The Sweetest Burn (Broken Destiny #2)

ADRIAN GLANCED AT my arm and his eyes widened. Without another word, he picked me up and ran across the roof, somehow managing to make his rapid steps almost soundless. When he reached the darkest corner where one of the emergency lights had burned out, he jumped down.

I stifled my grunt as we landed from that two-story drop with a thud that reverberated in my bones. Before I could tell him to put me down, he began running again, glancing behind himself several times. I did, too, but I didn’t see anything. I couldn’t hear anything, either, except the wind and the now barely perceptible sounds of the people inside. All in all, I took that as a good thing. If I was right and a demon was inside, at least it didn’t seem to have spotted us.

Adrian ran over to a looming clock tower that was surrounded by an iron fence. He easily scaled it, even with me still clutched to his chest. Once on the other side, he ignored my demand to be let down. He also ignored the door at the base of the tower and went around to the exterior stairs. He ran up those as though being chased, but unless he saw something I didn’t, no one was coming after us.

About two stories up, we came to another door, and this time, Adrian broke through it with one kick. The softly lit interior showed what appeared to be the mechanical guts of the clock that crowned the top of the tower. Adrian finally let me down inside here, but I had barely formed all the questions in my mind when he found the single emergency light and killed it, plunging the room into near-total darkness.

“What’s going on?” I whispered, blindly reaching out.

His hands covered mine moments later. “Shh.”

I stayed quiet, letting him guide me around the objects I’d only gotten a second to glimpse. I don’t know how he made his way without running into things, or how he found the staircase that took us at least another story higher in the tower. But he did, and a bracing, icy wind greeted us when we reached the top, which had large lookout points cut into the stone. At once, Adrian broke the small lights that lit up the exterior clock. If the castle hadn’t been near enough to see the lights that still illuminated it, the night would’ve resembled a wall of pitch.

“We should be safe here for a while.”

Adrian’s voice was low, but it wasn’t the whisper he’d used before. That, combined with his words, eased the knot that had formed in my stomach since my otherworldly tattoo had begun to glow and burn. Then he looked around, leading me to a corner where only a tiny window interrupted the stone.

“This spot should have the least amount of wind, and the stone walls will still retain a little heat from before.”

He paused on the word before, and I took in a slow, choppy breath. Right, before, when this tower and everything around it was being warmed by a bright desert sun. Now, nothing in this place would ever see the sun again. Another gust of wind blew by, a plaintive noise echoing on it that might have been a coyote’s howl, and I closed my eyes in silent grief.

No sunlight meant that every living thing here would die of starvation, if the cold didn’t kill them first. I wanted to howl, too, at the horrible fate that had literally dropped onto this place and everything in it. Find something else to fight for, Costa had urged me just days ago, and as I looked around, I knew that I had. If I could stop even one more place from suffering the awful future that awaited this one, it would be well worth the fight, whatever it cost me.

In the meantime, though, I could do nothing. The realization was no less bitter for its roots in logic. The staff wasn’t here, so all I could do was survive this realm in order to live to fight demons another day. I leaned back against the wall, a small, inadvertent sound leaving me when my back was warmed by the faint heat in the stones that would soon be gone.

“Why’d we come here?” I asked after a long moment. “Why didn’t we go back to the car?”

Adrian slid down the wall until he was resting on his haunches next to me.

“When people are afraid, they tend to stay indoors,” he replied, his tone matter-of-fact. “Add in the dark and the cold, and you almost never find them in exposed places outside. That’s why the demons and minions who arrive here will first look for humans in houses when they do their initial round-up. Then they’ll search all the cars, and eventually, they’ll get around to other open-area places, like the top of this tower. That means we should have a day or two at least to sneak past them to get to the gateway.”

Again, his almost casual way of describing this bothered me on many levels, but I had to focus on getting out of here.

“What if I’m wrong?” My voice was soft in case I wasn’t, and supernatural ears might be close by. “What if there is no demon, and the only people in that castle are a bunch of terrified humans?”

Adrian took my right hand and slid the jacket farther up my arm. “Do you see anything?”

It was very dark, but with the residual glow from the nearby castle, I could make out enough to see that the slingshot had faded back to its normal brown color, not to mention that my arm no longer hurt. “No. Not anymore.”

He let me go, and I thought I glimpsed a small, tight smile. “Exactly. The slingshot was glowing and now it’s not. To me, that means the demon is no longer near enough to active it.”

Activate it. I glanced at my arm again. That was one way to describe what had happened. Then I looked back at Adrian. If I concentrated, his features become clearer.

“I think it, ah, activated before, when you first came back and took out Snake Hands,” I told him. “I didn’t see the glow because of my long sleeves, but I felt the same pain. Maybe the slingshot embedded itself in my arm as a sort of...demonic early-detection system?”

Adrian looked at my arm, and this time, I was sure I caught a glimpse of a smile. “Maybe. Figures Zach wouldn’t have given us a heads-up about that. He does love his surprises.”

I let out a watery laugh. “Archons, right?”

Adrian laughed, too, and a thread of hope wormed its way through my depression over this area’s future. I’d gladly take the pain that came with the tattoo’s “activation” if it was warning us that a demon was near. We needed all the help we could get when it came to fighting demons, and if we won, no other place would have to suffer this same fate.

Adrian began to rummage through his jacket pockets. After a moment, he handed me a plastic bottle and something rectangular.

“Water and a power bar,” he said, his tone turning wry. “Hardly the romantic dinner I’d planned to have with you, but the jackets only have room for necessities.”

I gratefully uncapped the bottle and took a long swallow, then paused before my next one. “Where’s yours?”

He waved a hand. “I don’t want any right now.”

I knew him well enough to recognize a deliberately vague answer, and I gave him a look that he should’ve had no trouble deciphering. “That’s not what I asked you.”

With an unintelligible mutter, he pulled out an identical water bottle. “See? Happy now?”

I waited, drumming my nails for emphasis. “And?”