“We fight together.” I let him go, racing to my backpack by the desk. Slinging the heavy weight onto my back, I shrugged into it and secured the straps. “Let’s go.”
Kas blinked as if he couldn’t understand if I was leaving him. He stumbled to the side, tapping his temple as if his concussion had chosen this exact moment to make him fall unconscious.
“No. Don’t you dare!” I screamed, grabbing his hand and yanking him into a fast stumble. “You can pass out when we’re outside. Focus on me, Kas. Only me.”
He groaned and swayed, but his hand latched onto mine, fierce and awake. We tripped from the library into the foyer, running for the front door.
Smoke had found us, steadily filling the opulent foyer with haze and death.
I coughed and rubbed my eyes as they stung. My backpack bounced on my spine, and Kas tripped to one knee. He grabbed his head with his left hand, groaning in agony.
“Get up!” I dragged him forward.
I’d drag him all the way outside if I had to.
But he nodded and hauled himself to his feet, once again stumbling like a drunkard.
“Leaving so soon?” Jareth’s voice fell from above us, wrenching us to a halt.
Kas spun, and I followed, our eyes narrowed against the smoke, peering through the gray haze to Jareth.
He stood at the top of the stairs, leading toward the guest bedrooms. The rooms that Kas had kept meticulously tidy and clean for decades, immortalizing a mansion of monsters.
In his hands were two other liquor bottles. One dark whiskey and the other white rum.
Kas swallowed a howl. “Don’t. Don’t fucking do it.”
“You’ll thank me one day.” Jareth grinned. “Just enjoy it, brother. Enjoy watching it burn.” With a sweeping bow and icy laugh, he upended the bottles and strolled backward down the corridor, pouring a line of fuel into the expensive, decadent carpet.
He vanished into the first bedroom, pouring as he went.
Kas went to chase after him, but his legs slipped out from under him, sending him sprawling on the marble.
I fell on him, pulling and yanking with all my strength. “Get to your damn feet!”
He coughed on his hands and knees, his lungs sounding rotten and full of carcinogens. “I have to try to...” Cough. “...stop him!”
“It’s over, Kas.” With strength I’d cultivated climbing granite and feldspar, I managed to get him to his feet. Slinging his arm over my shoulder, I turned him away from the stairs and toward the front door.
Kas fought me. “What about Jareth? He’s trapped up there.”
“He’ll get out.”
I knew that without a doubt. He wasn’t suicidal. Just very, very vengeful.
I might not be able to read him, but I’d picked up on signals that he wasn’t as cool as he played. Being back in this valley had slowly driven him mad.
Now, he’d snapped.
And he would dance on the ashes he left behind.
Something exploded in the kitchen, rocking the house with an earthquake, sending the roar of fire and billows of smoke even worse.
Windows cracked and detonated, tinkling upstairs as a huge ball of fire appeared at the top of the landing.
Wherever Jareth was now, he must’ve successfully poured liquor through each room, giving the fire a perfect path to destroy.
Everything was burning.
All of it.
Every decadent, monstrous inch was burning.
“Kas, please!” I pulled again as another explosion shuddered the house.
Rubble fell over our heads, marble cracked, the painting of the valley fell off the wall and crashed onto the floor.
It snapped Kas out of wherever his mind had taken him.
He stood strong, he blinked with awareness, he grabbed my arm and ran.
He ran with me trailing him like a kite, pulling me out the front door, making me fly with his speed beneath a new moon and stars. My backpack bounced, and my legs tripped trying to keep up, but Kas never let me go.
He was inhuman in strength and stamina as we raced through the gardens, only slowing when we were far enough away not to be harmed by shrapnel.
Another explosion boomed.
Kas slammed to a stop and turned, breathing hard, coughing harder. Letting me go, he braced his hands on his knees, sucking in as much fresh oxygen as he could while his face glowed with fire from Fables.
I gasped as I looked behind us at the once ivy-covered, secret-shrouded camouflaged house.
It was no longer part of the landscape with its leaf-filled gutters and wildflower-dotted roof. It was ablaze. A beacon to anyone miles away that something awful happened here. Something that went on for far too long, hurt far too many children, and only now paid for its crimes.
Wiping away my stinging tears, I tried to focus and imprint the sight of Fables to memory as windows on the second floor exploded in a shower of glittering glass, letting furious flames dance up the windowsills and into the night. The fire flickered out the front door, letting us know that the library was devoured, the games room, the dining room, all the books, the plants, the tapestries—