It allowed her to cast her net wide, reaching hundreds of kilometers, perhaps even thousands, calling every breath of wind to her. It answered her call joyfully, singing as it raced through her. Soon her body was no more than a conduit for the furious power, and she formed it like a weapon, sweeping up shards of ice, and directed it at François. The force of it blew him from his feet as if he was no more than a paper doll, sending him tumbling into a deep crevasse.
She rushed over to Jason, pulling him to his feet. He let out a sharp grunt of pain as he put weight on his injured leg, and even in the darkness and swirling snow, she could see the white of his trousers stained red with blood.
“Can you walk?” she shouted over the wail of the wind. “We need to get out of here.”
Jason’s face was pale with pain, but he tightened his jaw and nodded. Allyra shouldered most of his weight and then pulled him into a stumbling run.
Chapter 31 – Allyra
The wind screamed and Allyra blinked, desperately trying to see through the swirling snow. The wind she’d called upon had developed into a storm so furious it was now beyond her control. Yet it had achieved everything she’d intended—it had saved their lives and hidden them effectively from their opponents, but it also had the inadvertent side effect of blinding her and slowing their progress to no more than a crawl.
The wind threatened to freeze her eyelids closed, and she blinked in a fruitless effort to clear her vision. Her body felt empty and hollow, as if the explosion of power had burned through every shred of her Gift, leaving her with nothing—not enough to even maintain a bubble of Air to protect them against the storm’s wrath. She stumbled over an unseen snowdrift and nearly lost her hold on Jason as he tipped forward, barely conscious now.
He leaned heavily against her, and even with her Gifted strength, she was struggling to keep them both upright and moving forward. Worse still, she could feel the feverish heat radiating from him despite the freezing wind wailing around them.
It was no use. She had to stop and rest.
She tried to set Jason down gently but failed miserably as he finally succeeded in slipping her grip and collapsed in an unconscious heap.
Allyra peered into the darkness. She sighed. It was useless. She could barely see her own hand, never mind any deeper into the storm. Nonetheless, it appeared that Jason had stayed true to his difficult and unhelpful nature and had chosen the worst possible place to collapse. There was nothing even vaguely resembling shelter, and she was using up what little was left of her energy just trying to stay warm.
She dropped down beside Jason, doing her best to shield him from the wind. Shuddering, Allyra removed the gloves from her left hand and plunged it into the snowdrift. The ice bit into her fingers like a thousand sharp needles. Her Gift had faded to a mere trickle, but she gathered what was left and searched clumsily for the blue Water threads and pulled on them, shaping them into a wall of snow. It took everything she had to reform the snow into a solid barrier of ice, the wall turning slowly and painfully from opaque to a pure, translucent blue.
The wail of the wind dulled, and she was finally able to see again. Beside her, Jason muttered incoherently, drawing her attention to his dire state of health. She placed the back of her hand on his forehead and winced as she felt the fever heat raging through him.
He was deathly pale, and a sheen of feverish sweat covered his skin. His eyelids fluttered restlessly as the poison from the Revenant blade raged through his body. The cut on his leg was still weeping blood despite having already painted an entire trouser leg red and probably leaving a trail of blood for their opponents to follow. She gently tried to part the cloth around the wound to get a better look but was thwarted by dry caked blood binding the material to Jason’s flesh.
If she was going to help him, she had to get a better view. She undid the button and zipper on Jason’s pants and groaned as she imagined his reaction. If he survived this, he was definitely going to accuse her of taking advantage of him while unconscious.
Allyra peeled Jason’s trousers away and finally got a better look at his wound. Her first instinct was to recoil away in horror. Black tendrils of poison were climbing up his leg, dark vines of misery stark against his pale skin. They were quickly making their way up toward his heart, and the smell of rotting flesh was unmistakable.
The scar in her side throbbed at the memory of her own encounter with a Revenant blade. Had her own wound looked the same when the Ancient had sliced its sword through her? She couldn’t help but remember the unimaginable pain that had flooded through every crack and crevice of her mind—it was surely what Jason was suffering through now. All because he had tried to save her. And now, there was no doubt that Jason was dying.
As strong as Jason was, he wouldn’t survive the poison of a Revenant blade, at least not without help. Unfortunately for him, they were in the middle of a snowstorm in Antarctica. It was literally the middle of nowhere—it meant that she was all he had by way of help.
She had survived the poison of a Revenant blade once before. According
