Cursed

I leant around the door frame, ducking my head against the scalding heat, and tossed the gem. It rolled to a stop a couple of feet behind the door. An instant later a piece of ceiling fell in with a crash, taking a patch of floor with it.

I felt the forcewall go down and the fire mage did too. I ducked back into the bathroom and slammed the door as a red light flashed and the wood of the door heated as the fire mage hosed down the bedroom. A second later, over the roar of flames, I heard the tread of footsteps. I waited until the fire mage was on top of the crystal, then signalled to Meredith.

The timing was perfect. The crystal exploded into a hundred tiny shards of jagged ice, throwing the fire mage from his feet and stunning him. “Come on!” I called to Meredith as I pulled the door open.

But as I looked out into the bedroom I realised with a chill that we’d left it too late. Everything in the bedroom was blazing. The bed was a bonfire, a wall of flame separated us from the living room, and the living room itself was an inferno. A wall of heat hit me, crisping the hairs on my arms, and choking smoke rolled over us, setting us ducking and coughing. I slammed the door again.

Meredith looked up me at with wide eyes. I tried desperately to think. Run through the flames—suicide. Stay here—suicide. Climb out—probable suicide. Probable suicide won. “Out the window.”

Meredith stared. “I’ll fall!”

“Falling beats burning.”

Meredith took a step to the window, looked out at the sheer drop, and turned back, her face ashen. “It’ll kill me!”

“Going out might. Staying here will. Pick!”

Meredith hesitated, then began to climb out, white-faced. There were enough handholds on the wall to make the climb just about possible for a expert mountaineer. Meredith wasn’t one and neither was I. I looked into the future to try to gauge her chances …

…and saw to my disbelief that the fire mage was coming back for another go. The roar of the flames through the bathroom door drowned out almost everything else, but I could just hear the sound of embers going crunch under the soles of heavy boots. “Oh, come on!”

“Come where?” a cheerful voice said in my ear.

I spun and saw to my utter delight the shape of Starbreeze, hovering just outside the window. “Starbreeze! Get us out of here!”

Starbreeze pointed in interest at Meredith, hanging halfway out of the window. “Her too?”

“Yes!” Meredith shouted.

The bathroom door exploded inwards, filling the bathroom with a cone of burning splinters. It missed Meredith by a couple of feet and I had just enough time to dodge into the corner. “Starbreeze, go!” I shouted as the fire mage strode in.

He was a big man, as tall as me and much heavier, with muscles that bulged under his dark clothes. A dim orange glow flickered around him, so faint as to be almost invisible, flaring where the flames licked around his feet. A black mask covered his face but I knew who he was; I’d known as soon as he’d cast that first spell. As he saw me, Cinder stopped dead, staring.

An instant later Starbreeze had turned the both of us to air and whipped us out into the night. I had one lightning-fast image of Cinder diminishing behind us through the window, then we were out of view and climbing. Smoke was pouring from the house’s top floor, flames glowing from the bedroom and attic, and as we rose higher I could see people emerging into the street to point and stare. Higher still and I spotted the flashing blue lights of the fire service, half a dozen streets away but closing in. As we kept rising I could see the yellow spark of the fire and the flickering blue of the engines becoming a cluster of points, then a faint glow, then a fuzz. And then there was nothing but the London sprawl.

The night view over the city was beautiful, a web of light against the dark patches of the parks and open spaces, but I wasn’t in the mood to enjoy it. Now that we were out of danger, as weird as it might sound, I was angry. I’d saved Cinder’s life and this was the thanks I got?

Cinder hadn’t looked very dangerous the last time I’d seen him. He’d been bloodied and out cold after losing a duel with another Dark mage named Onyx. I’d let him go on the condition that he owed me one. Okay, I hadn’t exactly been myself at the time, but I had been myself when I’d found him in a Precursor energy trap a few hours earlier and saved his life again. I hadn’t expected gratitude, but I’d kind of hoped he’d at least stop trying to kill me.