"Never. Need… to… move."
Adele wiped her weeping eyes. There was no time for relief. No time for tears. The entire tower was on fire now, though the flames were the least of their problems. She burst into a coughing fit, trying to keep her head low, below the roiling cloud of smoke. Sweet heavens, it was getting worse.
"Jack?" he asked.
"Alive," Jack rasped, one hand clamped to his chest. He must have jerked the knife out, but as they watched he burst into a coughing fit, his ravaged lungs no match for the smoke-tainted air.
Adele tore strips of silk from her gown and hastily fashioned a makeshift bandage for him. Hot red blood wept over her hands, startling her. She was so used to a blue blood's cooler, darker blood.
"Thank you." Jack's head slumped, but he turned to look at the fallen man nearby. "Is he dead?"
Malloryn tried to roll onto his side, still gripping the mask. "Came back… once."
Balfour stared sightlessly at the ceiling, his entire face ravaged.
Malloryn crawled toward him, bloody knife in hand.
"This time, I'll make sure he stays dead," he promised, and Adele turned her face away as he set about removing Balfour's heart.
The air was so thick with smoke that Adele couldn't see a damned thing as she heaved Malloryn to his feet.
For a second, panic bloomed. How were they going to get out of here?
A rope suddenly dropped through the open hole where the atrium's glass roof had once been.
Then a figure in black was sliding down it, wearing a similar mask over his face as the one Malloryn wore. A second figure followed the first.
"Over here!" Adele screamed, waving one arm.
She sucked in a lungful of smoke and started coughing as both figures turned toward them.
Nighthawks.
She recognized the hard leather body armor and the golden striking hawk embossed on the chest of the lead figure.
Then Malloryn's weight was being eased from her shoulders, and the leather-clad figure hooked some sort of harness around her husband's waist.
A breathing mask was clamped over her face as the second Nighthawk strapped Malloryn to him and gave a tug on the rope still attached to him.
"Adele first," Malloryn insisted, but the taller man by her side made an impatient gesture with two fingers, and suddenly Malloryn was vanishing up through the hole in the ceiling with the second Nighthawk.
"Your Grace," the stranger said, his voice echoing through the mask. He clipped a harness around her waist, and she barely had time to realize one of his arms was made of metal.
Jack presented a problem, but the Nighthawk solved it by offering the looped footstrap at the end of the rope to Jack. He lashed the pair of them together.
"You're not coming?" Adele screamed.
The handsome stranger winked at her, drawing a grappling gun. "Don't worry about me, Your Grace. My wife would have my hide if I did something foolishly heroic. I'll be on the roof."
And then she and Jack clutched at each other as the rope suddenly retracted.
The last she saw of the Nighthawk, he was pointing the grappling gun through the hole.
The pair of them swayed on the rope as it was winched toward the solid hull of the dirigible. The sudden lack of smoke and heat felt like a blessing that left her lightheaded. If she hadn't been harnessed to Jack, she'd have probably fallen.
Adele caught her first glimpse of the tower below.
Flames licked through every opening and window. Smoke circled its brow like a crown. Despite the hundreds of tiny figures in the yard around it, there was clearly no hope for the Ivory Tower.
She blinked, and then voices were shouting.
People hauling at the rope, leaning through a pair of retractable doors to snatch hold of her and Jack.
Somehow she found herself in the hold of the dirigible the Nighthawks owned. The Nightingale, Malloryn had called it.
Adele slumped against the steel hull as someone held a glass of water to her lips. She slurped at it, her dry, cracked lips raw and painful.
"Here." A cool, wet cloth wiped her face and eyes, and Adele finally got a good look at their rescuer.
The woman was tall and leanly muscled, her blonde hair braided tightly. Something about her appearance spoke of a quiet, solid sense of power, as if she'd faced the worst the world could throw at her and survived unscathed.
Lady Peregrine of the Nighthawks.
Which meant the Nighthawk with the bio-mech arm had most likely been her husband, the Guild Master himself.
"How did you even… know we were there?" she whispered hoarsely. Every inch of her hurt.
"Don't talk," the woman replied. "Byrnes waved us down from the rooftop. When we brought them up, he was beyond frantic. Said the duke was battling Balfour in the throne room and required assistance. If we didn't offer it, he was going to go back down himself."
Stoic Byrnes, with his callous shrugs and sarcastic rejoinders. "Is Ingrid all right?"
"We've got her in one of the bedchambers. They're trying to keep her immobile, but Doctor Gibson is hopeful that the loupe will repair the damage if given the chance."
Adele saw her husband then, pushing irritably at a pair of Nighthawks who were fussing about him. Lady Peregrine saw her attention shift and helped her to her feet.
"Your Grace, I believe you're upsetting Her Grace," Lady Peregrine told Malloryn. "Please let Fitz and Dr. Gibson see to your injuries."
"I'm fi—"
"That wasn't a request," Lady Peregrine cut in. "Don't make me hemlock you, Malloryn. It would be undignified."
"Though she'd probably enjoy it," said her husband, Guild Master Reed, as he was winched through the trapdoor.
Malloryn subsided with a thinning of his lips.
And then Adele was in his arms, and Malloryn gave her a gentle squeeze and a sigh as if to say, fine, he would submit this one time. For her.