My heartbeat stuttered with unexpected anxiety.
“It is our duty as clerics,” Imelda continued, “to serve you to the best of our ability. We are the earthly hands of these gods, and our only goal is to help them help you.”
Let’s not kid ourselves, Imelda. It was our job to please the gods, and we would help humankind only if it pleased the god we served. Suggesting anything else was utterly absurd or an outright lie.
The people in the crowd didn’t seem to care. They were eating it up with a spoon.
I craned my neck to see over the rows of clerics sitting in front of us. The civilian crowd shifted, and sure enough, there they were.
Sunny was next to Sawyer, an arm around her, and she appeared to be scanning the room for me.
When she spotted me, she waved and elbowed the teenager, pointing to my location.
Sawyer still looked surly but lifted her hand in a halfhearted greeting.
Then the corner of the stage exploded.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Imelda went flying, arcing through the air as if she were a mannequin, landing somewhere on the steps up to the second floor. All I could see was a jumble of limbs.
The area next to the stage, where the civilians were standing, was flattened. Bits of metal and wood were raining down over where the people had just been, and a huge crater was swallowing up what remained of the stage.
The big, heavy posts that had been constructed to hold up the audio system and lighting rigs swayed dangerously, then collapsed. A whole row of clerics fell under the first one. The sound made me sick to my stomach.
Camera crews were divided. Some continued to film, the instinct to capture the carnage greater than their need to run to safety. Others only cared about themselves—and who could blame them?—and ran for the exits.
The hotel lobby was a deafening roar of screams and panic. The ringing from the day before had returned, this time worse, but even though it was like a silent alarm going off in my inner ear, I could still hear everything else going on around me.
It took me a minute to realize why I was viewing everything from a weird angle. The weight of not one, but two bodies was on top of me, crushing me beneath a row of scattered chairs. I wriggled, trying to get myself free, and finally had to start throwing elbows back in order to get them off me.
Both Cade and Prescott had apparently lunged for me at the same time, resulting in a heap of the three of us being on the floor when the debris started coming down. They were both caked with dust, but neither was bleeding as far as I could tell.
I got to my feet too fast, wobbling slightly because of the imbalance created by my inner ear, and braced myself against Cade to keep from falling down again.
The second explosion blew me backwards anyway, toppling over the chairs behind me, sending me sliding through the mass of running bystanders.
The whole stage was gone now. Bits of
flooring and wood were raining down in splinters. People were tripping over me, kicking me, falling down in their desperation to get to an exit.
Now everything sounded like I was underwater. All the screaming and shouting had been reduced to the wub-wub-wub throbbing of my own heartbeat. I scuttled backwards across the floor until I was out of the way of the stampede, then used a pillar to pull myself up to standing.
My eyes were caked with dust, and wiping them barely did any good. The whole lobby was thick with smoke and debris, creating a cloud I couldn’t see through. Where the stage had once been was just a hole. Where the chairs were in neat lines only a minute earlier were only gnarled metal frames and smears of blood on the tile.
There were pieces of people on the floor.
I gagged and sobbed at the same time.
Where was Cade? He’d been right beside me a second ago, but now I was somewhere else, blown clear across the room. Was he okay? What about Leo? He’d been the farthest away, but it was hard to say how far the debris had gone.
My gaze crossed the room toward the stage, and the reality of it sank in.
The entire civilian area was gone.
My breath vanished. I braced myself against the pillar and tried to rationalize what I was seeing. Surely I’d just forgotten where people had been standing. There had to be some mistake. The civilian crowd must have been farther back, behind the cameras. They were all fine; they’d been the first ones to get out.
I lied to myself, because anything else would mean I had to admit that the place Sunny and Sawyer had been standing only a minute earlier was now a smoldering crater in the tile.