Ablaze (Indestructible Trilogy Book 2) (32 page)

He tilts his head up to meet my eyes—and the ground shakes. I brace my hand on the wall to keep from falling into the lava.

“What the hell?” Cas’s eyes widen.

“What’s going on?” I look up to see people coming out of the recreation room, and Murray crossing the corridor from his office. Shouts ring out.

Another tremor shakes the floor and lava spills over the platform Cas and I stand on. Only instinct makes me jump out the way to avoid burning the soles of my shoes off. Cas follows, calling to Murray.

I hang back, disconnection and shock rooting me to the spot even as cries ring out.

Not only human cries. Fiends.

“We’re under attack!”

Screaming. A siren-like wail kicks up, adding to the racket and making it impossible to tell where everyone’s running. My thoughts spin.
Not the tunnels around the back… the fiends got in that way before.
Have the defences even been fixed since Jared’s invasion?

The floor trembles.
The volcano’s extinct,
I remember. Coming to my senses, I run to Murray, but I’m caught up in the jostling crowd.

“What’s going on?”

Murray’s shouting something, but I can’t make out the words. Raw panic washes over me. A creeping sensation of eyes on the back of my neck.

A dark, winged figure drops from the ceiling. Then another.

The panic turns to terror as the crowd turns to the weapons room. Cas already has his sword out, slicing at a winged fiend.

How…?

Lucky I still have my blade. I grab it, cursing the narrow platform for slowing me down.

Another figure drops, landing right in front of me, warped and winged with razor-like claws. Jared’s fiend.

There are too many of us crammed into a tight space, and the ground shakes like the mountain itself is moving. Panic erupts along with Pyro fire.

I slash at the fiend, fighting to get to Murray. He shouts, loud enough for me to hear over the noise: “Get out! We need to evacuate now!”

A wrenching tremor cuts through the ground, sending everyone sideways, mid-fight. Fiends and humans fall into a writhing mass as a crack splinters through the floor, fanning out from the lava pool.

Growing by the second.

Too quick to stop two people sliding over the edge.

“NO!” I cry out.

But it’s too late. The mountain splits with a roar, leaving half of us on one side, the others sliding further away with each passing moment. I dig my hands into the floor, inches from the edge, close enough to see the bubbling lava.

The wavering shape of flames.

A fiend soars out of the gap, slashing at the hands of the people hanging onto the edge.

Impossible.
Another divide is opening.

I reach out with my dagger hand and stab any enemy within reach. On the other side of the breach, Val’s hurrying people away towards the back tunnel. But on our side, the ground’s tilting and it’s all I can do not to fall over the edge.

Then it stops. A gaping line divides our home in two, tremors still rocking through the ground.

“Everyone out!” Murray shouts. With shock, I realise there are only a handful of us left, including Cas, who’s speared one of the fiends with his blade, withdrawing it in a spray of blood.

“Out!” yells Murray, and we run for the tunnel. Worry for the others rattles through my head, but the shaky ground brings a renewed fear that the whole mountain’s going to collapse.

We climb down the rocky mountainside in panicked single file, Murray rushing up and down making sure everyone can walk.
And the others?
I want to ask. They used the back exit. Val was amongst them.

My legs burn with the climb, my heart beating fast, fast.
Please. Please let them be all right.

The ground’s stopped shaking by the time we reach ground level. From this angle, the mountain looks the same as ever, not like it’s split in two down the middle.

“Another divide,” I say to Cas, who’s nearby, anger etched on his face. “It’s another divide. That means…”

“The Fiordans,” says Murray, confirming my worst suspicion.

The second invasion of Earth has begun.

***

Thank you for reading!

The final volume of the Indestructible trilogy,
Transcendent,
will be published in June.
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Ablaze.
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More books by Emma L. Adams

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Darkness Watching.

Buy
Darkness Watching.

If you like fight scenes, double-crossing and dimension-hopping monsters, you might like
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the first novel in the adult urban fantasy Alliance series.

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If you like kickass urban fantasy, you might like Faerie Blood, the first book in the Changeling Chronicles series.

When faerie-killer Ivy is hired to find a missing child, replaced with a changeling, she's forced to team up with the seductively dangerous Mage Lord, at the risk of exposing her own dark history with the faeries -- and this time, running won't save her.

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About the Author

Emma spent her childhood creating imaginary worlds to compensate for a disappointingly average reality, so it was probably inevitable that she ended up writing urban fantasy and young adult novels. When she's not immersed in her own fictional universes, Emma can be found with her head in a book or wandering around the world in search of adventure.

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