Julius and Lachlan are locked in a tumultuous battle across the throne room. Their violently colliding swords send tiny sparks bouncing across the floor.
A grunt of pain causes me to flinch, fear slicing through my focus.
I flick my eyes to their battle to confirm that it wasn’t coming from Lachlan. But my brief assurance costs me. Odessa manages to graze her sword along my bicep. It’s only a shallow cut, and it’s more than worth the relief I felt at seeing Lachlan still moving and on his feet. Julius, however, seems to be waning.
Small droplets of my blood splatter onto the white marble floor. Odessa grins wildly at the shallow cut.
“Did I ever tell you how easy it was to kill your mother?” she hisses.
My entire body halts at her words. My blood boils, and I swipe at her with my axe with more force than before. Her eyes widen in horror as my blade narrowly misses her.
“Say one more word about my parents, and I will cut off your fucking head,” I grit out as I deflect her sluggish lunge.
“Julius killed your father first, after it was obvious they wouldn’t agree to our demands.”
My stomach hollows out.
“Your mother wept like a child over his body. Neither one of them had even attempted to fight us.”
My sight turns red, and a high-pitched ringing builds in my ears as I hack at her. Odessa scarcely manages to dodge and duck out of the way of my axe. My frustration boils over, and when I realize she’s in range, I kick out, slamming my foot into her chest and knocking her down.
Her skull cracks against the marble floor, dark blood creating a halo around her raven-colored hair. I unsheathe my father’s sword, the blade glowing in the moonlight spilling through the open ceiling. Odessa begins cackling like a mad-woman.
The world around me withers away until the only thing I can hear is the words slipping from my lips.
“Do you have anything else you’d like to spew before I end your life?” I hold the point of my blade just above her chest. My blood hammers through my veins, red still coating my vision as my knees threaten to buckle.
She lies there laughing and wipes a stray tear from her cheek that spills over.
“You really think you’re going to kill me?” she croons. “Not even your mother would have attempted to kill her own sister, and she was an actual warrior, born and bred. You? You’re just a weak, pathetic girl that your own parents didn’t see fit to raise here.”
Her words slice through me.
I tip over the edge, blacking out.
My arm rears back before thrusting my sword through her chest.
I didn’t have to push nearly as hard as I thought I would to cut through her ribcage or sternum and into her heart. The metal of my blade clinks as it makes contact with the marble of the floor. The blackness ebbs away. My sight returns. I see why it took so little effort as her body began to twitch.
Smoke streams from her sliced-open skin, and tendrils of it twirl around my blade.
A black oil-like substance spews from her body.
“Lachlan!” I shriek.
The writhing mass of flesh twists into something from my darkest nightmares. Footfalls thunder towards me. Julius is face down on the ground, Evander and Tane holding him in place while he screams with rage. The demons that had been pouring in from the hallways, now corpses littering the floor.
Their black blood is in puddles.
Lachlan skids to a halt beside me and watches the creature that was once Odessa writhe around the ground. Her golden skin shifting into blackish-green scales. Her raven hair fades to a brittle white and crumbles to dust around her.
What was once her beautiful, youthful face ripples and contorts into a grotesque, serpentine monster.
I take a step back. “Is that what I think it is?”
The writhing body stills on the cold marble floor.
“It’s an asphidra,” Lach mumbles. He turns his terrified expression my way. “From Jotnar.”
