Thanks to the silencer I’d given him, the gun barely made a sound, and the man was dead before he hit the ground.
Meanwhile, Sophia whipped the shovel off her shoulder and slammed it into the knees of the guy closest to her, causing him to howl with pain. He toppled over into the pit, and Sophia whacked the shovel against his head, caving in his skull with a satisfying crack.
That left one man standing. He looked around at his fallen buddies, his eyes wide with confusion and fear, wondering how they’d all died so quickly. He drew in a breath to scream, but my knife in his throat cut off that concern.
Less than a minute after it had begun, it was over, and all five of Grimes’s men lay dead at our feet. A good start but not enough. Notnearly enough.
I walked over to the edge of the pit, bent down, and held out my hand. Sophia clasped it, and I pulled her up and out of the trench. Up close, the stench was even more putrid and overpowering, the bodies bloodier and more rotten than I’d imagined. How had she managed to stand it? Both now and back then?
Sophia swayed forward, and I held her until she was steady on her feet. Owen stood off to one side, watching our backs.
Soot and ash flaked off Sophia’s once-white dress, which hung in burnt tatters on her back, while the heels had snapped off her shoes. Her black hair was a singed, tangled mess, while blood had soaked through the white bandages that had been placed over the gunshot wounds on her left arm and thigh. But the worst part was her skin, which was red, raw, and blistered, from her fingertips all the way up her arms. Her throat and face were as bright and shiny as a ripe tomato, her cheeks puffed up from the burns so that they seemed like they would pop if you so much as looked at them too hard.
Every single part of her had to just hurt. But she was still standing, still breathing, still in one piece. Everything else could be fixed—on the outside, at least.
“Jo-Jo?” Sophia rasped in her broken voice.
“cooper healed her,” I said. “At least, he tried to. I don’t know how well he did. Maybe he’ll know more about how she’s doing when we get back to his place.”
Worry glimmered in Sophia’s black eyes, but she nodded.Then the dwarf did something that she’d never done before in all the years that I’d known her: she threw her arms around me and hugged me tight.
“Thank you,” she whispered in my ear.
I would have hugged her back if I didn’t think that it would have caused her even more pain. “You are more than welcome. Now, come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Sophia nodded and pulled back. She leaned down, grabbed her shovel, and used it as a sort of walking stick.
Together, with Owen, we headed toward the woods and our escape route.
Chapter Eighteen
Warren stepped out of the trees and met us at the edge of the forest, still clutching his rifle.
“Anything?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not a peep so far. I don’t think that anyone in camp heard what happened here, but it won’t be too long before Grimes or some of his men come to check on the others. We need to disappear into the woods before they spot us—”
It was as if his words summoned up all the bad, capricious luck that I’d been expecting ever since we’d first set foot on Bone Mountain, because one of Grimes’s men chose that exact moment to run into the clearing.
“Hey,” he called out, still jogging forward and waving to someone behind him. “Go get Stewie, and come help me. Mr. Grimes changed his mind. He wants the woman brought back—”
He turned around and stopped short at the sight of Owen, Sophia, Warren, and me standing to one side of the clearing. His gaze zoomed in on the dead bodies of his buddies sprawled among the worn tombstones. The guy sucked in a breath, but he did the smart thing and didn’t approach us. Instead, he did something far, far worse: he pulled his gun out of the holster on his belt and fired three quick shots up into the air.
I cursed and started forward, ready to kill him, but Warren beat me to it. The old man raised his rifle to his shoulder and put a bullet in the other man’s forehead.
But the sharp, staccato sounds of the revolver and the rifle echoed around the clearing, then bellowed through the trees and rattled farther out into the main camp.
Shouts rose in the distance, indicating that Grimes, Hazel, and everyone else would descend on the area in minutes, if not sooner.
“What do you want to do, Gin?” Owen asked. “Make a stand here?”
I shook my head. “No. There are too many of them.
They can easily outflank us, and they have more weapons than we do. Now we run.”
Sophia hurried forward, but after a few yards she pulled up short and hissed in pain, despite the shovel that she’d been using to support herself. A bit of blood trickled down her bare leg.
“How bad is that gunshot wound in your thigh?” I asked.
“Just bandaged,” she rasped. “Not healed.”
That’s what I’d feared, but there was nothing to be done about it. So I put an arm under Sophia’s shoulder, taking some of her weight. Together, we headed for the trees.
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack!
We didn’t even make it into the woods before a couple more of Grimes’s men raced into the clearing, guns out and firing at us.
“You take Sophia!” Owen shouted, raising his own weapon to fire back. “Warren and I will cover you!”
“Do it!” I yelled back. “But stay close to us! We can’t afford to get separated!”
Owen nodded, and he and Warren let loose with another volley of shots. Their guns would be more effective than my knives at this range, even though all I wanted to do was turn around and throw myself at Grimes’s men.
Together, Sophia and I hobbled into the woods and back up the faint path that Warren had made earlier when he’d led us down to the pit.
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack!
Bullets zinged through the forest all around us as Grimes’s men let off another round of shots. They put their stockpile of guns to good use, because the bullets slammed into the trees, cut through the leaves, kicked up wads of dirt, and pinged off rocks.
I put myself on the side of the trail where the bullets where coming from, protecting Sophia as much as I could, but I didn’t reach for my Stone magic to harden my skin. I needed to save my power for something else that I had in mind, so all I could do was hope that Sophia and I wouldn’t get shot in the meantime and that Owen and Warren wouldn’t either.
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack!
Owen and Warren returned fire, and several yelps of pain sounded as their bullets hit home. They had the advantage of using the trees as a screen, whereas Grimes’s men were still standing in the clearing and firing blindly into the woods. Still, one of them could easily get in a lucky shot on any one of us.
Sophia hobbled along as quickly as she could, but it was slow going, especially since we were climbing back up to the top of the ridge that Warren, Owen, and I had used as a vantage point to spy on the camp earlier. Still, we trudged on and moved as fast as we could. That was all that we could do. Behind us, I could hear the crunch-crunch-crunch and crackle-crackle of Owen’s and Warren’s footsteps through the dry leaves as they stopped and started, firing, then moving up the trail, pausing to reload, then firing again, before repeating the whole process.