Page 33 of Rook
Get up. Keep going. They need you.
Somehow, she made it to the prisoner tent, now abandoned by its guards. The canvas flap hung partially open, revealing darkness within.
She opened the flap and was immediately assaulted by a muddy shoe.
"Stay the fuck away from us!" Janice screamed.
Sasha raised her hands, which may have looked a bit threatening since she was still holding her gun. "I'm here to rescue you."
Janice gave her an appraising look. "Took you long enough."
Janice was there. And Vanessa, along with a few of the others she'd seen on MISSING posters. There were also five others who'd been taken yesterday. Sasha didn't know all of their names, but she recognized most of the faces.
"Come on," she said. "We need to hurry."
She holstered her gun and pulled a small pocketknife from her boot, sawing through the crude restraints binding their wrists and ankles. Some of the captives were drugged, their movements sluggish, eyes unfocused. Others helped Sasha, working in frantic silence to free everyone. Vanessa, her nurse's training kicking in, checked each person for injuries as they were released.
"Can you walk?" Sasha asked a teenage boy whose ankle was swollen to twice its normal size.
"I'll fucking crawl if I have to," he spat, struggling to his feet.
They moved as a ragged group out of the tent, Sasha in the lead, Janice bringing up the rear. The camp was eerily deserted, most of the slavers drawn to the battle on the north side. The sounds from that direction had changed, though. Fewer explosions now, more shouts and an occasional roar that made the hair on Sasha's arms stand up.
Was Rook winning? Losing? The decrease in chaos made her stomach knot with worry.
"This way," she hissed, pointing toward the tree line. "Stay low and quiet."
They were almost home free. If they made it to the tree line, Sasha was sure they could disappear, and the dragons wouldn't ever find them.
The group moved as quickly as they could, half-running, half-stumbling across the open ground. Twenty yards to go. Fifteen. Ten.
Behind her, Sasha heard a thud and a cry of pain. She whirled to see Janice sprawled on the ground, clutching her ankle, face twisted in agony.
"Keep going!" Sasha shouted to the others, who hesitated only briefly before continuing their desperate dash for the trees.
Sasha ran back to Janice, dropping to her knees beside the older woman.
"You're okay," she said, helping Janice to her feet. "We're almost there."
Then a line of fire appeared right in front of her, the heat hot enough to singe her hands.
"I don't think you're going anywhere."
18
Fire raged around Rook, the natural playground of any dragon. The battle was chaos and fury.
The first slaver came at him with a whip of flame that crackled through the air like lightning. Rook deflected it with a wall of his own fire, the heat sliding off his skin harmlessly, and twisted his wrist to send the heat snapping back. It caught the slaver across the chest, and he went down with a scream that cut through the night.
These weren't warriors. They fought like street brawlers, all raw power and no finesse. Their flames were wild, uncontrolled, wasted on flashy displays instead of precision strikes.
At the Royal Academy, instructors would have beaten such sloppy technique out of them in the first week. But what they lacked in skill, they made up for in numbers and desperation.
A jet of blue-white fire erupted from his left. Rook threw his shoulder back and out of the way as the flame gusted past him, close enough to singe the air where his head had been. He spun, his own fire already forming in his palm, and hurled it at the attacker. The slaver barely managed to throw up a shield of his own flames in time.
Rook was the more skilled fighter, but it was one on ten, and the slavers just needed to get lucky.
Two more slavers circled around behind him, trying to flank him while he was engaged with the others. Rook could hear their boots scraping against the rocky ground, could smell the acrid tang of their fire building. He feinted left, then dove right, rolling across the dirt as twin streams of flame crossed where he'd been standing.
