Jekhipe coiled to strike.
“Tiggy, now!”
Three things happened at once:
Jekhipe struck, teeth flashing;
and,
Tiggy grabbed Ryan and bolted to the side, out of the way;
and,
I jumped in the other direction as Jekhipe snapped its fangs at me. I felt the heat of its mouth as it missed me by inches. It slammed into the precarious battlement face-first. The tower swayed dangerously and then it tipped, tipped, tipped—
And then collapsed on top of Jekhipe’s head.
I scooted back as quickly as possible, trying to avoid falling stone. When it landed on Jekhipe, its body tensed and began to writhe. For a moment, I thought it was going to squeeze Kevin and Gary further, but it released them, causing them to sag toward the ground as Gary gasped sharply.
“Sam!”
I turned and looked toward the other end of the island, where the sea of sand had been before I’d destroyed it.
Ruv stood there, waving his arms over his head. “Sam, this way!”
I pushed myself up off the ground and started to run.
Jekhipe roared behind me as I heard it pull itself out of the collapsed battlement. I didn’t look back, didn’t stop to see if it was coming after me or how close it was. Al
l I focused on was Ruv.
Wizard wizard wizard wizardwizardwizard—
My lungs burned with every step I took as I jumped over the ruins of the desert castle that lay spread out around me. Magic was curling itself against my skin, and I knew my eyes were flashing again. The ground shook beneath my feet as Jekhipe tore after me. I could do this, I could make this—
“Sam!” Ruv shouted. “Left, move left!”
I moved left.
Jekhipe’s head came down on my right, jaws snapping closed around nothing, much closer than I thought it’d be. The eye on the left side of its head focused on me, still black, but there was a hint of a reptilian shape in the cornea.
I kept running.
I distinctly remembered the island being much shorter than it was right now. Fear and terror of being eaten by a snake dragon monster thing apparently caused me to misjudge distances, because one moment, Ruv looked like he was as far away as the City of Lockes, and the next, I was about to crash into him.
“Go!” I shouted at him. “Go! Go!”
He started moving, and by the time I caught up with him, was running full tilt.
“What’s the plan?” he shouted at me, darting to the left when Jekhipe tried to snap at him.
“The plan? I thought you had a plan! You told me to start running toward you!”
“It was about to eat you!”
“It’s about to eat me now!”
The stone path that led across the cavern lay ahead. We were quickly running out of land on which to run. And the path was broken halfway through, probably farther than we could jump, from where Tiggy had fallen from the sky on top of the mermaid.