Free The Destiny (Blood and Destiny Book 4) by E.C. Jarvis Page A

the rest of the
downed ship did not abate. If she’d been entertaining any notion of climbing
aboard to look for Cid or any of the others, that idea had gone quite literally
up in smoke.
    “Miss Markus,
Larissa…please,” Vries said as he laid a hand on her arm.
    As yet another body was
laid out in the mud behind her, she took in a deep breath and silently told the
headache to go away. Not that it did much good.
    She turned in the mud,
her entire body caked in a layer of brown-grey dirt from top to toe. She
scanned the collection of injured men spread out around her, as if she were a
one-woman hospital capable of performing healing miracles on the entire crew.
The injuries ranged from cuts and scrapes to missing limbs and crushed bones.
All of them disappeared from her mind when she saw one body in particular.
Different from the rest, dressed in odd Eptoran clothing with gnarled, knotted
red hair on his head, Cid stretched out nearby, unconscious. A great, bloody
gash split across his forehead.
    “Cid,” she breathed as
she stumbled towards him, already concerned that it was too late.
    “Captain,” he murmured
as she knelt beside him.
    “Shush, let me heal
you.”
    “Bloody hell.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
     
    A glint nearby caught Holt’s attention as
he ducked a punch; a sword lay half-buried in the mud. He slammed his fist into
his attacker’s chest and followed with a punch to the throat. The man hit the
ground with a grunt, and Holt vaulted over his prone body. He rolled sideways
and grabbed at the sword, extracting it from the ground, and immediately swung
it across his body to deflect yet another attacker. Since entering into the
fray, the numbers of Marines and pirates on the ground had increased steadily,
and it was fast becoming an all-out battlefield.
    In the craziness of the
milieu, the fighters couldn’t tell which side Holt was on, and so he found
himself fighting both Marine and pirate alike, no matter how much he tried to
avoid battling with those he considered his own. He couldn’t exactly stop them
mid-fight to reason with them or prove he was on their side. The battle
disintegrated into nothing more than a mess of fighting, small groups of people
battling amongst themselves, with no strong leader to coordinate the Marines
into formation. If he had their backing, he would have pulled back to gather
them together into a cohesive unit. Every attempt he made to collect a group of
men together quickly turned on him, leaving him no choice than to plough on
regardless.
    Bodies lay strewn about;
severed limbs dotted the ground, already half-buried with kicked-up clumps of
mud. The rain persisted, though the cool air did nothing to dampen the
ferocious fire of the downed RDS Eagle , its carcass turned to a bright
orange ball of flame. The rain seemed equally unable to cool the heated blood
running through Holt’s veins. He ducked punches and swings from swords, barely
flinched when a bullet grazed his arm, and drew blood from the necks of any man
foolish enough to get close. Sweat poured down his face, the salty tang of it
playing on his lips.
    As yet another body fell
at his feet, he paused, turning. He’d moved farther away from the burning
wreckage, and a sea of fighting people had closed in behind. He could no longer
see Larissa. Something pulled inside his chest, as though a hand had tightened
around his heart. As much as he tried to ignore the pain, the worry, and to
stop himself from panicking, it wouldn’t go away as he trudged back towards the
spot where he’d left her to heal people.
    A great weight landed
on his back and sent him crashing down to his knees, mud splattering in all
directions. Something heavy clunked the back of his head, and black spots
danced across his vision. He fell farther forward, controlling the movement,
then spun around at the last second to flip the attacker onto his back. The
sword fell from his hands, and a flash of a blade caught his attention as the
heavy thug tried