And there is fire.
Everywhere.
Shooting out of Tomas like a flamethrower.
Russ runs. He’s through the door, outside, and it slams closed in his face with such force, the entire building shakes. I look over my shoulder to find Pell, palms up, one of his limited magic talents in progress. The door is closed and locked. But we can hear the sheriff pounding on it. Demanding to be let in.
In that same moment, Tomas disappears and my moths fall to the floor at the threshold of the door, dead.
And then I drop to the floor too.
Unsure if I’m dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - PELL
I see it all from across the upper hall—the gun, the moths, the man, the girl, the dragon boy, my hands coming up to slam the door closed with a finality of an eternal curse—and I don’t understand a single second of it.
But Pie is unconscious.
I rush over to her, not wanting to step on the lifeless bodies of the beautiful wood nymph moths, but unable to help myself.
A groan from deep below the sanctuary reverberates up from the floor and I know that is Tomas. Spent. Hurting from his fire display. He will need time to recover from this. Lots of time.
But Pie also did magic, and she is spent too.
Tomas—I can’t do anything for him. I can’t even get close to him. He is not himself down there. But I can help Pie.
I pick her up in my arms and carefully carry her down the hallway near the stairs to the steam cave. Once inside, I remove her clothes, then step into the water with her in my arms and hold her as the mineral water brings her back to life.
She is not dead. It doesn’t literally bring her back to life. But this spring is special, and soon she is squirming in my arms.
“What happened?” Her voice is weak and shaky.
“Magic,” I say. It’s the only answer I have.
She sighs, turning her body in to me. And I settle on a rock ledge, leaning back and letting the moment just exist.
She’s still and quiet for a little bit. But then, slowly, she comes awake again. “Pell. Where’s Tomas?”
“Don’t worry about him. He’ll be OK. It’ll take a few days, maybe. But he’ll be OK.”
“What will happen to us? Will the sheriff come back? Will he bring others? He can let them all in!”
“Shhh,” I tell her. “Don’t worry about it. I think your spell and my door lock will hold for a little bit.”
“What spell?” She struggles to sit up. And even though I don’t want to allow this, she doesn’t give me a choice. She sits in my lap with her head on my shoulder. “I didn’t do a spell.”
“Oh, you did. You most certainly did. Don’t you remember all those moths?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t do that. They just appeared from my hands. I wasn’t in control—”
“Pie, you need to face facts. You’re… well, I don’t know what you are, but you’re not human. Not completely, anyway. You did do a spell. I have a feeling it was a warding. To keep him out. And it seems to have worked. At least with all three of us participating. You bound him up, Tomas pushed him back, and I closed him out. It should hold. For a little bit. But we’re gonna have to come up with something better than that. Grant’s wards were strong. Very strong. But they’re obviously wearing off. We need to do them again.”
“How?”
“That’s a talk for tomorrow. You need to rest. And eat. We all need to rest after that. We were stuck in the magic all day. Hell, maybe longer than a day. That’s enough to give us a hangover. But getting rid of the sheriff will have pushed us to our limits. We need to recover first.”
I can tell she wants to fight me on this, but she’s too weak. So she can’t. She knows I’m right.
We stay there for a while, just leaning on each other. Every once in a while, I can hear Tomas’s groans from below. He breathed fire. I have never seen him do that before and I don’t think it’s good for him. In fact, I think his dragon magic is a very, very bad thing for all of us.
Eventually, Pie is awake enough to get out and put her clothes back on. I want to carry her back down to the cottage, but she insists on walking. She does lean heavily on me as we make our way down the hill.
Once inside, I make a fire while she rests on the couch, then go through all the food we have and come up with cans of soup that can be easily warmed up on the wood stove. We don’t sit at the table. We just hold our bowls in our hands and eat on the couch.