Fire in the Wall by S. G. Dunster

Author:S. G. Dunster [Dunster, S. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781795853422
Publisher: Blackhart Productions
Published: 2019-02-18T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

I yelled her name. I didn’t mean to. It escaped my body along with my breath.

“Logan,” Eap said urgently. “Up. Up.” He grabbed onto one of the ladders dangling above us that would take us back up to the Whippoorwill.

One of the creatures raised its head and looked at me with icy, laughing eyes.

Selah gasped. She said Dane’s name, too, her voice breaking around it as she grasped the lowest rung of a ladder and began climbing as fast as she could, her lean, dark body graceful and powerful, like an Olympic swimmer doing a crawl. Arapahoe, breathing hard, pulled himself up after her.

“Up, up,” Eap repeated, tugging at my arm from above. “We must keep on. Sirens like these are not limited to the ground as usual wolves are.”

I grabbed a bottom rung, and scrambled up a rope ladder as fast as I could, heart beating out of my chest, muscles in my arms and shoulders and back and stomach burning.

It seemed like forever. Selah and Arapahoe, even Lil and Eap, got there long before I did. Finally, I came up into the stern and collapsed on the wooden deck, gasping. “Keep going.” Eap hauled me to my feet. “Make your ship fly its turbines off.”

“Fly! Fly!” I roared. “Engines at full steam! Push it!”

The deck rumbled as the engine roared, and we began to move faster.

Not fast enough. Below us, the shadows were circling the platform, a dark maelstrom rising up toward us, suddenly towering over us. I saw faces in it—shapes. Wolves. And people.

“Go, go!” Lil shouted. She’d snapped out of her daze, and now she was swatting people left and right. A coal boy, one of my kitchen girls. “We have to go faster!”

The dark mass moved up. Tendrils of shadow arced into the deck and twisted around the mass of whirring paddles. Like a great, grasping hand, it tore them off with a sickening crunch. The deck shook, and the world swung wildly.

Shadow tendrils all along the deck grew with a terrifying speed, dark vines eating the wood. My coal boys were running everywhere trying to shift anchors, to release the weights. A tendril caught one and tore it off the deck’s bare, splintered stern edge and brought him plummeting down to the ground. I reached for it—I’m not sure why, to grab it away, to stop it somehow—and there was a sear of pain in my finger like a sharp knife-cut. Blood spattered the deck. I backed away as the shadows advanced, clutching my hand to my chest, leaving a trail of blood. A stream of shadow took in the blood. The bright specks swirled up into the darkness. There was a face. A face, forming in the shadow.

“No.” Eap’s voice, soft but resonant enough to make my marrow buzz, called out. And suddenly, the world was silent. Still.

I thought my heart slowed way down, and my breathing, too. Eap stood, facing the cloud, his dark curls torn by the wind but waving in slow motion.

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