𝐒𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐓𝐄 || Narnia x The Hunger Games Crossover

Chapter Eighteen

Lucy tripped up the steps to the stone table and crashed at Caspian's side, bright red rivulets dripping down the corner of the table above him where he'd made sickening impact with the altar.

"Caspian," she gasped, her breaths coming fast in thick, smoky air as she pulled him over onto his back.

A breath of a groan escaped him, hair slipping away from his face as his eyelids fluttered, and she gripped his arm, jacket slipping to reveal deep gouges from his shoulder to his chest, blood spreading black through the fabric and pooling beneath him over the stone, trickling down the side of the dais.

"Caspian," she choked again, and distant dark eyes flickered up to find her, the boy's chest stuttering with another half-voiced groan as he struggled to draw breath, fighting against some invisible pressure before his eyes lost focus and fluttered back into his head.

"Caspian!"

The struggle in his chest stilled, and Lucy's heart skipped a beat, fumbling hurriedly along his throat for a pulse, fingers shaking under his jaw, detecting nothing but their own trembling as the desperation set in and she held the back of her hand over his mouth, half a centimeter from his lips. 

A second later, the faintest ghost of a breath brushed her skin.

She gasped in relief and burst into tears.

Smoke burned her eyes, breathless, hitching, choking noises catching in her throat as she glanced desperately around the plateau, the dragon's hulking black corpse blurring and swimming in her vision, sprawled in a twisted, gnarled mound a few yards away.

Edmund's figure crept around the opposite side of it, kneeling over Jill's body.

Her narrow shoulders and rounded thighs lay tucked up as if she might only have been asleep, silhouetted dark against cracked grey stone, but her eyes glinted out from under her bangs in the fading orange light, still open, staring into nothing.

Edmund's pale fingers hovered over her for a second before slipping under the backpack straps and tugging them gently down her arms.

Short brown hair fell loose over the ground and her head lolled at the movement, too far, rolling around to her back, and Edmund turned away and clamped a hand over his mouth as if he would be sick, pausing there for several moments before breathing out slowly, stiffly, and bracing himself.

He grasped the strap again and tugged the rest of the way, pulling it free and standing quickly as he slung the bag over his shoulder, Jill's head rolling back around to her front, every bone in her neck shattered apart.

Edmund stepped away without looking back, and glanced nervously instead toward Caspian.

"Is he—"

"He's alive," sobbed Lucy, pressing shaking sleeves to her eyes and sucking in deep breaths. "I just— I don't know— what to—"

Edmund leaned over the dais and delicately lifted Caspian's jacket, ruby-red blood pooling over his once-white shirt where the monster's teeth had gouged deep trenches through his flesh.

He scanned the wounds with sharp eyes as if calculating an equation, face pale and impassive as a statue, and for a second Lucy remembered who he was, and a bolt of fear struck through her chest.

But then his concentration broke and he glanced around at their barren surroundings, making no move for the silver knife still shining in his belt. "It'll be getting dark soon, we should get out of the open."

Lucy blinked. "We? You're staying?"

He glanced at her, and hesitated before he sighed. "Come on, before I change my mind."