38. We need to hunt him down

Chapter 38: We need to hunt him down

Nora sat propped against a half collapsed wall with a blanket someone had thrown over her shoulders, and Mikaela knelt in front of her for a long time before she let herself accept what she was looking at.

"Nora." She took the girl's face in both hands, gentle, tilting it up. "Nora, can you hear me?"

Nothing. No flicker of recognition, no roll of the eyes, none of the sharp mouth Mikaela had watched needle Finn mercilessly not two days ago over a comment about his own supposed girlfriend status. The eyes that looked back at her were open, and empty, fixed somewhere past Mikaela's shoulder on nothing at all.

"She was fine an hour ago." Mikaela's voice cracked on it. "She was, gods, she was calling him an idiot in the yard, she had this whole light in her when she talked about him, this whole, I don't know, this whole fire, and now."

She couldn't finish it. She didn't need to. Freya crouched beside her, hand settling on her shoulder, and even Alaric, sword still drawn, still standing amid the wreckage like he hadn't quite processed what he'd seen down in that cellar, looked at the girl with something gone grim and sick in his face.

"Who does this," Mikaela said, and it wasn't really a question, more a sound wrenched loose from somewhere underneath the fury building in her chest. "Who looks at a fourteen year old girl full of that much life and just, just takes it. Empties her out and leaves the rest sitting here like a doll."

Nobody answered because nobody had an answer that helped.

Mikaela turned to Alaric, and something in her face must have shifted because he actually took a half step back before she spoke.

"Eto is not going to be happy about this." She said.

"I imagine not."

"You don't understand." Her hands were shaking now, and not from the cold. "Two days. He knew these kids two days and he let Finn climb him like a tree and he swung Nora around by her arms until she couldn't breathe from laughing, and he doesn't, he's not built to just, to just hear about this and sit still. He's going to lose whatever's left of his control the second he finds out what happened to her. You need to let him out. Now. Tonight."

Alaric opened his mouth to argue, some reflex about procedure rising in him out of habit, and then looked past her at the rubble, at Nora's empty eyes, at the hole torn clean through the world where a cellar full of children's home used to have a wall, and whatever he'd meant to say died before it reached his tongue.

"Agreed," he said instead, quiet. "Someone go fetch him. Tell them Captain Alaric's ordered his release, personal authority, I'll answer for it after."

This chapter appears on NovelPhoenix under the author's publishing account, but the copy here was taken without consent.

Something shifted in the rubble behind them.

Two shapes, moving, and for one wild second Mikaela's heart leapt somewhere it had no business leaping before she saw who it was.

Kael and Lyra pushed themselves up out of the broken stone, coughing, disoriented, blinking against torchlight like they'd been dropped out of a fever dream and hadn't quite landed back in their bodies yet. Kael's hand found the wall to steady himself, confusion written raw across his face, and Lyra just sat there in the wreckage staring at her own hands like she didn't recognize them.

"What," Kael managed, voice raw. "What happened, where, why does everything."

Nobody rushed to them. Mikaela barely spared them a glance, her eyes already back on Nora, on the empty stillness of her, and a single tear tracked slow down through the dust on her cheek.

She didn't say anything to anyone. She just stood up and ran.

Her legs screamed at her the second she pushed off, dizziness swimming up hard behind her eyes from the blast, from the blood she'd lost, from a night that had asked too much of a body already worn thin, and she ran anyway, past Freya's half raised hand, past Alaric's startled shout, out through the broken gate and into the dark streets beyond.

She didn't feel the ache low in her hips, the soreness that had lingered nine days now since that first night with Eto, not tonight, not with everything else roaring louder than it. She ran past guards posted at the guardhouse door who barely had time to register her before she'd shoved through, ran past the man on duty at the dungeon stairs who called something after her she didn't hear, and stopped only when she reached the cell itself, chest heaving, black spots swimming at the edge of her vision.

He sat exactly where she'd left him. Lotus position, spine straight, eyes open now, fixed on her the moment she appeared at the bars like he'd known she was coming before she'd even reached the last stair.

"Eto." She gasped the word out between breaths. "We need to go. Now. We need to hunt him down, we need to, it's Nora. It got Nora too."

He was on his feet before she'd finished the sentence.

He crossed the cell in two strides and took the barred door in both hands, and the metal shrieked once, protesting, before it simply gave, hinges tearing free of stone in a shower of dust and rust.

"What you mean," he said, low, and something in his voice had gone very flat, very cold.

"It's Finn." She was still trying to catch her breath, hands braced on her knees. "I don't know how, but it's him, he's the one doing it to the kids."

"How Finn."

"He's not a banshee. He's some kind of Feyra. From Tartaros."

Tartaros. He knew that word, or a shape close enough to it, some half memory of religious talk back on Earth, a word for the deepest pit hell had to offer, and something about hearing it now, in this place, attached to a boy who'd begged to be climbed like furniture, settled into his chest like a stone dropped into still water.

"Show me," he said. "We go now."

They were out of the guardhouse before the guards on duty had fully registered what was happening, shouts rising behind them, someone calling for the captain, someone else grabbing for a weapon out of pure reflex, none of them fast enough. Eto had Mikaela over one shoulder before she could argue about it, and then he was running, and then he wasn't running on the ground at all anymore, one leap carrying him clean up onto the lip of a rooftop, and from there he simply kept going, roof to roof, chimney to gable to chimney, the city unspooling dark and fast beneath them while the shouts of the guards fell farther and farther behind until they weren't there at all anymore.

He dropped out of the night sky like something thrown, and the street outside the ruined children's home cracked under the impact of his landing, dust and broken cobblestone kicking outward in a ring, every head in that torchlit wreckage snapping toward him at once.