AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Stop,” I said. “You’re hurting him.”
Thea – the thing that was once Thea – tilted her head with mock ignorance, feigned innocence. “Oh? Am I? Then surely you can stop me, can you not? You’re a mage now, are you not? Couldn’t you summon the forces from that black pit you call a home, to hurt me, to put a stop to my supposed madness?”
She gestured with her other hand, and the vines tightened audibly this time, creaking as they pulled across Asher’s body. He writhed, and screamed. It wasn’t just the pressure – those things were leeching something out of him.
“I said stop. You know I can do what I did to your abominations again. It would be easy.” I fought to keep the stammer out of my voice.
“What would be easy,” Thea said, “would be for you to rip everything on this platform asunder. You don’t have the slightest idea of how to control your darkness. Your master has taught you nothing. If you so much as try, you’d flay Brandt apart just as surely as you’d slaughter the boy on the dais.” Thea clasped her hands together, her talons somehow neatly interlocking in the spaces between her fingers. “Poor Dustin Graves. As worthless as the day I met him.”
“I’m not worthless,” I growled. Far too late in the game for her to be worming her way into my head like that. I wasn’t the same kid she took advantage of and warped all those months ago. “I’m better. I can beat you.” I curled my fists and stood on the balls of my feet, my chest puffed out, in spite of knowing that it only made me look more like the boy I was. “I can kill you.”
Thea’s laughter was otherworldly, in all the worst senses of the word. It seemed to come from three voices, one that was her own, one that sounded like flutes playing from some distant cloud, and a third that underlined it with a roiling, guttural chord, like that of thunder, or of something long dormant and impatient to explode.
She stepped closer, her hands falling to her hips, her talons extending as she walked. “You couldn’t kill me if I handed you a gun and broke all four of my limbs. You couldn’t kill me if I walked to the very edge of this tower and begged
you to push me. It isn’t your strength that I doubt, Dustin Graves.” She smiled again, light pouring from her mouth and her fangs, terrible to behold. “It’s your spine. Your utter lack of resolve, of courage. All you do is run. All you do is turn to your friends.”
A streak of green and gold sailed through the air far behind her, garnets sparkling like droplets of blood in the moonlight. Ah. One of my friends. Just in time.
Chapter 25
“It pays to have friends, Thea. Ones who can get me out of a bind. Or get others out of binds, if necessary.”
She followed my gaze, whirling, too late, to catch Vanitas at work. He sang in his flight, slicing cleanly through a clump of vines in a surgical swoop, freeing Asher from his restraints while leaving him unharmed.
Asher rolled off the dais, thudding to the ground, then scrabbling away from the altar as quickly as his bruised body could manage. Smart kid. Yet as precise as Vanitas’s cut was, what was even more satisfying was the sound of frustration that emanated from Thea’s mouth, in those same three horrible voices.
Retribution came swiftly. Thea’s claws swiped at me in a brilliant white arc, and if I hadn’t been standing in shadow then that would have been the very last of my face. I melded into the Dark Room, the mists and ethers of that other place so much more active and frenetic. I wasn’t just imagining things. It was fighting to get out. Black tendrils of smoke reached at me, probing at my arms, curling fond fingers at my cheeks. No. I couldn’t let them manifest.
I leapt out of the Dark Room, reappearing in a shadow further behind Thea, but she knew my tricks all too well to fall for anything. She was, after all, my mentor, something which I recalled with bitterness. She twisted at the hip, hardly missing a beat, raking at the air as I stumbled away from the wail of her talons.
She knew exactly where I was going. I cried out when the tips of her claws grazed my arm, fierce and sharp as knives. Three angry red lines bloomed on my skin. Thea smiled, lifting her talons to her face, admiring the traces of my blood on them. I steeled myself. Just scratches. Just shallow wounds. I needed to be more careful.
Bastion had coaxed Asher over to his side of the platform, and Vanitas hovered menacingly on the other end. At our fullest power this might have been ideal, with so many of us flanking Thea, but all we really had was a scared, damaged boy and a Hand who had spent the bulk of his power. This was up to me and Vanitas.
“V,” I thought. “Harry her.” Blade and scabbard approached, hovering in midair as if wielded by an invisible swordsman. Thea turned her head calmly from the sword, to me, and back.
“This won’t do,” she said, fixing me with the beetle-black of her eyes. “When did I teach you to play so unfairly, Dustin?” She curled her fingers to the sky, raising her palms upwards, and said a single word.
“Arise.”
And so they did, so many bulbous black sacs swollen with that same terrible fluid rising from all across the surface of the platform, each harboring another of the Eldest’s horrific abominations. The shrikes blubbered as they slithered out of their pods. They turned their headless torsos towards us, then uttered shrieks from their many mouths.
“Bastion,” I shouted. “Defend the kid.”
“On it,” Bastion said, his voice strained, but swelling with bravado. If there was one thing we could agree on, it was that we both shared the same idiotic, unreasonable notion that we could be heroes. Bastion would fight until all the blood ran out of his veins. He’d give the world and the Lorica nothing less.
The scabbard half of Vanitas rushed to Bastion’s side, as if sensing his need. The sword half could manage well enough on its own, already cleaving at the squealing, gibbering shrikes. In the midst of accounting for my friends I nearly failed to dance away from the hideous swipe of Thea’s talons as she leaned in to shred me once more.
“Stand still,” she hissed. “Stand still so I can kill you.”
“How many times have you failed now? How many more times can you take seeing me survive your bullshit, Thea? How does it feel to see your plans blow up in your face?”
“I should pierce your body clean through your torso,” she said. “I should lance you through your heart with my power. But this will be so much more satisfying. Ripping your head off with my bare hands will bring me so much more joy.”
She slashed again, stepping forward with every strike, her claws missing, but missing closer every time. The anger was gone from her face now, replaced by an alien impassivity. The carnage around her no longer mattered. All that counted was whether I lived or died.
“Insect.” Slash. “Vermin.” Slash. “Filth.” Slash – that one came far too close.
