Up in Smoke - Katie MacAlister [107]
Fear chilled me. Not a faint, worrisome fear, but the sort of freezing fear that slows your brain and locks your body into a statue of absolute, complete terror. Bael had kicked out Magoth?
“Jim?” I asked, blinding reaching my hand out for its head.
“Right here.”
“You remember what Aisling said?”
“Yup.”
I figured it hadn’t forgotten that Aisling had commanded it to follow any and all of my orders without exception.
“Excellent.” One part of my brain started back up, rather sluggishly, but enough to trigger self-preservation. “Destroy!”
A large, black furry shape lunged upward from the floor as Jim threw itself at the demon, taking it by surprise. The demon fell over backwards, immediately pulling the sword from its scabbard. I stomped down hard on its hand, causing it to scream in pain, Jim taking advantage of the distraction to clamp its teeth down on the demon’s other arm. I snatched up the sword, intending to disarm it and escape to the shadow world, but wrath demons are not so easily taken advantage of.
It spat out a few words, and instantly the ground was crawling with imps, nasty rage imps whose bodies were covered with a type of acid.
“Go!” Jim bellowed as it flung itself off the demon and onto the mass of imps that had risen as one to strike me.
I didn’t wait to debate the point, not while the wrath demon was preparing to spring at me. I twirled around and left that reality for the shadow world, the demon’s heavy sword still clutched in my hand as I raced away until I was sure it could no longer see me.
Instantly, I was aware of two things: one was Gabriel’s presence, and the other was that he was absolutely correct—there was another dragon there.
The man I’d come to think of as Baltic stood at the end of the twisted parody of Bael’s palace hallway. He spun around when I entered the shadow world, avarice chasing disbelief across his face as he saw me.
“You!” he said first, then seemed to scent the air. “You bear the dragon shard?”
He started down the hallway toward me.
“May!” Gabriel yelled; he was not visible to me, but I could feel his presence nonetheless. “What are you doing? Leave now!”
I spun around on my heels and bolted, not wanting to stay around to see what Baltic had on his mind. “I can’t!” I yelled to Gabriel as I raced around tortured bits of masonry and metal, sliding down an incline to a pit, only to leap up the other side and through a shattered archway. This part of Bael’s palace seemed to be in ruins in the shadow world, making it difficult to navigate. “Bael knows about the recall. He’s kicked out Magoth, which means I have no status.”
Gabriel swore again, this time more profanely, railing against the fact that he was unable to help me.
I hurdled a fallen stone pillar, quickly crawling underneath it to curl up in the inky recess it created, holding my breath as a shadow touched me briefly as it sped past.
“May? May!”
I waited until the dragon was well past me before emerging from my hiding spot, silently racing back the way I’d come. I assumed he could hear Gabriel and me talking, but the diffusing effect the shadow world had on sound made it likely he couldn’t pinpoint my location based on it.
“May, answer me!” Gabriel roared, anger, frustration, and an impotent fury audible in his voice.
“I’m here. I’ll find a way out,” I answered, taking a different path from the one that led to Chuan Ren’s prison. “Don’t worry about me, Gabriel. This is my world. I know my way around it.”
“Gabriel,” a male voice called out, uncomfortably close. I swung around and raced in the opposite direction. “Gabriel . . . Tauhou? Wyvern of the silver dragons.”
Gabriel spat out something in the language I recognized as Zilant, the tongue used by dragons centuries before English was adopted as a universal means of communication.
The voice chuckled, the