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“Vsuhl!” The name leapt from my throat with startling potency. I felt the glorious heat of the blade coalesce in my hand. White-hot fire surged down my arm and through my core, filling me with intimately familiar power. Gripping the hilt tightly, I lowered the blade. My whole body vibrated from the inside out with the promise of potential, like a swarm of angry bees confined in a sack. I smiled, then sent out a burst of power that knocked the three lords back on their asses.
I breathed deeply. That was more like it. With the combined power of the grove, the culminating ritual, and Vsuhl, I was a motherfucking badass.
Like ripples in a pond, the ritual flared in rings around me. When the perimeter ignited, a sound like a massive gong reverberated, and the carvings on the surrounding columns blazed with prismatic light. Clear tones rang out one after the other around me, unique for each column. The flowering vines encasing three of them vanished in instant incineration. The tones united in a continuous low thrum that fueled me like gas on a fire. The swarm of bees in me doubled in number and furor. I didn’t know how my skin held together with the intensity of the vibration, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
Mzatal was on his hands and knees just beyond a column. He tried to speak but coughed up blood instead. The lords got to their feet but I simply knocked them down again, laughing. I didn’t feel at all helpless now. Fuckers. You’re mine now.
Rhyzkahl and Jesral dragged Amkir up and then retreated a good distance away. I took the time to make sure that Idris and Mzatal were all right, though I kept an eye on the three lords. Mzatal struggled up to a standing position, keeping his feet in a wide stance for stability. He turned toward me, breathing heavily, bleeding from mouth and nose, with a deeply troubled expression on his face.
“Kara,” he said, holding a hand up toward me. “Ease your grip.”
I looked down at the blade in my hand and then back up to him. “Why would I do that?” I asked. “It’s okay. It’s perfect.” And it was. Why wouldn’t it be?
Mzatal took a staggering step toward me. I felt him extending and touching me on a level beyond the physical. “Because it is too much too soon,” he said. His voice was ragged, lacking its usual strength. “Remember what happened in the grove conflict. Just ease your grip. Trust me.”
I looked over at the three. They clustered together at least twenty yards away, but I couldn’t tell what they were doing. I frowned, hesitating. But I trusted Mzatal. That much I knew. The power of the grove leapt within me. It wanted to fully join with the blade energy again, wanted to meld into something perfect and huge. Again? The eagerness of the grove lit my cells, a glorious overlay on the supercharged blade energy. More. More! There was an ancient taste to it, but I remembered how easily I’d succumbed to the lure of the power during the previous battle with Rhyzkahl.
I eased my grip on the blade, shuddering at the decrease in power. Vsuhl touched me with whisper-traces of assent. The thrum of the columns eased to barely audible, and the bees settled into a milling mass. Mzatal let out a breath as if he’d just watched a pin put back in a grenade, then began to work his way through the ritual sigils to me. “Good. Keep hold, and balance,” he said. He glanced back at the three, brow furrowing. I followed his gaze and saw that all had their hands on the hilt of Rhyzkahl’s blade. What the hell were they doing?
My cop-sense lit up, that vibe that had served me so well in the past of “something’s wrong.” Those three were up to something. They hadn’t retreated. But we had the blade now. If we could get through the passage and get the hell out of here, then everything would be okay. But they’re not gonna let us just walk out.
“My Lord!” Idris suddenly called out, alarm coloring his voice. “Kara! The perimeter. Something’s happening to it!”
Even as the words left his mouth my bad vibe feeling increased about a hundredfold, and my upper chest, abdomen and right side ignited in a burning itch. Shit! Three of the sigils carved into my torso flared. I shot Mzatal an anxious look. He continued to work his way through the diagram to me, moving with utmost caution through the pattern so as to not leave behind any weaknesses or breaches in the protections. The ritual was over and the blade in my hand, but now we had to keep what we’d fought so hard to gain.
“Mzatal,” I said as the burning itch increased. “The sigil scars—”
I didn’t get a chance to finish my sentence. The three lords lifted Rhyzkahl’s blade and sent a seething mass of shadowy red rakkuhr arcing my way, far too familiar from my time in Rhyzkahl’s ritual. Still gripping Vsuhl, I threw up my hands in pure instinct to shield. The rakkuhr struck the blade, sending a shudder of remembered torment through me. Scintillating strands of ruby lightning strung between the blade in my hand and the one in Rhyzkahl’s, and I steeled myself for the pain that I’d been so well conditioned to expect to follow. Vsuhl leapt in my hand, dragging my arm upward, and with a single surge I felt it expand and consume the ugly potency, sucking the strands into itself with an ear-splitting whine that culminated in an ominous crack.
The three lords staggered back from each other. I jerked as the power slashed through the blade and into me. In the span between one heartbeat and the next every sigil on my body ignited in a sheath of pure agony. My hand spasmed tight on the hilt of the blade, and I instinctively called more grove power. I didn’t even think, simply reacted to fight off the attack, to stop the agony, pushing out and away as hard as I could. I was barely aware of the wall of power I struck out with, only dimly seeing that I knocked everyone in the courtyard flat, human, demon, and lord alike.
I sucked in a burning breath. The three different potencies coiled in a fierce maelstrom within me, like a volatile chemical reaction. These were not meant to exist within one person. It never should’ve happened. The natural perfection of the grove could not exist with the anathema of the rakkuhr. Had blade energy not immersed me, had it not entwined with the grove, the grove and the dark potencies would have simply existed together but separate, like oil and water. But that third power was the catalyst, the trigger, igniting a wrenching cascade of dissonance, like the swarm of bees madly dashing themselves into one another. The unified thrum from the columns shattered into a discordant wall of sound. The prismatic light of the sigils on the columns shifted to inky blackness
Shaking, I dropped to a crouch as I tried to pull it all back in. This was bad. This was really fucking bad. Eyes wide, I breathed in shallow gasps as I carefully pulled the power back, shoved it down. Each heartbeat seemed to last minutes, pounding through me like the tolling of a bell. As I felt the power settle within me, I slowly stood. I could do this. I could fix this. All I needed to do was let go of the grove. That would stop it.
But I wasn’t holding the grove power anymore, not the way I always had before. Now it rushed like a river through me, impacting the lava of the rakkuhr. I couldn’t let go of the river, couldn’t hold it back, and the lava refused to be cooled.
My skin burned, and I looked down, shocked and at the same time not surprised to see that the sigils glowed with a fierce red-orange light. I felt as if my body could barely contain me. I trembled, hot and cold at the same, but a heartbeat later realized that it wasn’t all me, that the entire courtyard shook with a deep tremor. A wind rose from nowhere, whipping my hair about my face.
Mzatal struggled up to a crouch. “Kara!” he shouted above the rising wind, shock and horror on his face. “Drop…the…blade!”
I panted for breath as if somehow that could cool the raging furnace within me. I struggled to ease my grip and drop the blade, but it was as if he’d asked me to drop my hand. “I can’t!” It was a part of me—not physically, but it might as well have been.
The worry in his face deepened to distress. “Idris!” he called. “Take it down! Take it all down!”
Rhyzkahl staggered to his feet, shock written across his features, and still clutching his blade. He started to move toward me, but I flicked the fingers of my left hand and sent him sprawling again. I didn’t want him anywhere near me.
“Kara!” Mzatal took a step closer to me, extending to me on all levels. He held his blade in front of him as if to shield himself from my power. “Kara, you must stop.”
I was trying. Couldn’t he feel that? Another tremor shook us, accompanied by the sharp crack of splitting stone. The demons had all gone to ground, huddling with wings folded close against the fierce gusts of wind. With unnatural speed, dark clouds shot through with purple lightning filled the sky. Rhyzkahl pushed himself back to his feet, teeth bared as he took a step toward me, posture bowed as if leaning into a heavy wind. The sigils burned and throbbed with the triple potency, and I knocked him back again, grinning ferally as he went tumbling.
My vision grew weird, as if everything was far too bright, but with no way to squint or shield my eyes. I felt Idris working frantically behind me, dispelling his circle and then peeling away the layers of my own diagram.
My breath hissed through my teeth. I felt and saw the power coming off me in misty tendrils. It probably looked cool as all hell, but I also knew it was seriously fucked up.
Kara!
“Here,” I whispered, clinging to Mzatal’s essence-touch. It felt as if the echo of our merged energies was the only thing holding me together at all. He took a step back as Idris dispelled the diagrams. Rhyzkahl stood again, blade held in front of him. As he took a step forward, the sigils on my torso flared, sending searing razors of pain through me. I felt the bindings, the wrenching of my shoulders, those ten heartbeats when he brought the pain.
