There was a thick bead of sweat rolling down the side of my forehead as I willed my powers around Oren's body for the tenth—or was it fifteenth—time in a row in order to keep him safe from the flaming mist that tumbled from my mouth as I sang.
A tale I had began to weave into my song around the ancient language that poured from my lips as easily as the mist contained the story of two young girls and the pact they'd made to always protect each other.
Marlisa was heavy on my heart, and I couldn't help but to agonize and wonder where she was, if she'd had her baby yet, how Drevan was doing protecting the three of them from this sick world around us...
If she missed me as much as I missed her.
The song inside me started to wane as the mist coiled around Oren's body but did not strike.
My fingers twitched, and so did the mist.
My eyebrow went up in confusion, but by then my concentration was broken.
As the last note faded from my mouth and the smoke rose up into the air, Oren stood from his spot perched on the sitting chair with the ominous brass collar sitting nearby.
"That's enough. What changed from before when you couldn't control it? You suddenly didn't want me to be hurt?"
"No. I can think of many reasons why I'd want to hurt you, but none of them would get me what I want."
"Which is to be out there, now?"
The sound of an explosion nearby rocked the walls of the small cabin. Screams filled the air. I couldn't tell if they were of anguish or victory.
"Yes," I gritted out through my teeth, the word poison on my tongue as he wrung it from my lips.
Oren took a few meandering steps toward me, as if the chaos outside didn't bother him in the slightest. As if this kind of thing happened every single day in Hefeta.
One more step, then two.
Each thud of his boots on the wooden floor beneath us was like a boom of thunder in the sky.
Lightning arced in a graceful forked tongue outside one of the only windows in Oren's cabin just as something rocked the cabin; I couldn't be sure if it was from the oncoming storm or for the battle raging outside these walls.
"You think going out there to try and save them will help your guilt for what you've done in the past, but it won't. Nothing can allow you to go back and change what's already happened. Nothing will help you forget the guilt, not until you choose to forgive yourself first."
"Forgive myself? And you believe that to be so easy? Who is going to tell Peter's parents that his murderer doesn't still suffer from his death, but that she simply 'forgave herself'? Who would tell my sister that our father's death was inconsequential all because I got to rid myself of guilt by saying, 'oh, it wasn't so bad. It wasn't my fault. I can forgive myself now'? No, Oren. I can't simply 'forgive' myself."
"You can if you admit to yourself that it was an accident. It clearly wasn't on purpose that you killed them."
"No, but what of the other men I've killed? Do I get a pass because they were deemed 'bad' by one quick judgement of someone in a split second decision? Or do I not need penance for those deaths as well? Forgive myself? No. But you, Oren? You can go fuck yourself."
Oren was too close to me and not close enough all at once, the scent of bonfire smoke and cinnamon wafting from him too enticing yet too strangling to be near.
It was a war of emotions battling inside me and I was terrified for which one would come out on top.
Scorched earth and wet soil filled the cabin with new scents to drive out Oren's particular brand of enticement, and I had never been so grateful to a storm in my entire life.
"Are you done throwing your temper tantrum yet, Princess? Because it sounds like our people need us now."
And he was right. Shouts for help were intermingled throughout bursts of explosions and peals of thunder.
"Then why are we still standing here?"
He reached a hand up and threaded it through the hair at the base of my neck before tilting it upwards so that his amber eyes bore into my own.
"Because I need to make sure you know exactly what you're getting into. This isn't going to be pretty."
"I've been on the run from this king my entire life. I've killed men in their sleep and I've killed them as they tried to take my body. I've never done pretty; I wouldn't know what to do with it if it fell right into my lap."
His fingers tightened on the hair it was coiled around and I sucked in a sharp breath as he leaned down closer to me, his lips brushing against mine as he spoke once more.
"Good. You stay by me, you do not leave my sight. You follow all of my orders as I give them. Do you understand?"
I went to nod my head, but that only brought our lips that much closer together and I had to fight the overwhelming urge to put my hands where they shouldn't ever have wanted to go—around his waist, over his shoulders, to the base of his head in order to draw him down further...
"Yes."
My shallow gulp could be heard in the silence between heartbeats and the explosions of thunder and war outside the small cabin separating us from peace and chaos, though I couldn't be sure that the fire in my heart couldn't be considered chaos when I was near Oren, the insufferable bastard.
But it was my fault that I couldn't keep my heart from racing in excitement when he was near.
It was my fault that my skin prickled with awareness at his touch.
And it was my fault that I didn't push him away, even as his head dipped lower and closer. As our lips connected briefly, the pleasure hot and thick as blood between us.
When he finally pulled away, my heart was beating too fast, my lungs constricting too harshly, my skin on fire as each place he touched came alive with his presence.
His eyes sparkled with barely restrained lust, and the ruggedness of his features was transformed into something akin to longing, an emotion I hadn't ever witnessed cross his face.
More screams of panic and fear sounded outside of the cabin.
"Time to go."
I nodded quickly, racing to the front door before Oren pulled on my hand and placed something inside as I unfurled my fingers from my palm.
"My dagger?"
I hadn't thought I'd ever see it again as I traced my fingers over the jagged edges of the handle.
"I had it sharpened for you. Be smart, be aware of your surroundings, and remember to stay—"
"Stay by you. I know, I know."
A single nod, and then he was edging in front of me until he took the brunt of the wind and pelting rain as he opened the front door of his cabin, and my mouth went slack at the destruction all around us.
Bodies of soldiers littered the ground covered in moon dust which had been their apparent demise, pieces of their bodies burned off and lying next to them as burns corroded their faces and exposed body parts.
Sirens were scrambling all around, some of them carrying quivers of bows with the lethal moon dust strapped to the rods of the arrows inside, rushing them to what seemed like the front line which was in the direction of the water.
"How did they make it all this way?"
"I don't know, we're almost to the very edge of Hefeta. These must have been the front line that broke our defenses. Stay close."
Sure footed, Oren slung a stray quiver filled with moon dust arrows and a bow that had been dropped by some of the Sirens rushing past and didn't slow as we bounded up the hills and down the valleys toward the cliffs by the sea.
My heart was in my throat as rain lashed at my cheeks and the ferocious wind pulled at strands of hair in my braid.
The scent of burning bodies forced a gag from my throat, but still I pushed my way past them.
The Sirens running to do their jobs didn't pay us any mind, and my heart leapt to my throat as I spotted a fallen body with white and golden robes splayed out on the ground with deep scarlet blood seeping into the soil beneath her body.
Her hair was dark brown and greying from the top. I hadn't ever met this Siren, but her eyes stared unblinkingly up at the sky as her decapitated head lay a few paces away from the rest of her.
Vomit threatened to rise up from my gut, but Oren's grip on me was unfaltering and he left no room to stay back and question how she'd been killed, or by whom.
Of course, I'd known that decapitation was one of the surefire ways to kill a Siren, but when it came to stabbings and burning and poison and blood loss or illness, those didn't necessarily have the strength enough to kill a Siren for good.
Cutting out someone's heart, cutting off their head, or the bronze dagger blood dipped in that specific Siren's kill, though? Those would do the trick.
And suddenly the ground was littered with heads that didn't have bodies attached to them.
A sob rose up in my throat, my mind begging for all of this to be some kind of horrific nightmare that I would soon awake from and laugh about with Inala or Sabira, but that simply wasn't the case.
It wasn't the case at all.
Especially not as I came face to face with the body of Minna, the mother of Sigrid who I'd helped to rescue from the king's men not two nights before.
I could only pray to Nalini, the mother of the Siren's creator, that Sigrid had made it out in time along with the other children too young to partake in battle.
Inala, Sabira, and Erinna were out there somewhere, too, as well as the Elders and Warrick and even Soraya and Yuni.
These were the only people I knew in Hefeta aside from the beast of a man pulling me closer and closer to the fray of battle, and my stomach lurched into my throat as I imagined one of them decapitated or burned or—
A sharp slice of pain cut directly through my middle as I dropped to my knees in the heat of it all.
"What's wrong?"
Oren had to yell over the fierce baying howls of the wind and torrential downpour of rain.
Perhaps if I prayed to Gesa, the Goddess of storms would lessen her might upon us.
"Something's wrong!"
Though there was no blood pouring from my stomach, some strange connection inside of me grew taut as Inala flashed in my mind.
"We have to find Inala!"
Oren didn't waste a moment as he reached down to grab me up in his arms and then we were running, the bow and arrows banging against the side of my arm and water nearly drowning me as pelts of rain lashed into my face.
I could barely breathe as the pain intensified and the need to sing grew almost unbearable despite the energy I'd already depleted in the cabin with Oren by trying to convince him that I could control my powers and not hurt the innocent.
Oren grunted in pain as a bolt of something slammed directly into his leg, but still he continued on, his strong arms wrapped around my body so unyielding that I doubted he'd let go even if I attempted to leap from them.
"Are you alright?"
Lightning speared across the sky in a blinding illumination before his footsteps slowed and we neared the cliffside that doubled as my first vantage point of seeing Hefeta as a whole.
All around us were dead or dying soldiers, Sirens tending to wounds and rushing forward past the demarcation line of where the beach began and Hefeta ended.
Cries of despair and agony retreated as the wind became relentless, trees bowing to the mighty fury of nature.
Gesa herself must've orchestrated this storm.
And then Oren was falling, his body launching me over top of his, and then we were through the invisible barrier which kept Hefeta hidden.
There was only one warship approaching fast on the Gold Sea, and it looked to be completely out of soldiers.
How only one warship had taken out so many of Hefeta's people even including the magical barrier...it was sickening to understand just how defenseless these people truly were.
"Oren?"
Oren grunted once more in pain as I scrambled over to his body with sand slapping my cheeks raw and golden flecked water whipped tears out of my eyes.
A nearby palm tree cracked in half and toppled over just as I rolled on top of Oren's body to hopefully maneuver us out of the way, but Oren's hands were there, blocking the hit of the heavy branches from hurting me by turning us so that he was over me.
"This was a mistake."
His voice was a caressing whisper against the cacophony of chaos unfurling out around us like the petals of a night blooming flower at dusk.
My arms were trapped beneath us, and he lifted his head up just as I realized where his injuries were by the deep warmth of his blood seeping through his armor and leeching into my body.
"What do we do now? How do I help you?"
"You lay here and pretend you're dead, and then when they're done, we assess the damage and count our dead."
"You mean...we give up? No. No, that's not an option! There's still a few dozen soldiers and Sirens that we passed on the way still fighting. I'm not injured. Just because you are doesn't mean I have to stop."
"I couldn't even make it all the way to the front without being hit multiple times by arrows. Arrows clearly tipped in poison."
"But...what about Inala, or—"
That sharp pain from before returned with a vengeance just as that flicker of a connection with my blood sworn faded in and out.
I had to go. I had to find Inala.
Just as I began shimmying out of Oren's embrace, however, he clamped his hold around me tight.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"I'm going to find Inala. And Sabira, and Erinna and Warrick and I'm—"
"You're going to what? Fight with your all encompassing battle experience? You start to sing, and you'll only kill the soldiers fighting on our side as well as theirs. It'll be a massacre. Do you not realize that's why the Sirens aren't using their gifts? It's because they don't want to take their own out as well."
"What if I could use my powers without singing? That's what Soraya was trying to teach me how to do. What if I—"
"What if this, what if that. It won't matter—you'll still be dead."
"It's better than lying down and taking it."
My snapped retort must've changed something in Oren's mind as he pushed his hips upward so that I could roll out from underneath him.
Grabbing the discarded weapon Oren had lost, I ducked behind the fallen palm tree that had almost crushed us to death and sucked in a sharp breath before holding it and releasing it.
My inhales burned scarlet in my lungs and my exhales tasted of ash and smoke.
And still I kept breathing, blocking it all out.
Blocking out the traumas of seeing those bodies decapitated and destroyed all around me.
Blocking out the memories of everything else that had come before this moment, searching in my mind for that tether to Inala and hoping that somehow, someway, it would be able to lead me to her, because it was the only thing I had to go on in the moment.
It wasn't like I could've just trampled around in the sand screaming her name, or asking the dying and dead if they'd seen her.
"Concentrate."
"What do you think I'm trying to do?"
Oren shut his mouth after realizing I was already doing the best I could, and that was when a light burst to life behind my eyelids.
A red light, the very same red as the color of Inala's hair.
My mouth opened, and darkness consumed me whole.
***
Author's Note:
What did you think of this chapter?
What do you think will happen next?
What do you want to happen next?
Plot twist theories??
Let me know what you all think!
Until next time my lovely readers,
Kristen :)
The World of Irena: