The Gold buff sang through Naomi's body like a live wire buried under her skin, and she hated that the sensation felt good when everything else felt so wrong.
She stood on a ridge of volcanic rock that jutted from the forest canopy like the spine of something enormous and dead, her staff planted against the stone and her pink eyes tracking the smoke columns still rising from the eastern quadrant where Blair's fire had chewed through a mile of ancient jungle before the mana-saturated moisture finally won. The air up here tasted wrong. Not just humid, not just thick, but actively hostile, like breathing through a washcloth someone had soaked in warm copper pennies and left in the sun for a week. Every inhale required a conscious decision to accept what entered her lungs, and every exhale carried the faint sweetness of mana corruption that made her teeth ache in the back where her wisdom teeth had never come in.
Jace was down there somewhere.
