Talamayas had Helia out of harm's way faster than the rocks could fall, though she certainly wouldn't thank him for holding her against his chest as he moved blocks from the conflict. A blade nearly sliced off Talamayas' fingers as Helia freed herself, but she moved with him as they fled. While she wanted to be nowhere near him, at least she recognized that he wasn't trying to bury her in rubble. Talamayas could deal with that as long as she didn't get herself killed.

The mages gave them no time to rest, as they hopped through the city in the opposite direction of Blaze's compound. It was no coincidence that they were keeping them far from home base, and Talamayas was grateful only for the fact that it would keep Wren out of this. If he saw a Sol fighting mages, he would assume the worst, as the Songs always did.

Helia was not willing to fight her people, so the best they could hope to do was lose them. There wasn't enough city to keep them enclosed for long though, and they could not flee into the desert. This wasn't Sol territory for yet a few miles and putting him and Helia out in the open was a bad idea when he had no idea how many Songs were floating around here. To avoid that, they zig-zagged around the town, steadily approaching its borders, but the mages somehow found them in each nook or cranny they used to obscure themselves.

It didn't take long for Talamayas to ascertain that they had a way of tracking Helia. They did not have heightened senses like vampires, so their precise targeting made little sense otherwise. Both he and Helia had their magic muted enough that if they ducked into trash cans and put the lid on, a mage could pass by with no doubt to them being anything other than refuse.

Talamayas could evade pursuit easily, blending in with his generic cloak and muted magic, but Helia was neither disguised nor did she look like she belonged here. Still, they had avoided the townsfolk, so it wasn't intel leading their assailants on. It was more. There had to be something on Helia that they were following. It had to be her.

Talamayas stopped, catching Helia with an arm and spinning them into a narrow alleyway. Carrying her sparked the most unpleasant light energy against his body, but he had little choice. As a human, she was too slow, and he would never get enough space between them and the Cinder assassins at their backs. If he splattered her people that would fix the immediate problem, but she'd shake his protection and loathe him until he was dust. That would cause issue for Vice, so here he was picking an angry cat out of a tree while it clawed him even though it was in danger.

Talamayas slipped his hand around her back and hopped down several more alleyways before dropping below a tarp and pushing her against the flat of a wall. When she looked like she was going to spit in his face with anger, he placed a single finger to her lips to keep her quiet as he listened for their pursuers. They were far back but heading straight for them still. Light magic flared under his finger, and he snapped it back before she bit it off. It calmed the woman little as Tala slid his hands back into her hair, raking his fingers over her skull and along the edges of her face, searching for any adornment. A hairclip, earring, or necklace that Blaze could have enchanted

The trembling form under his fingers as he rounded her throat with his hands had him freezing in place. Under his fingers, Helia's skin had faded greyer than her normal dim pallor. With all of her bravado and headstrong nature, he'd forgotten she was a woman. Talamayas didn't deal with the fairer sex often, but he didn't have time to argue about how little he wanted anything from her physical body. They needed to shake the assailants, and he didn't have time to calm her to his touch.

There wasn't enough time in the void to manage that feat.

Talamayas trailed the back of her neck and eased them along her shoulder line until he met the collar of her mage clothes. No jewelry, or accessories, which made sense for a grand mage, but she must have something on that could have been bugged.

"I need you to remove your clothes." Talamayas barely got the words out before she cranked her knee directly up into his groin. Talamayas firm hand stopped it before she damaged anything, but she used the opening to spit in his face. With bared fangs and a growing growl of frustration, he wiped it from his cheek before he dropped his forehead to hers. "I have no interest in your body. There is something on you that the Cinders are using to track us. If we don't get rid of it, then we'll never escape them. There are too many in the city to break all of their knees."

"Get off of me, now." Helia's words gave no room for objection, and Talamayas gave her exactly one measured step back. It was enough air to breathe, but not for her to flee if she tried.

The woman took slow breaths with her eyes pinned to Tala's knees for so long, that he was opening his mouth to explain how little time they had when she moved. The shawl fell first, hitting the ground, and she slid her hands into her decorative mage robes to lose those at well. It left her in nothing but the mage from of Kevlar, tightly shaped around her abdomen and tied with a string dyed a rainbow of red. Tala reached for it as soon as he saw it, yanking it back from her before she could stop him.

Blaze's ugly magic tainted the woven rope, wound into the dye of all things and Talamayas incinerated it with flame in an instant.

"I could have deactivated that while keeping the string intact."

Helia's angry tone drew his eyes back, and he stiffened in embarrassment as he realized it had been keeping her ensemble together. Without the tie, the tight fabric of the top loosened around her chest, and the lower skirt was now held up only in Helia's fingers. The creeping blush that headed quickly to her ears was all that kept her rage in check, and Talamayas cursed his impatience.

"Take this, I'll get you something." Talamayas thrust his cloak at her.

Of course, Blaze had chosen a part of her clothing that she couldn't cast aside without going about naked. Had the mages never heard of elastic waists? Their necessity for traditional wear was as archaic as the Shades in their efforts to exist deep in the forests like deer.

Tala found a woman outside of her adobe and watering the plants a few houses down, and he dropped in front of her in a silent movement to catch her eye before she could raise alarm. "Might you have a tunic to spare?" The allure behind his eyes had her heading inside, and she brought out a looser dress that would fit Helia.

It was nothing fancy, just a tan slip with a tie for shape, but Helia took it the moment he returned. Using the new tie, she secured her upper mage Kevlar, but it wasn't long enough to help much with the pants and skirts. Those she discarded as she slipped the shift over the tops, patting the skirt flat to her knees. Helia was taller than the desert woman, but she didn't care much what she was wearing as long as it wasn't a cloak that Tala had worn on his bare skin.

That, Tala took back to cover up his muscular form all too quickly. Helia's eyes had plastered to how much raw power clung to his form, and he didn't need any more fear for him culminating in her mind. Talamayas wanted her to love him as family, as Ghost did, but that would never happen. It broke his heart each moment that he considered the kind of rift it would spread between Vice and him.

Helia could ruin them.

It was no fault of hers though. Tala was skilled at screwing up relationships with the mates of those closest to him. Silvia Arc had known him for a minute before he'd melted her insides just for the pleasure of hearing her scream. Only Silvia's grace had convinced Neil to forgive him, but Tala had never forgiven himself. The ecstasy he'd felt while burning Silvia alive from the inside out haunted him on some of his worst days. Something was broken in him, and Vice was the only one who never saw it. Wren knew and soothed him the best he could, but to Vice, Tala had no faults.

Without Vice, he didn't know how long he could walk upright before he crumbled under the weight of his sins and his warped mind.

"Are you okay?" Helia's voice dragged him into reality. With a hand on each side of his head, he'd sunk against a wall into a crouch, and he was a hair shy of a rolled-up pill bug.

"I love Ghost," Tala rasped, unable to control the tears that flooded his eyes. Since his creation, he'd always walked with another, first his mother, then Vice, then Wren. Being truly alone, without even Vice pressed to his back in case he needed someone to stabilize him was unraveling him. "I'm sorry for what I did to your father. Please don't take Ghost away from me. He's all I have." Tala was begging, curled up and weak, but the slightest pressure or pain could ignite a blaze that would eat him alive.

Light magic grazed the hand clutching his skull, and it shook a sob out of him when it wasn't Wren's. As much as he tried to play it off, seeing Wren like that, without the love that had conquered their hatred and melted Tala into the arms of a mage, had shaken him. Ghost was asleep, Stone didn't know him, Shan would know shit for what to do with his grief, and there was no enemy he could incinerate to make it all feel better.

"Look," Helia sighed, kicking the dust as she stood closer to him than any mage would normally dare. "Ghost said you wouldn't harm me." There was a question in the statement, and Tala lifted his tear-soaked face only to meet her eyes and nod it back into the ground. "As long as that remains the case, I'm not going to sit around and scheme ways to steal him away, all right? Got a few other things to worry about right now. I can feel Horus from here, and his magic is weak. Can you put yourself together so I can save my idiot brother?"

Tala stood, dropped his face into his cloak against his arm, and wiped the moisture from his face. It did little to make it any better he was sure, but it was the best he could manage as Helia headed down the alleyways. What sort of pitiful man was he that he couldn't function on his own? The desert had shielded him from so much more than he realized.

They found Horus in about the same shape as Helia would have been without Tala's interventions. One of his arms was snapped, blood dripped from his tousled red hair down his forehead, and a gash cut him hip to thigh, all injuries he would have never sustained with Rodney in the picture. Behind Horus, slumped against a wall, Rodney was unconscious from a blow to the head. The man had likely been as reluctant to fight the Cinders as Horus and Helia were, and it had been his downfall. The new injury was close enough to where Tala himself had hit Rodney before, and without the compounded injury, the man might not have fallen. This was also his fault.

A pair of Cinder mages approached Rodney as another two kept Horus front and center, and a protective need filled Talamayas with rage that swallowed his guilt. Rodney was his, and as the Cinder lunged to touch one of Tala's people, his mind melded to blackness. By the time Tala realized what he was doing, the Cinder's neck was snapped in two and Tala dropped the man to the ground with a despairing growl. Before he could look to Helia and try to repair anything he'd just ruined, his nose lifted from the smell of melted flesh.

Ahead of Horus, who'd fallen to his knees, his two attackers were nothing but piles of liquidized flesh. Tala had not done that. Helia passed the corpses of her people with a shadow in her eyes, and she pulled Horus to his feet with no patience for his trembling form.

"You killed them, Hel!" Horus was near hysteric as Tala lifted Rodney into his arms behind them.

"That's what they'd have done to you if I hadn't, Horus!"

"Flash placed bets with me weekly, Helia. You don't know that he was here to kill me!"

The sound of Helia's slap across her brother's face echoed among the empty alleyways. Horus touched his cheek, stunned by the strike as much as the tears that filled Helia's eyes. The woman had wanted to kill her people as much as Tala had the Cinder at his feet. All they'd both wanted was to protect those close to them. Horus and Helia stood across from each other in silence long enough that his ears rang and his feet itched to move. Rodney needed blood, now, not later.

"They gave us no choice, Horus," Helia finally said to break the silence. "This city isn't safe. We have to leave."

"And go where?" Horus growled, wincing from the break in his arm. No matter how Helia tried to prop it, the bone needed to be set before anything could be done about it.

"I will take you," Talamayas said well before he considered what he was offering. Allowing a few friendly mages into his territory was one thing, but two hostile grand mages was another. Shan would stab him in the eye with his glaive for this.

"Is that Talamayas fucking Sol, Hel?" Horus near shrieked at her. She rolled her eyes, like her brother should know that she wasn't with him by any choice of her own. "Why are you with him, and—get your grubby mitts off Rodney!" Horus thought process skipped to his friend as soon as he realized the position he was in. If it was Tala's decision, he would return Rodney to Horus, but at the moment, his Sol magic was expediting Rodney's recovery. Until the man could get blood, the power of his sire served as a substitute to aid him.

"I'm sure it will be in shackles," Helia responded to what Tala had said, and he cringed as she offered her wrists to him up and together. It seemed like a dare more than a real offering. "Go ahead Talamayas. This is what you wanted right? Some ploy to take Pyre's heirs into your castle and throw them in your cells. We have no other choice here. We'll be either surrounded or pushed into the desert soon, so just do it." Helia's tone was as bitter as when she's spoken of Ghost withholding information, but Helia was resigned to her fate. There was no refuge in this city for her and her brother, nor would there be anywhere else after she'd killed her own.

With a shallow sigh, Talamayas shifted to their side, brushing up against Horus with a shoulder as he dropped a hand to Helia's lowered head. Touch was needed for them to join him in his dark transportation magic, and he whisked the siblings away to his castle. What he would do with them there was entirely up to them, and he hoped it didn't come to chains.

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Word Count: 2704