Fire Heart (The Titans: Book One) (25 page)

Have to hurry. Have to get back to Will.
The thoughts raced unceasingly through her mind, and all she could think of was Will fighting in his wounded state, being torn apart by a yaru. Why had she told him to stay on the wall? Stupid, stupid, stupid! She should have stayed to fight instead.

But she couldn't think about that now—she skidded to a halt in front of the house, dismayed at the extent of the damage. There was a massive crater in the roof, and the wood around the edges was jagged and splintered. For anyone to survive an impact like that would have been nothing short of a miracle, but she had to look regardless. As Will had said, they needed Serah if they wanted to survive this fight.

She kicked the door open with a bang and ran inside and up the stairs, her boots pounding heavily on the floor. Serah lay in the middle of a small crater in the wood on the upper level, her body unmoving. Clare knelt down beside her and put her fingers to the woman's throat; she felt a pulse, and Serah's chest rose and fell with each shallow breath she took.
Good
. But then she saw her torso. A thick splinter of wood, at least the length and width of Clare's forearm, had pierced right through her abdomen. Blood leaked around the edge of the wound and dripped down onto the floor below, staining the wood a deep ruby-red. Only a short length of the jagged spike protruded from the front of her body, but Clare thought it might be enough for her to grab onto and remove it.
But should I?
she wondered.
What if I cause even more damage? What if it doesn't even matter at this point?
She reached out gingerly to touch it, unsure what to do, and the moment her fingers brushed the wood Serah's eyes flared open.

The desert woman gasped for breath and sat up, coughing. “No, wait! You can't move,” Clare cried, but Serah brushed her away.

“Stand back,” she rasped, her voice hoarse. When Clare was a good distance away Serah reached around and grasped the longer end of the splinter. With a grimace of pain she yanked on it, and it came free in a gout of blood that spattered across the floor and speckled the wall behind her. She coughed some more and leaned over, bent double. Clare moved forward hesitantly to help, but stopped when Serah growled, “Do not touch me.”

Clare obediently moved away again, her eyes widening as, against all rational reasoning, Serah stood up. Bolts of lightning began to arc across her body, and when she turned to look at Clare her dark desert eyes were gone, replaced with glowing orbs of pure electricity. “It takes more than that to kill a Titan,” she rumbled, her voice suddenly deep and fierce as a hurricane. “Get back to Will. You must protect him. One of the Fallen is here.” And then she leaped back out through the hole in the roof and flew through the air, lighting flashing in her wake. A gale-force wind followed her passage, buffeting Clare so hard that she lost her balance and fell heavily on her backside.

Dazed—and completely astounded—Clare simply stared in shock for a moment. And then she felt a hand on her shoulder, and she turned to see Castor's woman staring down at her. “Come on!” she cried. “What are you doing? Get off the floor! We need to help the others!” She shook Clare's shoulders. “You need to help Will!”

That was all it took. Clare was dashing back out the door in a matter of moments, Katryna trailing behind her and the stoic Grim at her side. Overhead Serah flew toward the wall. She seemed to be made entirely of twisting, snapping lightning, and had sprouted what appeared to be a pair of dark, cloudy wings that left a churning trail of fog in her wake.

Clare made it to the nearest ramp of stairs just as Serah disappeared from view, and then she heard a chorus of tremendous booms that eclipsed even the roar of the cannons. The world flashed with unnatural daylight, and for a moment she was struck deaf and blind.

“Enemies of life,”
Serah rumbled, her voice booming with thunder,
“I am Sorr, goddess of the four winds. I have returned to rend you asunder. Your time has come.”

Clare crested the stairs just as the last note of Serah's voice echoed away into the distance. She saw a stray yaru leap over the edge of the wall, highlighted in flickering blue-white by Serah's lightning, its claws reaching for an unsuspecting soldier—and then it was torn apart in midair.

The beast's legs separated at the knees, its arms at the elbows and shoulders. The top half of its body split from the bottom at the waist, and its head, forever frozen with an expression of horrified surprise, spun away from its neck and tumbled away into the darkness. Blood rained down among the combatants, followed closely by the severed body parts.

The way Serah had cut Will's face flashed through Clare's mind, and she felt a sickening twist in her stomach. For one person to possess such power seemed...wrong.

But she put the gory spectacle out of her mind and looked frantically about for Will. When she finally saw him, she was horrified to see that he was holding two yaru at bay at once, fighting left-handed so as not to use his wounded arm. His face was twisted into a mask of pain and rage, but though his injuries were obviously hurting him he continued to fight relentlessly. His sword flashed and whistled through the air, and with phenomenal speed he blocked and parried the yaru's attacks. But he was losing energy fast—Clare could see him begin to slow, and a single claw made it through his defenses, tearing just the surface of his shirt sleeve before he yanked his arm back and spun out of the way.

Will was going to die in a matter of moments, and that knowledge awakened something inside of her, some deep presence that until then had remained dormant. Rage filled her—pure, white-hot rage that invigorated her entire body from head to foot, filling her veins with fire and sharpening her senses past anything she had ever experienced. The reek of blood and rent innards filled her nose and everything she saw seemed to sharpen with raptor-like clarity. The din of battle faded into the background, replaced with the sound of Will's sword ringing off of claws as hard as steel. Her muscles bunched, tightened, and bulged beneath her skin, and she was on them in an instant.

Her longsword flashed through the air, hewing through skin, muscle, and bone like a hot knife through butter as it passed through one of the yaru's arms at the elbow. The pieces separated with a sickening squelch as the cartilage in the joint parted, and the beast screamed, spinning toward her and flecking her face with its foul blood. Her next strike caught it underneath the chin, silencing it instantly, and the tip of her sword cracked through the top of its skull and halted a hand's breadth out the other side with mechanical efficiency. A feral snarl of fury tore from her lungs as she ripped her sword to the side, tearing the creature's head completely away from its shoulders. It slid off the end and tumbled away through the air, striking the ground with a wet squelch.

She used the excess momentum to bring her sword back, and then up over her head before cleaving diagonally downward. Her blade bit into the next yaru, and tore through its shoulder and almost completely through its body before thudding to a halt against its bottom rib. The creature's mouth gaped like a fish as it tumbled to the ground, a thick pool of blood spreading rapidly around its body.

Clare looked up and saw Will staring at her. He looked...terrified. She blinked, and the rage cleared, leaving her strangely light-headed.

“Are you alright?” Will asked cautiously.

“Are you?”

He nodded. “Thanks to you. But how did you...?” He indicated the first yaru's head, which lay a good distance away.

“No idea. Come on. Stay close to me and I'll keep you safe.”

~

The expression Clare had been wearing frightened Will—much more so than the prospect of dying at the hands of the yaru. The face he found so enchantingly beautiful had been twisted and contorted into a hideous mask of bloodthirsty rage. And then she had torn off the yaru's head as easily as if she had
been picking a flower. And she had moved so
fast.
For a moment he had been unable to move himself, frozen by the image before him.

But then she had turned back into the Clare he knew...he hoped. Still, the memory was troubling. And he was beginning to understand how she had been able to fend for herself against the horde for the past eight months. He shook his head, pushing the thought to the back of his mind; he couldn't be distracted now, not with so many enemies around him.

As if to prove his point, a yaru leaped on top of a man in front of him, punching one clawed hand through the man's skin and into his gut as though he were made of wet parchment. The soldier's eyes widened from pain so intense that he could not make a sound, and then the yaru ripped its hand away, dragging with it a long rope of entrails that the man feebly attempted to stuff back inside of himself. He collapsed a moment later.

Will made no sound as he charged; he simply swung his sword in an upward arc. He caught the yaru in its ribs, just beneath the arm, and then cleaved through its torso to the opposite shoulder. The beast's bloodstained mouth snapped at him as the severed portion of its body slid away and hit the ground with a sticky thud.

The sounds of battle reverberated all around him, the metallic ring of swords mixing chaotically with the screams and yowls of dying men and yaru and the deafening crack of thunder. The cannons had gone silent, but Serah had easily picked up where they left off.

He saw two yaru tear a group of five men apart, only to be cut down by a second set of soldiers. The archers had drawn their swords by now, and their battlecries mixed with their comrades' as they joined the melee atop the city wall.

And overhead Serah continued to hover, lightning flashing from her body to smite the yaru where they stood. The wind itself seemed to form into flurries of invisible blades that tore the yaru apart with grisly efficiency, and every now and again Will thought he could see a shimmer in the air where the ethereal blades flashed through the night.

It seemed once again that the defenders had the upper hand. But suddenly, off in the distance, something caught Will's eye. He looked down off the wall, to the very edge of the ring of torchlight, and saw none other than the boy yaru—the alpha. An unstoppable tide of its fellows swarmed around it like a mass of putrid water, and the boy simply stood and stared—straight at Will. It had that same dead, emotionless expression that he remembered from the forest, and when it turned its gaze on Serah's hovering form Will felt his stomach plummet. The boy's eyes flared bright red, shining like bloody suns.

“Serah!” Will screamed. “Look out!”

But he was too late; a roiling, twisting cloud of black energy, darker even than the night itself, leaped from the boy's body and collided with her. So great was the noise that his ears simply stopped working, and the force of the blast knocked Will away so that he landed painfully on his back. His vision swam as the back of his head smacked into the ground, and he groaned. Clare was thrown on top of him, and he clumsily flung his sword away at the last moment to avoid cutting her. He caught her with his bad arm. He winced and grunted in pain but did not let go.

“Thanks,” Clare said, though he could only watch her lips move; all he could hear was a shrill ringing in his ears. It faded slowly back into the sounds of battle, though they were tinnier now—those fighting nearest Serah had simply stopped to stare, awestruck.

“Will,” Clare said, “Will, I'm fine.” He nodded and released his hold on her, and then moved dazedly to retrieve his sword—but looked up in surprise when he realized that the blade was still reflecting Serah's bluish-white glow. The dark bolt of power from the boy had not, as Will had suspected, thrown her out of the air. Instead she continued to hover over the battlefield, all of her energy directed into one massive, roping beam of lightning. It was meeting the boy's own dark cloud head-on, and they seemed to be involved in some titanic battle of sheer will. The boy-yaru's face was twisted into a mask of grim concentration.

But Serah was losing.

Little by little the dark cloud was pushing her lightning farther and farther back, until it was only a scant few paces from Serah herself. But just as the black energy seemed about to reach her body, she let loose an inhuman scream of rage. With a blinding flare of light her beam of energy suddenly surged forward, smashing aside the boy's power. For an instant surprise etched itself across the boy's face, but then the lightning engulfed him. The explosion sent Will stumbling to his knees once more, and when he looked again over the side of the wall all that remained of the boy was a crater that belched thick, lazy clouds of smoke into the night air.
That's it?
Will thought, blinking in surprise.
We won?

Serah, once again her normal self, descended down next to Will and fell to her knees, breathing heavily. Jhai and Zizo were instantly at her side, seemingly materializing from thin air with their bloodied swords drawn and at the ready.

“Will,” Serah gasped, and he ran over and slid down next to her. “We have to leave now,” she panted.

“But why?” Will asked, dumbfounded. “You just obliterated their leader.”

She shook her head. “Not—
ah!
” She grimaced in pain and held her hand to her side, which Will noticed for the first time was marred by a gaping hole that went all the way through her body. Blood continued to trickle from the ragged wound. “Not dead,” she breathed through clenched teeth. “One of the traitors. Too strong for me.” She groaned. “Have to...heal. Then we are leaving.”