Page 88 of Storm to Victory
Jayna landed next to her. “Come on.”
The two of them raced through the buildings toward the wall. In the office behind them, the man shouted, raising the alarm.
They just had to get out of the complex, then they could disappear into the city streets.
More shouting rang out behind them. Then a gunshot cracked against the night.
Pip bit down on her squeal of fright and ran faster at Jayna’s heels. She didn’t dare use her magic. Not yet, anyway. At this point, the Mongavarians didn’t know a person with her kind of magic existed. At least, they didn’t know she was in Mongavaria.
But if they saw her magic, realized what she could do, and started putting the pieces together…
Then she and Prince Edmund would be in a lot of trouble.
At the wall, Jayna grasped the vine, her green magic blasting into it with such force that the whole thing glowed green for a moment.
The vine snatched Pip off the ground with such speed that her breath was squeezed out of her. She gasped as she was yanked upward, and it was all she could do to cling to the satchel and try to catch her breath.
“There they are!” The shout rang out just as they crested the top of the wall. For a moment, they hung, suspended and silhouetted against the night sky.
A gunshot rang out just as Pip was being yanked downward again. Pain sliced across her upper arm, and this time she cried out, slapping a hand to the spot.
Then she was below the wall, even as more gunshots blasted into the quietness of the night, the bullets zipping high overhead.
Her feet touched the ground in the relative safety on the other side of the wall. The vine released her before it slumped, already brown and dying.
“How badly are you hit?” Jayna appeared in front of her, her gaze searching.
“Not…not bad. I don’t think.” She was shaking as if caught by an extreme chill. Something hot squeezed between the fingers she had pressed over her upper arm.
Jayna’s gaze settled there as she tugged the handkerchief off her face. “Let me see.”
Pip gritted her teeth and lifted her hand. Her arm burned, and just shifting it enough for Jayna to get a better look had tears gathering at the corners of her eyes.
Jayna stepped closer and peered at Pip’s arm. “I think it is just a graze. But we can’t take time to deal with it now. We have to get moving.”
Then with a swift, almost ruthless movement, she wrapped the handkerchief around Pip’s arm and tied it tightly.
Pip kept her mouth shut around her cry of pain, forcing herself to take off her own handkerchief and hand it to Jayna.
Jayna tied that one around her arm too before she took the satchel from Pip. “Come on.”
The two of them briefly ducked into the carriage house, grabbed the bundles they’d made of their maid uniforms, then set out through the back garden of the next house over.
Thanks to all the commotion, lights were turning on in the townhouses, and people were peering out windows and opening doors to see what was going on.
Jayna kept them going through the back gardens until they reached an alley just as motorcars screeched around the corner of the main street, men shouting orders.
Pip stumbled in Jayna’s wake, following her lead as they ran through the streets of Landri. At one point they even used the train tracks to cut through a neighborhood without being seen.
Eventually, they found a sheltered spot near the castle where they changed back into their uniforms. The black fabric hid the blood that was still seeping through the two layers of handkerchiefs and dribbling down Pip’s arm. Instead of heading for the door they’d gone out of, Jayna led them to a sheltered spot where she used her plant magic to lift them up and over a garden balustrade.
When the two of them finally stumbled their way through their back door into the dungeon and into the room they’d turned into their headquarters, Prince Edmund took one look at them and pushed off the bed where he’d been lounging. “What happened?”
“We were seen leaving. Pip was shot.” Jayna collapsed onto a chair, breathing hard, her face washed in a gray pallor.
“How bad?” Prince Edmund’s gaze focused on Pip as he shuffled toward her.
Pip’s legs wobbled, and she somehow tottered her way forward. “Just a graze. That’s what Jayna said.”
