Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment #1)

Iris woke to the faint wash of dawn, her cheek pressed to Roman’s chest. His arm was wrapped around her and his breaths rose and fell slowly in sleep. After she got over her shock at how good his body felt against hers, she realized her face and hands were like ice, even though the blankets were draped over them and Roman was hot as a furnace.

It was far too cold for late spring, Iris thought, carefully rising.

She walked to Roman’s window, moving the curtain to peer beyond the glass panes. She couldn’t see any of the soldiers who were supposed to be guarding this side of town. The world looked gray and withered and empty, as if a frost had fallen.

“Kitt?” Iris said, urgent. “Kitt, get up.”

He groaned, but she heard him sit forward. “Iris?”

“Something’s not right.” No sooner had the words left her mouth than she heard distant shouting outside. She couldn’t see what was inspiring the commotion from this vantage point and she turned to face him. “We need to get dressed and go downstairs. See if Marisol knows anything. Did you hear me, Kitt?”

Roman was staring at her as if he were in a daze. She stood naked before him, wearing nothing but morning light on her skin.

“We need to get dressed!” she repeated, rushing to gather their garments, which were strewn all over the room.

He continued to sit in their bed, watching her every move. He seemed frozen, as if she had cast a spell on him, and Iris brought his belt and jumpsuit to him. She drew him up to his feet, the blankets falling away from his waist.

He was perfect, she thought with a sharp inhale. Roman watched her study his body, his cheeks flushed. And when her gaze finally returned to his, he whispered, “Do we have time?”

“I don’t know, Kitt.”

He nodded his disappointment, reaching for his jumpsuit. She helped him step into it, her fingers swiftly buttoning up the front, cinching the belt. She wished they had more time. She wished they could have woken up slowly, and her hands shook as she struggled to hook her bra. Roman stepped forward to help her, his fingers warm against her back. He was fastening the buttons of her jumpsuit when a knock sounded on the door.

“Iris? Roman?” Attie called. “Marisol is asking us to come down to the kitchen. Don’t touch any of the curtains. Eithrals have been spotted, heading to town.”

“Yes, we’ll be right down,” Iris said, her blood going cold.

There had been no siren. And then she remembered that Clover Hill was gone. A shudder passed through her as Roman finished buttoning her clothes and buckling her belt. They quickly laced their boots.

“Let’s go,” he said, and he sounded so calm that it eased Iris’s fears.

He wove his fingers with hers and led her down the stairs. She could tell his leg was still bothering him, even as he tried to hide it. There was a slight limp in his gait as they walked into the kitchen. Iris was beginning to wonder if he’d be able to run through the streets and climb over the barricades, but she chased those thoughts away as they joined Attie by the table.

“Good morning,” she said, Lilac purring in her arms. “I hope the two of you lovebirds had a good night’s rest.”

Iris nodded. She was about to thank Attie for all her help yesterday when the house suddenly rocked on its foundation. A splitting boom shook the walls and the ground, and Iris fell to her knees, hands clapped over her ears. She didn’t even remember ripping her fingers from Roman’s. Not until he knelt behind her on the kitchen floor and drew her into his arms, holding her back against his chest.

He was saying something to her. His voice was low but soothing in her ear. “We’ll get through this. Breathe, Iris. I’m here and we’ll get through this. Breathe.”

She tried to calm her breaths, but her lungs felt locked in an iron cage. Her hands and feet were tingling; her heart was pounding so hard she thought it would split her open. But she slowly became aware of Roman. She could feel his chest against hers—deep, calm draws of air. Slowly, she mimicked his pattern, until the stars that danced at the edges of her vision began to fade.

Attie. Marisol. Their names shot through Iris’s mind like sparks, and she lifted her chin, searching the kitchen.

Attie was on her knees directly across from them, her mouth pressed into a tight line as Lilac screeched in fear. Everything was trembling. Paintings fell off the walls. The pot rack shook. Herbs began to rain down. Teacups shattered on the floor.

“Marisol,” Iris panted, reaching for Attie’s hand. “Where is Mari—”

Another bomb fell. A loud peal of thunder not that far away, because the house shook even harder, down to its roots. The timber beams overhead groaned. Plaster from the ceiling began to fall in chunks around them.

The B and B was going to collapse. They were going to be buried alive.

The fear burned thorough Iris like a coal. She was trembling, but she breathed when Roman breathed, and she held fiercely to Attie’s hand. She closed her eyes, envisioning the night before. A wedding in the garden. Flowers in her hair. A dinner of candlelight and laughter and nourishing food. That warm feeling, like she had finally found her family. A place where she belonged. A home that was about to crumble.

Iris opened her eyes.

Marisol was standing a few paces away. Her revolver was holstered at her side, the dash-packs in her hand. Her dress was red, a striking contrast to her long black hair. She was like a statue, staring into the distance as the house rocked for the third time.

Dust streamed down. The windows cracked. The tables and chairs inched along the floor as if a giant was pounding the earth.

But Marisol didn’t move.

She must have felt Iris’s gaze. Through the chaos and devastation, their eyes met. Marisol slowly knelt beside Roman and Attie, their bodies creating a triangle on the kitchen floor.

“Have faith,” she said, touching Iris’s face. “This house will not fall. Not while I’m within it.”

Another bomb exploded. But it was as Marisol swore: the B and B shuddered, but it didn’t crumble.

Iris closed her eyes again. Her jaw was clenched, but she envisioned the garden, the life that grew within it. Small and seemingly fragile, yet it flourished more and more with each passing day. She envisioned this house with its many rooms and the endless people who had come and found solace here. The love that this ground had been claimed by. The green castle door that had seen sieges of an older era. The way the stars shined from the rooftop.

The world was becoming silent again.

A heavy, dust-laden silence that made Iris realize the air was warmer. The light shone brighter through the seams in the walls.

She opened her eyes. Marisol stood amid the debris, glancing at her wristwatch. Time felt distorted, the seconds spilling through fingers like sand.

“Stay here,” Marisol said after what could have been two minutes or a full hour. She glanced at the three of them, a dark fire shining in her eyes. “I’ll return soon.”

Iris was too shocked to say anything. Attie and Roman must have been the same, because they were quiet as Marisol departed.

“Iris,” Attie said a few moments later, her voice strained, “Iris, we can’t … we have to…”

They couldn’t let Marisol out of their sight. They were supposed to protect her, ensure she was taken to safety in the lorry. They had made a binding vow.

“We should go after her,” Iris said. Now that she had a task, a mission to focus on, she could take control of her thoughts. She pushed herself up, letting Roman help her when she stumbled. Her knees felt watery, and she took a few deep breaths. “Where do you think we should look first?”

Attie stood, petting a disgruntled Lilac. “Keegan was stationed on the hill, wasn’t she?”

“Right.”

“The let’s start there. But let me put Lilac somewhere safe.”

Iris and Roman waited in the foyer while Attie closed the cat in one of the downstairs rooms. A beam of light snuck through a crack in the mortar, cutting across Iris’s chest. The front door sat crooked on its hinges; it creaked open beneath Roman’s hand.

Iris wasn’t sure what she would find beyond the threshold. But she stepped into a sunlit, steaming world. Most of the buildings on High Street were unscathed save for shattered windows. But as Iris and Roman and Attie walked deeper into town, they began to see the radius of the bombs’ destruction. Houses were leveled, lying in piles of stone and brick and glittering glass. A few had caught on fire, the flames licking the wood and thatch.

It didn’t feel real. It felt like the wavering colors of a dream.

Iris walked around the barricades, around soldiers who were either holding fast at their posts or rushing to put out the flames. She watched through billows of smoke, her heart numb until Roman brought her to the foot of the bluff. Their summit.

She felt his hand tighten on hers, and she looked up to what remained.

The hill had been bombed.

There was a crater in the street. The buildings were heaps of rubble. Smoke rose in steady streams, smudging the clouds and turning the sunlight into a dirty haze.

From the bluff looking down on Avalon, there seemed to be a pattern to the destruction, as if Dacre had cast a web of ruin. Although the longer Iris stared at the bisecting lines of unscathed homes and the corresponding pockets of debris, the stranger the sight seemed to be. She struggled to make sense of how one home was standing while its next-door neighbor was demolished. But when she squinted, she could almost see pathways. Routes that were protected from the bombs. Marisol’s B and B was on one of them.

Iris had to turn away from the uncanny observation. She released Roman’s hand to help the wounded.

There were more than she could count, lying on the cobblestones. Broken and moaning in pain. Her gorge was rising; she had a moment of panic. But then she saw Keegan farther up the road. Moving and bleeding from a wound on her face but wondrously alive. Iris felt her resolve trickle back through her. She knelt beside the nearest soldier, pressing her fingertips to his neck. His eyes were open, fixed on the sky. Blood had poured from a wound in his chest, staining the street.

He was dead, and Iris swallowed, moving over loose cobblestones to reach the next soldier.

She was alive but one of her legs was splintered below the knee. She was struggling to rise, as if she didn’t feel the pain.

“Just lie back for a moment,” Iris said, taking her hand.

The soldier released a shaky gasp. “My legs. I can’t feel them.”

“You’ve been wounded, but help is coming.” Iris glanced up again, watching as Keegan helped a few nurses lift a wounded soldier onto a stretcher. And then she caught a glimpse of Marisol’s red dress as she assisted a doctor in a white coat with another wounded soldier. There was Attie, racing up the hill to give aid to a nurse who was shouting for it, and Roman, a few paces away, tenderly wiping the grime and blood from a soldier’s face.

She hadn’t been expecting this.

Iris had expected a siege or an assault. She had expected gunfire in the streets and the flash of grenades. She hadn’t believed that Dacre would send his eithrals and his bombs.

A war with the gods is not what you expect it to be.

“My legs,” the soldier rasped.

Iris tightened her grip on the girl’s hand. “The doctors and nurses are coming. Hold on, just a moment longer. They’re almost here to us.” But a barricade and countless bodies lay between them and the medical help, who were methodically making their way down the street.

“She’s losing too much blood,” Roman whispered in her ear.

Iris turned to find him kneeling next to her, his gaze on the girl’s mangled leg. Roman eased closer to the soldier, removing his belt to cinch it tightly on her left thigh.

A chill raced up Iris’s spine. Her hands and feet suddenly felt cold again. She worried she was descending into shock.

“I’m going to see if I can get a stretcher for her,” Iris said, rising. “Will you stay beside her, Kitt?”

Roman’s lips parted, as if he wanted to argue. She knew his thoughts, the reason why he was frowning. He didn’t want any sort of distance to come between them. But the soldier groaned and began to thrash, and he quickly gave her his attention, talking to her in a soothing tone. Reaching for her hand to help her through the waves of pain.

Iris turned and stumbled up the hill. She needed a stretcher. A plank of wood would even work. Anything that she and Roman could use to carry the soldier to the infirmary.

Should she search the rubble for something? Should she pull a board free from the barricade? She paused before it, rife with uncertainty even as her thoughts roared at her to hurry.

At the corner of her eye, a wounded soldier was bowed over, weeping for his mother. His agony pierced Iris, and she decided she would take a board of wood from the barricade. There was no time for her to chase down the nurses or the doctors, who were already overwhelmed. There was no time to find a stretcher. She began to claw at the structure, determined to work a plank free.

She didn’t feel the shadows or the cold that rippled through the smoke. She was so intent on liberating this piece of wood that she failed to realize that the wind had ceased and frost had spangled the cobblestones at her feet.

“Down, down, down!”

The command cut through the mire and the chaos like a blade.

Iris froze, lifting her eyes to the churning sky. At first she thought the clouds were moving. A thunderstorm was building. But then she saw the wings, long and pronged, transparent in the fading light. She saw the monstrous white bodies emerge as they flew closer, nearly upon the town.

She had never seen an eithral before. She had never been this close to one. Even as she had once lain sprawled in the field with Roman, she had never been so close as to taste the rot and death in their pinions. To feel the beat of their wings.

“Down and steady!” The command came again. It was Keegan’s voice, hoarse and frayed and yet powerful enough to knock everyone’s sense back into place.

Iris turned, frantically searching for Roman.

She found him five paces away, standing frozen, but it was evident he had been coming to her. Wounded soldiers and rubble lay between them. There was no clear path, and his eyes were wide, his face pale. He had never appeared so afraid, and Iris had to resist the temptation to run to him.

Don’t move, Iris, he mouthed to her.

She drew a deep breath. Her hands twitched at her sides as the creatures flew closer. Any minute now. Any minute, and they would be overhead.

“Mum,” the soldier beside her moaned, rocking on his heels. “Mum!”

Iris glanced at him with alarm. So did Roman, a vein pulsing at his temple.

“You must be quiet,” she said to the soldier. “You must stop moving.”

“I need to find my mum,” the boy wept, beginning to crawl over the ruin. “I need to go home.”

“Stay down!” Iris cried, but he wasn’t listening. She could see her breath; she could feel her heart pounding in her ears. “Please stop moving!”

A shadow of wings spilled over her. The stench of decay stole through the chilled air.

This is the end, Iris thought. She looked at Roman, five paces away.

He was so close, and yet too far to reach.

She imagined their future. All the things she wanted to do with him. Experience with him. All the things she would never taste now.

“Kitt,” she whispered. And she didn’t think he could hear her, but she hoped he could feel the force of such a whisper in his chest. How deep her love was for him.

Something small and shiny was falling from the clouds. But Iris didn’t let its descent draw her eyes from Roman.

She held his steady gaze, waiting for the bomb to hit the ground between them.