CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
WE TOLD GELILA to drive her boat away as fast as she could. She’d be far safer on the water than she would be on the island. Then we followed the monks up the steep, rocky terrain. The jungle was so thick around us that I could barely see the ground, let alone the path that the monks traveled with ease. But the possibility of losing my footing was hardly my biggest concern.
“Please tell me you’ve got lots of guns on this island,” Adrian said. “The eclipse won’t last long, but while it does, they’re going to hit us with everything they’ve got.”
And if we survived that, nightfall wasn’t far away, so they’d be back for more. Yeah, lots of guns would help. Bullets couldn’t kill demons, but they could kill minions. Besides, pumping demons full of bullets would distract them, and I’d need all the distraction I could get to reach the spearhead, reattach it to the pilum and use it before one of the demons stopped me.
“We have many swords, but only a few guns,” Sebhat replied.
Adrian ground out a curse in Demonish. Sebhat looked sharply at him. “How do you know that tongue?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said quickly. The last thing we needed was for them to freak out over who Adrian was. “We’ll need all of you to arm up with whatever you’ve got, and if you have any mirrors on the island, they need to be broken. Now.”
Sebhat pulled out a satellite phone. I would’ve been impressed that he had one, except the pilum suddenly yanked me so hard to the right, I almost bashed myself into a tree.
“Ivy!” Adrian tried to help me, but I pulled away, breathing hard. I didn’t trust what would happen if he accidentally brushed against the pilum again. Ever since I set foot on this island, it had been powering up, until it felt like it was starting to burn me even through the layers of towel.
“Don’t come near me, Adrian,” I said tightly. “It’s too dangerous. The pilum’s power is growing, and it’s being pretty specific that it wants me to go to the right, not straight.”
Sebhat came closer. The way was so narrow, we’d been walking single file. Adrian’s tall, broad shoulders left most of the monk’s face hidden, but I could still see some of Sebhat’s face, and his expression was reverent.
“The spearhead is to the right as the crow flies, but the climb is too steep and the jungle too dense that way. You must follow us up this path until we reach the clearing.”
Adrian glanced up at the sky. What had been a small spot before now stretched to a cone shape, and the sky was darkening by the moment. “Whichever way we go, we need to hurry.” To me, he said, “Don’t suppose you can use the staff to slow down the onset of the eclipse and buy us more time?”
What was meant as a laugh came out as a gasp as new flares of pain shot up my arms. The towel might keep my hands from erupting in burns on the outside, but the pilum now felt like it was burning me on the inside, too.
“Doubt it.” The intensity of the pain made my reply more snippy than I’d intended. “For one, my tats haven’t activated because the demons aren’t here yet. For another, I might have been able to blast away some clouds, but I don’t think I can stall the alignment of the planets. Lastly, it’s taking everything I have to keep holding on to this pilum, so don’t expect more from me, because I’m about done.”
The look Adrian gave me briefly made me forget how it felt like fire had replaced my blood in the worst possible way. For a second, all the anguish he’d been hiding came out, and seeing it seared me in ways that my physical pain never could.
“It’s okay, Ivy,” he rasped. “You’re right. You’re almost done.”
I closed my eyes. I hadn’t meant it that way, but he was right. I was almost done, permanently. Yet if I looked at him one more moment, I might throw away the pilum, my destiny and the lives of all those trapped people just to see that awful pain leave his expression. Out of everything I futilely wished I could change, hurting Adrian was at the top of that list.
But I couldn’t change that, and no matter how it tore at me, I had to look past it. “Call your people,” I said to Sebhat. “Tell them to get their guns and break their mirrors. We’re almost out of time.”
We started back up the path, and I walked those first few steps with my eyes still closed. Only when I heard Sebhat talking into his phone did I open them. By then, Adrian had turned away, yet the shadows that no one else could see had grown until they rose behind him like a living storm. If I was tempted to throw the pilum away, Adrian had to be fighting every cell of his combined demon and Judian heritage not to yank it from my hands and destroy it.
I couldn’t say anything to help him with this fight. This one, he had to do by himself. I knew he was strong enough, but it took only one moment of weakness to ruin everything. So many lives depended on both of us being at our best for just a little bit longer. We couldn’t fail. We couldn’t.
Adrian’s head suddenly whipped around, then he pointed up. “A plane’s coming in very low. Is that normal around here?”
Sebhat shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked up. “No,” he said in a concerned tone. “Not that type of plane.”
We quickened our pace up the steep trail. When we reached a small clearing at the top, the plane flew directly overhead, and a thick white cloud released from the back of it. It landed on the island in a way that reminded me of crop dusting, but there were no fields to fertilize here. When a new, even more intense pain suddenly hit me, I thought I knew what it was.
“Poison gas,” I said, covering my nose with my sweater even though I doubted that would help.
“No,” Adrian spat. “Something else.” He gave a hate-filled look at the pale substance falling all around us like a thicker, sandier version of snow. “The ground has been cursed.”
What? “I thought you had to enclose a place in circles made from powerful dark relics to do that, like you did when you held Blinky under the church.”
“That’s one way.” Adrian’s tone was as dark as his shadows. “But if you’re in a hurry, you can saturate a place with the ground-up bones of hundreds of minions, and that will turn even hallowed ground into cursed earth.”
I looked at the pale substance with a disgusted sort of understanding. Minions, like demons, turned to ash when they died, so they didn’t leave behind bones that could be ground up. That meant Demetrius and the other demons would’ve had to keep the minions alive while they hacked off their limbs in order to harvest their bones. No wonder such heinous torture resulted in cursing the earth of whatever it touched.
The sun was more than half hidden by the shadow of the moon now, and a sudden chill swept through the air as darkness descended. The ground was cursed, the sky was darkened and we all knew what would come next.
Adrian met my eyes, his shadows swirling madly around him, and said, “We’re out of time. You have to run, Ivy. Don’t wait, don’t look back and don’t let anything stop you.”
I knew he was right, yet I still wanted to say that I loved him, I was so proud of him, and a thousand other things. Instead, I turned and ran in the direction where the pilum was leading me. It took all of my willpower, but I did it.
The attack came ten seconds later.