Page 151 of The Rebel and the Rose
Plucking a rusted sword from the riverbank, Sera staggered on. Five steps, then five more, held upright by the furnace of her own magic.
Ransom was up again, the sword heavy in his hand. The river wind rippled up the back of his shirt.
Her heart lurched. ‘RANSOM!’
The corpses edged closer, no longer attacking. But taunting.
Lark’s little power game.
Sera flung herself into the fray, swinging with everything she had. Bones shattered, falling around her like confetti as they went to work, fighting side by side. After a while, the bodies stopped rising. Unseeing skulls stared up from the grass, the odd finger twitching, before falling still.
Without an army of skeletons between them, Sera saw Lark more clearly now. Standing alone with his hands in hispockets, he looked out over the debris of bone and metal, and shrugged, as though he had simply got bored.
Was it a reprieve or another one of his games?
Sera was so busy glaring at the Necromancer that she missed the sight of Andreas leering at them from the outer parapet of the Summer Palace. ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us, Saint-maker!’ yelled the soldier at his side, acting as his temporary mouthpiece. ‘We won’t let an enemy as powerful as you simply walk away!’
Andreas raised his hand, and a volley of arrows arced through the sky.
Sera dropped to the grass, covering her head in her hands. The arrows struck, plinking off metal and bone. But there came no pain. No wounds. Drawing a careful breath, she peered through the crook of her arms. Arrows littered the ground around her. Missed, all of them.
There was a deep, sucking gasp.
Sera’s heart stopped.
No.
A few feet ahead of her, Ransom was doubled over, clutching at an arrow in the centre of his chest. The one he had taken for her.
Sera’s scream split the night in two.
He stumbled backwards, blindly reaching for her. ‘Seraphine.’
The word was blood-soaked and far too quiet.
It sounded like goodbye.
‘No.’ She lunged for him, but he was already falling.
It only took a stumbling misstep.
He went over the riverbank.
She screamed again, reaching the edge just in time to watch him fall. Down, down, down into blackness and oblivion and cold, unforgiving water.
Chapter 39Seraphine
Ransom was dead. If that arrow didn’t kill him, the river would. He couldn’t swim, couldn’t breathe with that steel in his chest.
Andreas’s general bellowed another command. More arrows flew, but this time, Sera didn’t look up. She was looking down at that dark, churning water.
The thread in her chest went taut.
One minute she was on the bank, and the next, she was free-falling down into the swirling waters of the Verne. She barely registered the shock of cold or the tug of the current. Every fibre of her being was focused on Ransom.
Find him.
Save him.
