Elemental Hunger

Chapter Eight

"I thought you'd left me." My breath stuck in the winter sky as white clouds. I balled one hand into a fist and held the other in front of me, pouring fire to erase the snow. Adam didn't reprimand me, even though I was broadcasting our position with shooting flames and a cleared path. He also didn't answer.

It didn't take long to open the gate, and we'd barely crossed the first field when the buzz of the hovercraft sounded.

I vaulted a limp wire fence and cleared a path down into a ditch. I shot a plume of fire to the right and then the left, melting the snow for a hundred feet in each direction. My feet should've been screaming in pain, but I couldn't feel them. I didn't know which sensation was worse.

"Left," Adam hissed, splashing down next to me.

"I'll catch up," I said, turning right. Sloshing through the calf-high water, I shot another fireball, clearing more of the ditch. I ducked and turned back the way I'd come.

"Good idea," Adam whispered when I caught up to him. He motioned for me to go first, and we crept, almost on our knees, toward the snow bank still frozen in the ditch. I held my hand over it, melting it in a much subtler manner.

"Culvert ahead," Adam breathed behind me. "Crawl in, don't come out the other side."

The metal cylinder ran under a snow-covered road. I scooted inside and turned to see Adam refreezing the ice over the ditch. The last of his frigid wind died as he joined me in the culvert. I hunched over to squeeze inside, pulled my knees to my chest, and massaged some heat back into my shoeless foot. The metal bit through my jeans with an unrelenting chill, and my foot stung with newly-realized pain.

Mere moments later, Patches's high voice carried across the frozen darkness.

"Melted in both directions." A pause and then, "Okay, but if you kill her, I'll kill you. She's mine." The steel in Patches's voice made my blood run cold.

"Wow," Adam whispered. "He really hates you. Sentries don't normally care how the hunted dies."

I cringed at the word dies.

"I sense a story I haven't heard," Adam pressed.

"I'm sure you have some as well," I shot back. "I'll tell you when we're not minutes from dying."

"Great. I'll never hear it then." Adam's smile carried in his voice. He rummaged through his backpack and pressed a knife into my hand. "I think I might be better with these, so I'll keep two. That okay?"

"Fine by me." I gripped the knife, repulsed just from holding it. My stomach filled with fire.

"I can't," I choked out.

"Can't what?"

I dropped the knife in an ear-splitting clatter of metal on metal. An excited shout rang out, and Adam cursed.

"Come on," he hissed as he stumbled over me inside the culvert. His boot scraped along my thigh. As if I didn't have enough physical pain already coursing through my body.

He clambered through the culvert toward the other side. I maneuvered around and had almost gained the opening when a light shone behind me. I turned to look, getting blinded by the beam.

"Get out!" Adam yelled, pulling on my legs. I fell to the ground as Adam unleashed a gale-force wind through the tunnel. Scrambling up, I saw all three knives in Adam's belt.

He lowered his hands, straightened, and looked at me. "We need to work on your stealth. I bought us maybe five minutes. Come on."

Then he ran.