Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment, #1)(101)

They couldn’t let Marisol out of their sight. They were supposed to protect her, ensure she was taken to safety in the lorry. They had made a binding vow.

“We should go after her,” Iris said. Now that she had a task, a mission to focus on, she could take control of her thoughts. She pushed herself up, letting Roman help her when she stumbled. Her knees felt watery, and she took a few deep breaths. “Where do you think we should look first?”

Attie stood, petting a disgruntled Lilac. “Keegan was stationed on the hill, wasn’t she?”

“Right.”

“The let’s start there. But let me put Lilac somewhere safe.”

Iris and Roman waited in the foyer while Attie closed the cat in one of the downstairs rooms. A beam of light snuck through a crack in the mortar, cutting across Iris’s chest. The front door sat crooked on its hinges; it creaked open beneath Roman’s hand.

Iris wasn’t sure what she would find beyond the threshold. But she stepped into a sunlit, steaming world. Most of the buildings on High Street were unscathed save for shattered windows. But as Iris and Roman and Attie walked deeper into town, they began to see the radius of the bombs’ destruction. Houses were leveled, lying in piles of stone and brick and glittering glass. A few had caught on fire, the flames licking the wood and thatch.

It didn’t feel real. It felt like the wavering colors of a dream.

Iris walked around the barricades, around soldiers who were either holding fast at their posts or rushing to put out the flames. She watched through billows of smoke, her heart numb until Roman brought her to the foot of the bluff. Their summit.

She felt his hand tighten on hers, and she looked up to what remained.

The hill had been bombed.



* * *



There was a crater in the street. The buildings were heaps of rubble. Smoke rose in steady streams, smudging the clouds and turning the sunlight into a dirty haze.

From the bluff looking down on Avalon, there seemed to be a pattern to the destruction, as if Dacre had cast a web of ruin. Although the longer Iris stared at the bisecting lines of unscathed homes and the corresponding pockets of debris, the stranger the sight seemed to be. She struggled to make sense of how one home was standing while its next-door neighbor was demolished. But when she squinted, she could almost see pathways. Routes that were protected from the bombs. Marisol’s B and B was on one of them.

Iris had to turn away from the uncanny observation. She released Roman’s hand to help the wounded.

There were more than she could count, lying on the cobblestones. Broken and moaning in pain. Her gorge was rising; she had a moment of panic. But then she saw Keegan farther up the road. Moving and bleeding from a wound on her face but wondrously alive. Iris felt her resolve trickle back through her. She knelt beside the nearest soldier, pressing her fingertips to his neck. His eyes were open, fixed on the sky. Blood had poured from a wound in his chest, staining the street.

He was dead, and Iris swallowed, moving over loose cobblestones to reach the next soldier.

She was alive but one of her legs was splintered below the knee. She was struggling to rise, as if she didn’t feel the pain.

“Just lie back for a moment,” Iris said, taking her hand.

The soldier released a shaky gasp. “My legs. I can’t feel them.”

“You’ve been wounded, but help is coming.” Iris glanced up again, watching as Keegan helped a few nurses lift a wounded soldier onto a stretcher. And then she caught a glimpse of Marisol’s red dress as she assisted a doctor in a white coat with another wounded soldier. There was Attie, racing up the hill to give aid to a nurse who was shouting for it, and Roman, a few paces away, tenderly wiping the grime and blood from a soldier’s face.

She hadn’t been expecting this.

Iris had expected a siege or an assault. She had expected gunfire in the streets and the flash of grenades. She hadn’t believed that Dacre would send his eithrals and his bombs.

A war with the gods is not what you expect it to be.

“My legs,” the soldier rasped.

Iris tightened her grip on the girl’s hand. “The doctors and nurses are coming. Hold on, just a moment longer. They’re almost here to us.” But a barricade and countless bodies lay between them and the medical help, who were methodically making their way down the street.

“She’s losing too much blood,” Roman whispered in her ear.

Iris turned to find him kneeling next to her, his gaze on the girl’s mangled leg. Roman eased closer to the soldier, removing his belt to cinch it tightly on her left thigh.

A chill raced up Iris’s spine. Her hands and feet suddenly felt cold again. She worried she was descending into shock.

“I’m going to see if I can get a stretcher for her,” Iris said, rising. “Will you stay beside her, Kitt?”

Roman’s lips parted, as if he wanted to argue. She knew his thoughts, the reason why he was frowning. He didn’t want any sort of distance to come between them. But the soldier groaned and began to thrash, and he quickly gave her his attention, talking to her in a soothing tone. Reaching for her hand to help her through the waves of pain.

Iris turned and stumbled up the hill. She needed a stretcher. A plank of wood would even work. Anything that she and Roman could use to carry the soldier to the infirmary.

Should she search the rubble for something? Should she pull a board free from the barricade? She paused before it, rife with uncertainty even as her thoughts roared at her to hurry.