Page 6 of Fractured
“The mirror.”
Every drop of blood in my veins turned to stone, yet somehow, when Hessa kept moving for the door, I did, too.
I made it up, I just made it up,I thought as I carried half of Helid’s weight, and I was moving, but…
“N-Nilah, the mirror.”
Again, Helid said that word.Mirror.
“Hush, my love, save your energy,” Hessa said, and no, I wasnotsurprised at what she called him because I wasshockedat what he was saying to me.
And then we were outside in the hallway. My legs were still moving—I couldn’t tell you how.
But Helid wasn’t interested in saving energy because he said, “Find it at all costs.”
So many things went through my head. I saw nothing ahead, only moved, my mind busy with questions—how the hell do you know about the mirror? Why are you in a jail cell? Why have you been stabbed? Do you mean the mirror in the hands of the Ice Queen?
I had no voice to bring these questions to the outside world, though, and Helid kept chanting, “Find the mirror, find it. Find the?—”
The bright light that basicallymelteddown the barred door of the cell room we’d come through cut him off. The energy that came from it crashed onto us like a wave, picked us up andthrewus back like we weighed nothing at all.
Hessa screamed. I couldn’t—my vocal cords were still locked down by shock. Even when I hit something withmy back, fell, and rolled on the ground, I still couldn’t make a single sound.
My eyes were wide open, though. The shock erased any trace of pain from my body, too, so I sat up at the same second I fell, and as the dust slowly settled, I was able to see.
The Seelie Queen was standing just inside the cell room, the guards Hessa had left unconscious on the ground still there, the metal of those barred doors melted into shiny pools at her bare feet.
“I told my son you were not to be trusted, but he’s become blind by his confidence.”
The words weighed on my shoulders like fucking bricks.
I thoughtIwas the one she spoke to, but it took me a few blinks to realize that the queen wasn’t looking my way at all.
She was looking at the other side of the cell room—at Hessa, who was standing, pushing back the hair that had fallen on her face, her dress dirty, her teeth gritted.
“You traitorous?—”
That’s as far as the queen made it before Hessa attacked.
Once more, blinding golden light took away my vision, and my instincts reacted, and I was crawling on all fours, moving toward the other body on the ground—Helid, who’d fallen on his side and couldn’t even sit up.
Could Hessa beat the Queen of the Seelie Court in a fight?
I had no fucking clue. But what Icoulddo right now was grab Helid and make sure we ran together the moment we could. It was the only thing that made sense to me in this chaos and the only thing I could let guide me.
Except pulling Helid up all by myself was more difficultthan I expected, and I couldn’t even tell you why. He wasn’t a big guy, wasn’t bulky, but it took all my efforts to pull him to even sit up and drag him a little closer to the wall.
Meanwhile, the golden lights behind me continued to flash as the queen and Hessa fought—which, by the way,what the actual fuck?!
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” I kept chanting like an idiot, trying to pull Helid up, and he looked so strange with the beard, with his hair all over the place, with his golden eyes half open while he struggled to breathe.
He was most definitelynotokay, and the wound Hessa had tried to heal on him was bleeding again. I realized it when my hand fell on his chest and came out wet—with blood.
“Listen to me, mortal,” Helid whispered, and I barely heard him because of the screams and cries of the women fighting behind us. I even turned to look, but Helid’s hand closed around my wrist and he pulled me so hard, I was in shock all over again.
“My sister has set the curse in motion,” he said, eyes closed, his lips barely moving.
“Helid, please,” I said, simply because I had no fucking cluewhat elseto say, how to tell him that he wasn’t making any sense at all.
