When I grab the handle of his axe, he pulls back on it sharply, trying to wrench me loose, and we grapple with it for a few seconds, him pulling, me pulling, the axe slicing around at a blank spot of air.
When I’m sure he’s pulling with every last bit of his strength, I let go. He goes flying, taking two stumbling off-balance steps before rolling onto his back, still clutching at the axe handle, as if he thinks it will protect him against—
—cracking his head off a pillar. He shoots me a final helpless look and then his eyes close, his shoulders weaken, and his fingers uncurl, letting the axe slide away. Two down.
There are grunts and cries all around me. I whirl around, trying to take it all in, but it’s too much. Everything’s a blur of movement and fighting and killing. This is no pub fight. This is real. People are dying. And then—
like the strange distortion of a nightmare becoming real,
everything twists
and turns
and comes together
in one moment of clarity, as the curves straighten and the blurs sharpen. And what I see is this:
Skye standing over a growing pile of bodies, wiping her dripping knife on her hip;
Siena dodging a punch from a guy twice her size, diving, rolling, snagging a satchel of arrows and a bow from a fallen guard, stringing one, shooting the guard through the neck;
Circ sword fighting another guard, taking a blow to his off-shoulder, but swinging his own sword across his opponent’s chest, striking him down;
Feve, moving as fast as Skye, running from enemy to enemy, eliminating them with seemingly no more than his bare hands and a short knife;
Wilde, using a long dagger to hold her own against two medium-sized guards with swords, but getting pushed back, back, back toward the palace, until—
—Buff charges from the side tackling the guards, laying down a barrage of punches on one of their faces while the other lies motionless, his own sword sticking from his chest;
Abe getting hit in the leg by a wall guard’s arrow, going down, Brock standing over him and screaming obscenities at the foursome of guards that surround them, holding them off until—
—he gets stabbed through the gut and his eyes go white, and he falls, falls onto Abe, who’s injured but not dead, a dead man covering a living one, but then—
—Hightower is there, swinging a huge club in one hand and a battle axe in the other, chopping down guards like small trees, throwing his axe down, rolling Brock off his brother, picking Abe up and slinging him over his shoulder, arrows filling the air like sleet, hitting him once, twice, thrice, shoulder, chest, thigh, but he’s running, running like a raging bear, using his club to knock away the guards in his path, another arrow, this one in the arm with the club, which he’s forced to drop, reaching the gate crank, kicking the guard who’s manning it, and finally, finally, using one arm to spin the crank faster than anyone’s probably ever cranked it.
The gate starts to open.
It slides higher and higher, rising up into the hollowed out wall. We all hear it—and so do the guards, who begin running toward it to make their last stand. The wall guards abandon their posts and throw ropes over the wall, slide down them. There are only a half-dozen left.
Skye yells, “To me!” and there’s no doubt that she’s the leader of the fighting portion of our escape.
I start to run to her, but then I realize that in my moment of clarity, there was one person missing. The person I should’ve been looking for first, who, was I thinking clearly, I would’ve sought out. My brother. Wes.
I stop and spin around, searching, searching—frantically freezin’ searching—and not finding. The others rush past me toward Skye, stampeding over any guards in their path. Buff grabs my arm, tries to pull me. “We gotta go!” he says.
“Wes,” I say. “Have you seen him?”
“What? Nay. He’s probably with the others…” We both look to where the others are standing, Skye shouting quick orders. He’s not there.
“C’mon!” Skye yells in our general direction.
I push Buff toward them. I run the other way.
Chapter Twenny-Six
I hear a cry behind me but I don’t look. The others are storming the gate, fighting their way through. I should be with them, helping, not running away, but I can’t leave him. I can’t.
I run through the courtyard, tossing aside bodies of guards piled on bodies of guards, desperately trying to find the man who clothed and fed Jolie and I when my father was dead and my mother stricken with something worse than death. But he’s not here. He’s not here.
Then, suddenly, Buff’s beside me, pulling at bodies, searching alongside me. “Go!” I yell at him, right in his face. “Go, you can’t be here!”