Blind Salvage: A Rylee Adamson Novel(55)

From behind him came a voice I did recognize. Dox.
“Rylee, just let him help!”
Liam scooped up the foal. “I’ll carry her as far as I can.” She rested her chin on his shoulder, trust shining through the threads I still held onto. Keeping pace with Liam, we ran for the stairs, bolting up them as the lava spilled over the lip of the pit, eating up the ground where we’d stood only moments before.
The grey ogre didn’t ask, just took Calliope from Liam’s arms, and she didn’t fight either of them. Fatigue washed through her and I finally let her threads go. I didn’t need to feel that; I was tired enough as it was without her adding to it.
The grey-skinned ogre spoke to Liam. “We have to move fast, and you may have to carry the Tracker.”
Across from us stood ogres in every color possible. Like a bag of skittles, see the fucking rainbow that would like to taste you after roasting you on a spit. This couldn’t be good, yet they weren’t trying to kill us.
“The Roc—” I started to ask, and Grey boy cut me off.
“Time for answers later. We have to move our asses if we’re going to all get out of here alive.”
Dox ran to my side, the distinct imprints of teeth all over his neck and shoulders. At least he’d had some fun. “Rylee, you… .”
I shoved him to get him going. “We couldn’t wait.”
We took off, running blind down the mountain in the dark, night having fallen fully as we’d fought Orion. The ground around us shook, and a blasting spurt of lava erupted out the side of the mountain, three hundred feet to the left of us.
The ogres covered the ground in leaps in bounds, literally jumping and letting gravity taking them further down the mountain with each stride, snow flying up around their feet as they landed. An explosion behind us spurred me on. Out of the frying pan we were, and into the big-ass fire.
A crackling sizzle reached my ears, but I didn’t turn around.
“It’s hot on our heels, get your fat, monkey sucking asses moving!” Dev shouted, and the ogres seemed to find a new gear. Liam didn’t scoop me up, but Tin did, snagging me around the waist and throwing me on his back. I clutched around his neck with my arms, and stood on the thick edge of his belt.
Then I looked behind us, sucking in a sharp, horrified breath. The entire top of the mountain was crumbling inward as the lava burst up and out. Brilliant red and orange geysers of liquid death shot into the starless sky followed by massive billows of black smoke illuminated by the lava that spilled down the mountain toward us. With each passing second the lava drew closer, eating up everything in its path.
“We aren’t going to make it,” I yelled, hoping that their mages had some way to help us.
Two of them turned around long enough to toss a spell, that to my eyes, did nothing.
“They pushed the gases in the other direction,” Tin said. My understanding of volcanoes wasn’t at its peak, but I did recall something about a flow of gas and rock that outpaced even the lava. I looked back, and all I saw was the red flow of death. I suppose that was better than the alternative of choking to death on fumes and then being consumed by the lava.
Grey boy glanced over his shoulder. “Head for the lake.”
As one, the ogres turned, angling toward the lake that surrounded the base of the mountain. Though it had taken us hours to climb Mt. Hood, riding ogre-back on the downhill took mere minutes. We were out of the snow now, but the ground was sloppy and wet, thick with ash, and a red ogre to the right of us lost his footing, tumbled and fell.
The lava caught him, swallowed him in one gulping wave, leaving behind his hand reaching up for a second, the fingers blackening before the lava even touched them.
I swallowed hard, heart pounding, my adrenaline racing and there wasn’t a damn thing I, or anyone else, could do.
The sharp incline leveled out and the gang of ogres thundered into the forest. Like a living thing, the lava flowed ever onward, devouring everything in its path. This was what Orion did, with a few words? With a gesture and a single spell when his host’s body had a broken neck? Son of a fucking bitch, he was as bad as all the prophesies made him out to be.
Maybe worse.
Thank the gods he was done.
Tin leapt over a downed log, and my feet slid off his belt, leaving me dangling from his back. All thoughts of Orion fled as I fought to hang onto the bounding ogre, the vision of what had happened to the red ogre who’d gone down seared in my mind. That would be a seriously bad way to end this salvage.
“Tracker, if you fall, I can’t stop,” Tin puffed out.
“Got it,” I barked out. Shit, I was sliding; there was nothing I could hang onto, his slick bare skin giving me no traction whatsoever.