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Her blood answered.

It was not much. She had little left to spend, and what she spent was clumsy. The cuts she'd opened on Elzhbeta didn't bleed harder, didn't tear wider. They only pulled, the way her own marks had pulled a moment before. A small thing. Enough to make Elzhbeta's weight wrong on her front foot.

Idonea lunged.

They went down together. Elzhbeta's knife skittered. Idonea got her forearm across the older woman's throat and her weight behind it and drove her back against the trunk of the nearest tree, and for a count of three they were close enough that Idonea saw the shape of Elzhbeta's pupils, which were a woman's pupils, not a daemon's, which was somehow worse.

She got the dagger to Elzhbeta's throat.

"Where is the relic."

Elzhbeta smiled. The smile was patient.

"You are weaker than I thought."

She slammed her palms into the tree. Sigils blazed bright, burning with a searing light. The blast was not large. It didn't need to be large. It was close.

The world went white at the edges and Idonea was in the snow again, ten paces from where she'd stood, her ribs full of the sound the blast had made. Snow in her lungs. She coughed and the coughing hurt in three new places. Somewhere above her, a branch creaked and fell.

From the corner of her eye came a streak of scales.

Chapter 28

The strike came faster than a breath.

Lance’s body speared straight through Elzhbeta’s abdomen.

The sound was wet. Final.

Elzhbeta’s mouth opened in a soundless gasp as the force lifted her off her feet. Her body arced, then crashed into the snow in a spray of red.

Idonea’s eyes went wide. She couldn’t move, couldn't even inhale — she simply watched the steam of Elzhbeta’s blood rise into the freezing air. The wound was catastrophic: a torn tunnel of flesh and shattered bone, punched clean through her middle.

Lance wheeled above, twisting in a brutal, graceful loop. His wings cut the night like razors.

Idonea forced her legs to carry her forward. She dropped to her knees beside the dying woman.

"Elzhbeta."

The witch's eyes were huge, unblinking, startled more than afraid. A thin froth of blood bubbled at her lips as her chest shuddered. There was no spell, no poultice, no miracle that would save her.

"You weren't supposed to die."

The words came out weak. Her only lead to the relic was gone in an instant, gone with Elzhbeta's last breaths, drifting up into the cold air as steam.

Lance came down to the snow beside her. Lance held still. He didn't come to her.

She looked at him. He had decided. He was waiting to see if she understood.

"She would've run," Idonea said. "Wouldn't she."

Lance didn't move.

"She would've made it to the trees and I would've followed her and she would've killed me."

A low chuff. The closest he came to yes.

Idonea swallowed. Her throat hurt. He'd decided. Not her, him. The choice of his own judgment over the plan she'd not bothered to tell him because she'd not thought of him as something to tell, settled badly beneath her ribs.