Karen Duvall - Darkest Knight

His gargoyle form suddenly appeared above me and his talons pierced the appliance like it was made from tin foil. The fridge crumpled when he lifted it off the floor. I watched as it flew a dozen feet to the side, then bounced a couple times before coming to a stop. The cellar door was free. And Aydin was already gone.

Sirens screamed in the distance, meaning help had arrived. I opened the cellar door and a plume of gray smoke puffed out the opening. The dimly lit outline of a child lay at the foot of the stairs. I scuttled down the steps and scooped up the boy, who couldn’t have weighed more than forty pounds. His dark hair was powdered with ash, and soot smeared his nose and cheeks. He still breathed, but barely.

I ran up the steps and out of the burned rubble toward the ambulance. “Help!” I called to the two men who hopped out the back. “This boy was in the cellar when the house burned.”

They took him from me and got to work. I heard the boy cough and a wave of relief washed over me.

Catching my breath, I scouted the area for Natalie. I saw that a thick wall of smoke had replaced the flames so I hoped that meant the fire was out.

Gasps of heavy weeping came from the back of the ambulance and I wondered if it held another victim of the fire. I went to see if there was anything I could do to help.

Natalie sat crouched inside, head lowered over a prone figure covered head to toe with a white sheet.

“Natalie?” I climbed up to sit beside her. “What’s going on?”

Head still down, she snuffled before saying, “It’s Rusty. She’s dead.”

“What?” I couldn’t believe it. An immense sadness welled up inside me, but my fury battered it down. My sister knights were dying and I was helpless to stop it.

Hands shaking, I gently lowered the sheet to find Rusty’s pretty, pale face underneath. “How did it happen?”

“Don’t know,” Natalie said. “I arrived at the front line. Found her by a wall of fire. She was backing it off. Using her will to put it out. Then…” She gulped air before going on. “Then she collapsed.”

“Did anyone try to revive her?” I touched my fingers to Rusty’s throat. No pulse, but her skin was still warm. I thought about the boy. “She must have suffocated from inhaling too much smoke.”

Natalie shook her head. “Smoke has never been a problem for her.”

It obviously was now. I lowered my ear to Rusty’s face and listened. Not even the slightest breath.

“The EMTs did try to revive her.” Natalie wiped her nose on the sleeve of her coat. “But she wouldn’t come around.”

So that’s what had taken so long for them to get here. I glanced outside the ambulance to see both EMTs caring for the boy, who cried and coughed but appeared to be okay. I didn’t want them seeing what I was about to do.

“I’m going to try something.” I reached into my coat pocket and tugged out the ox horn charm. “I don’t know the extent of its power, but I have to give it a shot.”

The ugly black horn, no bigger than the width of my hand, was chipped and blackened with age. I’d never seen one used, but I knew it to be an object of magic the Vikings kept with them as part of their battle armor. It enabled them to breathe through smoke as they pillaged the villages they burned.

I didn’t know much about this charm and was hesitant to place the horn between Rusty’s blue lips. There was always a price to pay for using dark magic. If it gave her breath back, what would it demand in return?

“Chalice?” Natalie gulped a breath between sobs. “What are you doing?”

“What Rusty should have done when she had the chance.” I slipped the horn’s tip into Rusty’s mouth.

I waited a full minute. Nothing happened.

I started to withdraw the horn when a wisp of smoke trailed out the charm’s cone-shaped end.

“I think it’s working,” I whispered.

Rusty’s chest began rising slowly, as if being pumped with air. Now I was afraid she’d burst from a breath too big for her lungs. Instead, color pinked her cheeks and her eyelids squeezed so tight it looked like she was in pain, and I hoped she was. That would mean she was alive.

Rusty coughed and the ox horn flew from her mouth and landed in the snow outside. She sat up, gasping, clutching her chest and heaving in gulps of air.

Natalie lunged at her and wrapped her in a hug so tight I thought she’d squeeze the breath out of her again. They cried in each other’s arms. As much as I wanted to join in, I hung back and tried not to feel left out. I was a knight too, and that knowledge would have to be enough for now.

“You scared me to death,” Natalie told her.

Rusty looked confused for a second, then shot me a glance. “Was I dead?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” I said.

She touched her lips. “Was that thing in my mouth? That cursed horn?”

I pulled back my shoulders and straightened my spine. “Yes. It gave you back your life.”

“If not for Chalice you’d still be dead,” Natalie said. “She saved you.”

Rusty frowned, not appearing one bit thankful. Then her frown deepened. “Something took my breath away.”

Natalie nodded. “The smoke. You suffocated.”

Shaking her head, Rusty said, “No, smoke has no effect on me. It was something else.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“It felt so…strange.” She still clutched her chest, her eyes growing distant as if trying to remember. “Like being inside a vacuum. There was no smoke, no air, no nothing. As if something sucked my breath right out of me.”

Natalie and I exchanged looks. She said, “That’s impossible, Rusty. It’s only happened to knights that are asleep.”

“Maybe whatever it was is now desperate enough to prey on us when we’re awake,” I said. “Rusty, what was the last thing you saw before passing out?”

“Fire.”

“You didn’t see anyone near you?” I asked.

“Of course there were people near me.” Rusty bit off each word. “We were fighting a fire. Four fighters stood beside me, each wearing a protective suit and mask.”

“So you couldn’t see their faces,” Natalie said.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“I bet one of them did it,” I said. “The Hatchet murderer disguised himself to get close to you.”

“Hatchet murderer?” Rusty chuckled. “You make it sound like a villain from a bad horror movie.”

I glared at her. “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

“Don’t worry, you weren’t,” Rusty said, but the corners of her mouth pulled up in a smile. “Thanks for saving my life even if you did use that…thing.”

I looked down at the snow where the horn had fallen. It lay there looking dull and ordinary, its power spent. I vaguely wondered if it could be recharged and if so, who could recharge it. Cursed or not, it was a handy gadget to have around, especially for a fire master like Rusty. I hopped down from the ambulance and snatched it up to shove into my coat pocket.

I gazed out at the sky, wondering if Aydin still watched. He was more of a guardian angel than Rafe, who spent too much time being stubborn about accepting Aydin for the good man he was. He wouldn’t stop criticizing him for becoming a gargoyle, which wasn’t even his fault. Come to think of it, none of our guardian angels had come to the rescue.

“I’m new at all this knight stuff,” I told my sisters. “Can I ask you both a question?”

They had guarded looks on their faces, their eyes shifting attention from me to each other and back again. “Sure,” Rusty said. “Shoot.”

“Where was your guardian angel when you were suffocating to death?” I asked.

The corner of Rusty’s mouth slid up in a smug grin. “That’s not how it works. It’s not like they’re on autopilot.”