Bind the Soul (35 page)

Blindly feeling her way through the wreckage, she crawled out from under the broken cot and slid her hands along the tent until she found a tear large enough to wiggle through. Sunlight stabbed her eyes as she rolled out onto the grass.

She stared at the wreckage of the tent. Only the pole near the back was still standing, part of the canvas clinging to it like a lopsided teepee. The rest was a pile of torn canvas, shattered wooden bed frames, and bits of stuffing from the cots. One booted foot stuck out from a pile of debris, but there were no other signs of the medics.

Fingers trembling, she touched her neck. Her fingers met an aching burn but nothing else. The collar was gone.

Relief made her knees go weak. She looked at the Sahar, still clutched in her hand. It had gone dark, back to its usual silver sheen, the power still and silent. For now. She rubbed a hand against her forehead. Her head ached but there didn’t seem to be any physical damage from the magic she’d channeled through her body.

Other damage, though, she wasn’t sure about.

That vision. Dream. Or was it a memory? A memory of . . . the Sahar. Of the soul inside the Sahar. Natania, a haemon who’d lived and died five hundred years ago. Died so Maahes and Nyrtaroth could bind her soul to their lodestone to give it limitless power. Natania’s bitterness over her lovers’ betrayal would explain the seething hatred and violence that filled the Sahar. Five hundred years of imprisonment in a bit of rock could have only exacerbated her hate.

A hunk of wood slid off a pile of debris with a loud crash, making Piper jump. She shoved the Stone in her pocket and looked around. Fear pounded in her head as she scoured the wreckage of the tent. The collar breaking must have released a lot of magic. It had blown the tent apart.

The antidote was somewhere in that wreckage.

She staggered into motion, scrambling over the canvas toward the back of the tent. Dropping onto her hands and knees, she shoveled aside the rubble until she uncovered the collapsed table where the chest of poisons and antidotes had sat. The chest was on the ground on its side, the lid splintered, the lock gone entirely. She grabbed it. As she righted it, its contents sloshed and clinked ominously. Heart in her throat, she pushed up the lid and moaned.

The bottom was full of shattered glass and a murky mix of liquids.

“No,” she whispered. “
No
.”

Gritting her teeth, she carefully turned the chest over on its side and dumped the contents on the ground. Grabbing a handful of bandages to protect her skin, she quickly sorted out the unbroken bottles. Three of them held clear liquids. No way to tell which was the right one.

She unscrewed the first lid. The liquid could have been water for all she could tell. She capped it and tried the next. The stench of rotting vegetation assaulted her. She capped it too and set it aside. Last one. She twisted off the lid.

The sharp scent of vinegar burned her nose.

“Yes!”

She screwed on the cap, carefully slid the bottle into her front pocket with the Sahar, and dug through the broken shelving until she found a syringe. It went into her pocket too, the capped needle sticking out the top.

How long had it been? How long had she been lying there having visions of the past?

She ran through the debris, leaping over tent poles. When she’d cleared the mess, she turned east toward the valley where she’d left Ash—and paused. Swallowed hard. She needed to get to him as fast as possible.

A dozen yards from the shattered tent, two of the Hades horse-beasts were tied to a tree, already saddled.

Taking deep breaths, she warily approached. One ignored her, dozing with one hoof canted, totally unconcerned by the violent destruction of the tent. The other, its coat an odd speckled white, watched her with a reddish-orange eye as she came closer. Its ears flicked forward and back.

If she pretended not to notice the different shape of its jaw and the bits of pointy teeth that overlapped the lower lip, it really did look like a horse. Its eyes were closer to the front of its head than the sides and its body was more muscular, built for attacking rather than fleeing.

“Hey there, big boy,” she cooed. “Think you could give me a ride?”

Watching it warily, she untied the reins from the tree and stepped back. The horse didn’t move. She tugged the reins. Its ears flattened to its head, but it shuffled into motion. Urgency pounded in her as she led it into a clear spot and pulled the reins over its head and into position. She stepped to its side and gave it one more mistrustful look. It turned its head and looked back with one eye.

“Now or never,” she muttered and heaved herself into the saddle.

The horse immediately launched forward. Piper grabbed at the saddle, biting back a squeal. The horse took a couple running steps then pranced on the spot, head up, ears forward, tail lashing. It was excited. It hadn’t liked waiting. It wanted to join the fight.

“Okay,” she panted, settling herself in the saddle and wishing she had a clue what she was doing. “Okay. You want to run?”

She pulled on the reins, turning the horse’s head toward the morning sun.

“Then let’s run.”

She tapped her heels against its sides. It gathered itself and sprang into motion, leaping into a full gallop as though it intended to chase the sun itself out of the sky.

CHAPTER 20

S
HE NEVER
would have found Ash again if not for Zwi. She heard the dragonet’s soft, high-pitched whimpering as she rode by on the horse. Leaping off the beast, she rushed into the trees. Half hidden beside a fallen tree, Ash lay on his side. Zwi was curled under his arm, shaking with whimpering cries. As Piper burst into view, Zwi’s head came up, her golden eyes dull. She let out a long wail when she saw Piper.

Oh God. He was dead. She was too late.

She ran to his side and dropped to her knees. His shoulders moved with fast, harsh breaths.

“Ash,” she gasped.

Grabbing his shoulder, she pulled him onto his back. His face was white except for a bright, unnatural flush of fever across his cheeks. Perspiration shone on his skin. He didn’t so much as stir as she turned him.

“Ash, can you hear me? Ash?”

No reaction. Zwi pawed at his shoulder, mewling softly. The dragonet obviously had no idea who had stabbed her master and left him for dead. Piper fumbled for the antidote. She loaded the syringe with every drop of liquid in the bottle, squirted out the bubbles, and lined it up with his bicep. Was she supposed to aim for anything in particular? With no way to find out, she pushed the needle in and injected every last drop into his arm.

Pulling it out and throwing it aside, she pressed her wrist to his forehead. His skin was scorching hot. She was pretty sure a human would already be dead from a fever that high. She pulled up one of his eyelids but saw only the whites of his eyes. He was deeply unconscious. Maybe even—maybe even already in the fatal coma, the last stage of the poison.

“Come on, Ash,” she muttered. How fast would the antidote work—
if
it worked? Once the symptoms set in, there was no guarantee that the antidote could counteract the poison in time.

She checked the stab wound on his leg. Though it had mostly stopped bleeding, she used one of his short swords to cut a strip off her shirt and bound the wound anyway. Zwi watched her, still making quiet sounds of distress.

“It’s okay, Zwi,” she said shakily. “He’ll be okay. I gave him the antidote. He’ll pull through.”

She looked at him. No sign at all of improvement. The antidote had worked quickly on her but she’d only been lightly dosed and the fever had barely begun.

“Ash,” she whispered. Exhausted by the weight of fear and guilt, she curled up against his side. “Please, Ash. Don’t give up.”

Seconds dragged into minutes as she lay beside him, breaking inside because she couldn’t help him. Couldn’t save him. Couldn’t do anything but wait and hope. She listened to his breathing. It wasn’t growing any stronger. If anything, it was harsher and more irregular. She refused to believe she’d been too late. He was strong. Tough. He was a draconian, resistant to venoms and poisons of all kinds. He would pull through.

Back in the trees, the horse-beast whinnied impatiently. Slowly and stiffly, Piper sat up. She wiped away her tears and took a deep breath. There was nothing more she could do for Ash. But there was something she could do to help her father, Miysis, and the others, if it wasn’t too late for them too. She had to try. This was her fault. If she could do anything at all to prevent more deaths, she had to try.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Ash. She touched his cheek, feeling the heat of the fever, undiminished. “I have to go, but I’ll come back. I promise to come back . . . if I can.”

She turned to Zwi. “Stay with him, okay? Protect him until—until he wakes up.”

Zwi made a soft trill of agreement and curled up against Ash’s side. Piper gazed at him, knowing she would probably never see him again. Her fingers touched the braid on the side of his head. She’d never asked him where his strip of red silk had gone. Or why he and Seiya wore them. There was so much she’d never asked. And now she never would. The chances of them both surviving the morning were too slim. This was it.

Biting hard on her bottom lip, she rose to her feet and walked away as fast as she could. If she looked back, she would never be able to leave him.

With a deep, steadying breath, she set off to find her horse and ride into war.

. . .

She heard the battle before she could see it.

She squinted at the curving highway. The horse-beast had run at a tireless canter for the better part of an hour but she couldn’t be at the Consulate yet. The wide avenue of long grass with the narrow, paved road running down the center didn’t offer her a wide view of what came beyond the bend ahead. A hundred years ago, the highway had probably been smooth and safe to travel on at high speed. Now it was a cracked, crumbling shadow of a road with great tufts of grass growing out of it and whole chunks missing from its edges.

The closer she got, the worse the battle sounded. The boom of explosions came almost nonstop but the trees blocked her view. Somewhere around that bend, people were fighting. Dying. It was no small skirmish. Why would Miysis lead his inferior force out of the defensible Consulate to meet Samael’s greater numbers? It didn’t make sense.

She tugged on the reins. The horse slowed from a canter to a trot, ears swiveling with each blast. Screams and shouts sounded between explosions. As the horse cantered around the corner and Piper saw what lay ahead, she grabbed the reins and hauled it up short.

A wide-open space a hundred yards ahead. Two highways intersected in a network of bridges and ramps. Only a single piece of one bridge remained, jutting over the crumbling highway. Chunks of concrete the size of trucks littered the ground amidst shattered trees and collapsed ramps. A thick cloud of dust hung over the area, obscuring the flashes of magic, the flickering orange light of flames, and the bursts of white explosions. Movement was discernible only as darting shadows in the roiling dust.

Somewhere on the battlefield was her father.

There was no way to tell who was where. Who was winning. Who was dying. Piper clenched and unclenched her hands. She knew who would be winning: Samael and his elite knights. The battle was still raging. Maybe it wasn’t too late to make a difference. She urged the horse toward the intersection and its maze of rubble and dust. The closer she got, the harder her heart slammed into her ribs. She couldn’t just ride in there; she might charge into the middle of enemy forces.

She turned the horse toward one of the semi-demolished ramps. Each explosion stabbed at her ears, painfully loud. Spitting out a gritty mouthful from the dusty air, she swung off the horse and tied the reins to a bush. The ramp rose ten feet above her, one side crumbling away. She scrambled over the rubble and climbed on top. Dropping to her hands and knees, she crawled to the edge and peered across the battlefield.

Huge clouds of churning, writhing dust obscured everything. The faint breeze teased the clouds into swirling eddies, revealing scattered groups of black figures: Samael’s knights. Her gaze darted across the debris-strewn scene, searching for a pattern. Half the force had congregated near the one bridge with its base intact. The greatest density of shadowy figures pressed against a low wall of rubble.

The dust swirled. Between the wall and the base of the bridge were more human shapes, most of them in red—Miysis’s soldiers. Her breath caught in her throat. They were trapped. Samael’s knights had them pinned against the bridge. If it hadn’t been so cloudy with dust, more of the knights probably would have already joined in and overwhelmed the vulnerable force.

She had to help.

Sweeping her gaze over the scene once more, she noted the overhanging bridge, the barricade of rubble protected by the enemy that closed off the only escape, and the spots where the Hades knights were thickest. Scooting backward, she rolled to her feet and ran back down the ramp. At the bottom, she pulled the Sahar from her pocket and stared at it, her mouth dry. Exhaling harshly, she forced it under her armguard, shoving it into the middle of the leather brace. It dug painfully into her inner wrist, but it definitely wouldn’t budge an inch.