Infinity

“Wait. You’re a Hound?” I asked, stunned. “A half dragon?”

“I know.” He shook his head. “It’s an unfortunate accident of birth, having a mother who is nothing more than a weak human, but then again, it is better than being a hostage. In you go.”

He shoved me into the room and slammed the door. I heard the lock being refitted and then the sharp snick of it sliding closed.

“Wait!” I yelled.

I heard someone cough behind me and spun around, trying to see in the dim light. Whoever it was coughed again, and I stepped toward the sound.

“Fish Girl?” the frail figure gasped. “Holy crap, is that really you?”

Chapter Eighteen

“Heidi?” I hurried forward a few steps and then froze. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” She hobbled forward and coughed again before swiping her limp blond hair out of her eyes with a grimy wrist covered with a thick coating of brown dirt. “What do you think I’m doing here? We’re being held prisoner, of course. Isn’t that why you came? To rescue us?”

“We? Us?” I felt my heart pick up. “What do you mean ‘we’? Is Jesse here, too?”

“Of course Jesse’s here.” She shuffled over to a small table in the corner and sat down heavily in one of the chairs beside it, her back to the small fire that was crackling in the hearth. “At least, I think he’s still here. They haven’t let me see him in about ten days. They keep us apart. We only see each other when one of us is being taken to the kitchens and the other is being taken back from the kitchen, and even then, we only cross paths if there’s a problem. They’re afraid we might try to escape again.”

“You tried to escape?” I sat down in the chair opposite her and fought the urge to reach out and grab her hand with my shackled ones.

“Well, duh, Fish Girl. What were we supposed to do? You’ve taken forever to get here. I was starting to think you weren’t going to bother, and then we’d never get home. You’ve got the only way back. So what took you so long?”

“Heidi…we thought you were dead. You and Jesse.”

“You what?”

“We thought you were dead,” I repeated.

She looked up, narrowing her blue eyes at me. “So you’re not here to bargain for our freedom? You didn’t negotiate our freedom as part of your peace treaty?” She reached out and grabbed the chain between my wrists and shook it. “What am I saying? Duh, stupid Heidi, of course you didn’t come here to save us. You’re a prisoner just like we are. When were you going to come for us? Forget when, were you ever going to come for us?”

“We thought you were dead! The Fate Maker told us—”

“We might as well have been,” she snapped.

“Heidi,” I started.

“It would have been better if we were,” she said, quieter this time. “It would have been better to let us die then force us to live like this.”

“Heidi, we didn’t know. We thought you were dead. The Fate Maker told us that you’d died in the forest during the first battle of the Crystal Palace. He told me you burned to death.”

“You didn’t bother to check? You just…what? Abandoned us here while you made plans to go back home?”

“He told us you were in the forest when it caught fire. He told us that you and Jesse had been being kept prisoner there by the wizards. We set fire to the trees where they were, and we thought you were with them.”

“Do you mean you set fire to a forest I was supposed to be hiding in? You tried to murder me? What the heck!”

“We didn’t know you were in the forest until after! We didn’t know where you were. You had disappeared, and then during the battle, there was magic coming from the forest so the dragons set fire to the trees to flush the wizards out. It started burning, and the wizards ran. But not everyone made it out. There were bodies.”

“My body? You saw my body?”

“No, well, yes… We thought we did. We couldn’t tell. It was burned so badly that we couldn’t tell for sure who it was. Then after we’d trapped the Fate Maker, he told us you were in the forest. Once we’d dealt with him, we tried to find you and Jesse, but all we found were the bodies, and we thought…”

“So you just wrote the two of us off as a couple of charbroiled corpses and walked away? Thanks a lot.”

“We didn’t just forget about you! We held a memorial. Okay, it wasn’t much of a memorial, but we had plans to do something bigger once the war was over. We were going to put up a marker for all the dead with their names on it, to make sure that no one had forgotten that you’d died here.”

“Great!” She stood up and threw her hands in the air before stomping over to the window. “I was going to be a name on a stone. That’s just great. Thanks a lot.”

“What did you want me to do? We thought you were dead. It’s not my fault.”

“It is your fault!” she yelled, and then she stormed back over to the table and picked up an empty pitcher before flinging it at me. I ducked to the side, and the pitcher hit the wall behind us, shattering. “You left us behind.”

“If we’d have known you were here, we would have come for you. We wouldn’t have left you behind.”

“You already had. You and Winston disappeared. Mercedes was surrounded by those green tree women, and they were all throwing these weird clingy vines at people and tying them up, and that big guy had his army, and we had nothing. We were just there, standing in a crowd full of screaming, terrified people.”

I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing I could do now to change what happened. I bit the inside of my cheek and listened.

“There were people with swords and all these monsters, and there was nothing we could do.” She kept going, and I could see tears collecting on her eyelashes and making muddy trails down her hollow, dirty cheeks. “Jesse and I just stood there watching. Neither of us could do anything. We were just trapped. We just had to stand there and watch. Then, these two men in black suits grabbed us, and I couldn’t even fight.”

“Heidi, I’m—” I started.

“We were screaming for someone to help, to save us, and I was trying to fight them, but they were too strong and they took us. And you want to know the worst part?”

“What?” I swallowed, staring at her as she raged.

“No one even turned around to notice,” she said, her voice cracking. “They took us, and no one even noticed. You left us alone and unarmed, and no one even cared.”

“Heidi…” I reached for her, and the girl who most loved to hate my guts launched herself at me, toppling us both over on the floor as she wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her head in my shoulder, sobbing.

I reached up and tried to pat her shoulder, but she winced as my bound hands brushed across her ribs. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

“They make us crawl,” she sobbed into my collar. “The guards and the people who work here. The servants, I mean.”

“What?” I swallowed and tried to blink back my own tears. The last thing that would help Heidi right now was me breaking down when she needed me the most.

“They take me and Jesse to the kitchen and make us crawl around on the floor while they throw bread at us. They laugh and they point at the maid and the boy who wanted to be king as they throw food at us like we’re animals.”

“They won’t do that anymore,” I promised her. “We’re going to find a way to get you out of here.”