The Offering (The Pledge 3)

I doubted, however, that they realized I was in here, and that I could become a casualty should I be in the wrong place when their bombs were launched.

I moved quickly now, my disguise making it easy to maneuver through the throng of other bird-faced warriors. No one seemed to notice that I was half their size, or that I was moving in the opposite direction. They were all too focused on their own tasks. Far too occupied with the trappings of battle to pay attention to a pipsqueak underling who ran away from the uproar of the attacks.

I had no idea where I was headed, though. And the mask made it hard to see. The goggles’ lenses were transparent, but they were clouded over by residue from the smoke that seemed to be everywhere, including inside the mask. I choked on the taste of ash and the stink of my own sweat. I could hear every breath I took echoing back at me.

“Damn!” I cursed as I reached what seemed to be yet another dead end—a row of tents and tanks and soldiers packed so tightly together, it would be impossible for me to get through without drawing attention to myself. “Damn, damn, damn.”

I turned and raced down another long stretch of tents, past more screaming soldiers who barely noticed me. Torches flew past me in a blur as I refused to slow. And all the while, beneath my cloak, my fingers clutched the handle of the gun I’d pilfered, in case my luck soured and someone tried to stop and question me.

I ran, turning corner after corner, and ran some more. I bumped into soldiers and whipped past horses and overheard voices and smelled fire. I had no sense of where I was. I thought I was running away from the battlefront, but then it grew louder, and the ground rumbled more intensely, until it seemed I was standing at the very epicenter of it.

My heart sped, and so did my feet, carrying me away, until again I thought I’d put some distance between me and the fighting. Corpses littered the ground in places where the earth had been hollowed out by explosions. There were body parts, dismembered and grisly and charred, strewn about, and I could only imagine that the stench I smelled was that of burned flesh.

I ran from that, too.

There seemed to be no safe place. And no way out.

Stopping, my side aching, I weighed my options. As badly as I wanted to go after Elena and Niko, I knew this was neither the time nor place. Even if I managed to find them in this maze, I’d only be recaptured and used against my own troops as a way to force them to surrender.

I could hide in one of the tents and wait it out, stay out of sight until the fighting subsided, and then try to slip away, unnoticed. But that, too, seemed a poor plan. One that would likely end in my being discovered and recaptured by Elena and her men.

No, I had to take a chance. It was now or never.

My best option was to try to slip through the perimeter at its weakest and least defended point. To make a run for it.

Also not a great plan, but better than waiting there to die.

If only I could reach my troops to let them know I was alive. I’d be safe then.

Urging myself to keep going, I ignored Sabara’s whispered rancor, Surrender, Charlaina. Surrender now while you still can.

She was still angry over being bested by me—still trapped in a place she longed to escape. Her vitriol spilled into my thoughts, and my blood, as she tried everything in her power to poison me.

I ran, knowing there was nothing I could do to save myself from the danger within.

Unfortunately, I ran smack into a wall of soldiers who were marching in the opposite direction. The impact threw me backward, and I landed flat on my back.

The mask, which had been too loose for my head in the first place, slipped halfway up my face. The goggles got lost in my tangled hair beneath the hood of my stolen cloak. I was virtually blinded by the metal covering my eyes. “Who are you?” a voice boomed above me.

My heart pounded as I realized I’d been discovered. My mouth went dry. Too dry to form words, or even to move. I was paralyzed by fear. Even my fingers, still curled around the gun’s grip, were frozen.

I wanted to answer, to tell him there’d been some sort of mistake. To surrender, even. But I was incapable of doing anything.

And then a gunshot split the air right above me, and I flinched. And flinched again at the next one. And again, and again.

I waited for the pain. For the searing heat of a bullet’s wound. For the warmth of seeping blood. Something to indicate where I’d been shot.

But there was none of that. Just the sounds and smells of the battle continuing around me.

When I dared to reach for my mask, my heart was hammering so hard, my ribs ached. I lifted it, pushing it all the way aside.

In front of me, where there had once been a massive wall of beaked soldiers, there was now a pile of gunshot-riddled bodies slumped on the ground.

I scurried as far back from them as I could get, glancing around to see who had done this . . . and saw the last person— or people—I’d expected.

Caspar—or at least I was almost certain it was Caspar, with his black eyes peering at me from behind his mud-crusted disguise—grinned down at me. “Thought I might find you here.” “How—how did you know it was me?”

“Recognized your glow.”

I glanced down at myself and could see he was right. There was a definite luminescence radiating from where I’d removed the mask.

I wasn’t sure what to say. This was the strangest turn of events I could ever have imagined. All the fighting—the bombs, the bodies—I had been certain it was Ludanian troops. “Why? Why would you do this? Why are you here?”