching back to him. “Stay low,” she said, her voice hoarse. “The smoke will rise. Stay low.”

They pulled one another along, stumbling over rubble and debris and soft, smoking, sweet-smelling humps that Chris refused to let himself think very hard about. He thought to look behind him, and when he squinted hard, he saw their carriage in the midst of the furnace. A chunk of debris almost as big as it leaned to one side, scorched and blackened, and Chris realized it had been pressing against the floor when he’d been telling Olivia it would be easier to turn the carriage that way.

How did she know
?

He would ask her later.

The heat lessened and the smoke cleared as they made their way back toward a world that smelled of things other than burning, a place where there were colours aside from red and black and orange. Chris heard the sound of voices screaming and crying close at hand. There were other people left, people who weren’t them or dead. His head pounded and his vision doubled and danced, but his heart yearned towards those voices, and allowed himself to think maybe, just maybe, they could get back to the world of the living…

Something creaked, and then, in a rush of air and heat,
crashed
. Pebbles went up, scoring the back of his legs as if thrown with a slingshot. Olivia shrieked in pain. His hand, which had been pulling her along behind him, suddenly came up empty as her fingers released their grip on his. He stumbled forward and hit the ground, and for a moment he simply stared without comprehending while Olivia sobbed a desperate, angry, defiant plea.

He stumbled onto his back, braced himself up with his elbows, and his heart twisted and dropped into his toes at what he saw.

Olivia’s leg pinned beneath the fallen rubble was bad enough. Tears cascaded down her face as she screamed curses at the Three and Three. But that wasn’t what turned his bowels to water.

A pulsing, glowing worm twisted and coiled around itself as it undulated lazily towards them in a haze of distorted phantom moisture. Its scales were jewelled in all the colours of the rainbow, but the crevices between them all pulsed a ruddy, baleful orange. It drifted over to them, slow but purposeful, and the temperature grew hotter and hotter the closer it came. The ground beneath it burned black in its passage.

It was nearly sated. It had wrecked its vengeance and it was full and sluggish and ready to return to the elemental plane, satisfied with its justice. But it had seen them, and thought it might have time for a little more fun, one last bit of vindication.

Olivia twisted about to look at him. “Are you a sodding
idiot
?” she screamed. “Get away!”

He scrabbled backwards like a crab, barely wincing as a sharp piece of rubble sliced down the palm of his hand. She was right. He should stand up and run as fast as he could, get safe. He would be able to outrun the sluggish salamander where she never could, pinned as she was. She was right.

He didn’t move.

The salamander rose high into the air and hovered above Olivia. It took its time spinning around itself, lazily spiralling and twisting its way down. Pulsing orange-red light glowed from deep beneath its scales, stoking its own fire as it rubbed against itself. A darting forked tongue taunted her, and Chris watched his employer close her eyes tightly and howl in thwarted terror.

No!
He gritted his teeth.
Leave her alone!

He
projected
his rage, his
will
out at the rogue elemental. He flung the mental command with every bit of strength he had, feeling like a single man trying to hold back a deluge with only his outstretched arms. This was madness. He should be running. Spirits could be bound only by arcane song, and Chris didn’t speak that language.

He wouldn’t leave her.

Don’t touch her!

And the salamander halted.

Its small, glowing red eyes broke away from Olivia and focused on him. They regarded him in confusion, puzzlement. His heart skipped a beat, his stomach fluttered oddly, and the man and elemental stared at each other, both watching to see what the other would do. Chris fumbled with his own mind, dazed and confused but unwilling to break whatever spell he had somehow cast.
Go away,
he commanded the serpent, but it only cocked its head slightly and narrowed its eyes at him. Its tongue flicked out at him, and orange light kindled deep beneath its scales. Heat blossomed like the seeking tendrils of a plant. Olivia cried out in pain.

No.

GO! AWAY!
Chris
slammed
his entire self into the creature. It shuddered wildly and all the ruddy light went out at once. The chaotic life in its eyes fled, the tension left its sinuous body, and it fell, limp, vanishing in a puff of smoke and a roar like a spark finding tinder.

He shoved all his confusions and questions and amazement aside. What he’d just done had questioned every principle set down by Richard Lowry hundreds of years ago, but later, later. He crawled to Olivia, seizing the chunk of stone and mortar in both hands and attempting to push it off of her.

“Gods,” Olivia said, and her voice was so hoarse it sounded like a whisper. “What…what just…I thought…”

He couldn’t move the debris. He growled in frustration, braced himself, put
all
his strength behind it, every tiny last reserve he could muster. It didn’t budge.

He laid his forehead against the stone, heaving deep breaths. The surface of it was warm to the touch, and when he raised his head, he saw with a sinking feeling in his gut the sheer devastation spreading around them. Three salamanders, if he’d counted the blasts right, and he’d only dismissed one. He skimmed that thought. Later. The other two were still torching and wreaking havoc at their leisure, and the fires were spreading. Already, the whole block was a conflagration, a riotous devouring inferno that swallowed everything in its path.

“We need to move this thing,” Chris said, trying to sound calm. He blinked and raised his head to meet Olivia’s eyes. “Olivia, we need to move this.”

“I thought I was dead,” she whispered. She shook herself and focused on the rock pinning her leg. It was smeared with blood from his head, and she seemed to remember all at once the pain it must be causing her. “That’s bloody heavy,” she said with a whimper. “Oh, fuck me, that’s bloody huge.”

“I can’t move it,” he said. “I’m not strong enough.”

“Serves me right.” She threw her head back and winced. Tears shone on her cheeks. “Hiring a handsome assistant instead of a tough one. You’re bloody useless, Mister Buckley.”

“You can call me Christopher,” he said without thinking, and then flushed when she smiled through her tears. “For the moment,” he amended. “If you bloody well help me move this damned thing so we can get out of here. Now.”

She gritted her teeth as she placed her hands on the edge of the stone. He did the same on the other side. “Now…
heave
,” he said, and they grunted simultaneously.

The rock shifted and Olivia’s grunt became a howl of pain. “Olivia!” Chris cried, but as he pulled his attention from the stone to her, terror clutching at his chest, he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye…

…and heard a familiar voice raised in song.

No, that was impossible. What would she be doing here?
How
would she be here? It wasn’t
possible
. But he would know the voice anywhere, absolutely anywhere, and as he saw her walk into sight, calm as she was while striding through the wooded paths of White Clover Farms, his mouth went slack and his lips mouthed,
Rosemary
.

He’d never heard a song so complex or multilayered before. He heard her sing as if she were three different girls singing three different songs, but there was only one girl and somehow, only one song. An azure-skinned undine flew over their heads, and rain poured down in her passage, a deluge fanning out and spreading. A crystal dancer, a tiny fiaran, darted around Rosemary’s head, frosting her glossy black ringlets with dainty little ice crystals, and sweet, blessedly cool air emanated forth from her, pouring forward like a wave.

One layer of the song commanded the undine. It was soaring and domineering and powerful. Another controlled the fiaran, and that song was musical and light and suggestive. The third and final layer, well, that was a searching song. It curled in through the burned out shells of buildings, snaked through the wisps of smoke left behind by the fires the undine’s magical amphora quenched. It sought the rogue salamanders, exploring relentlessly. It was a binding song, the oldest and most common phrase in that arcane language.

Chris slumped against Olivia, unable to believe his eyes
or
his ears. It was his head injury, surely. He was hallucinating, seeing what he wanted to see, hearing what he wanted to hear. But when Rosemary walked past them, close enough to touch, she looked down and smiled, and her eyes twinkled, and Chris knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that this was really his sister, and somehow, she really had come to save him.