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I had to quit while I was ahead. There was no tiring Thea out. Wherever she was drawing her power from – the Eldest, doubtless – it was giving her the fuel to continue. I couldn’t wear her down by dodging. Not that I wanted to. There was only one way to end this. I turned my sights over to where Vanitas fought. It was time.
She had murdered me, turned me into this thing that wasn’t quite human, wasn’t quite an abomination, and it was clear that letting her live would only mean she’d repeat the pattern, again and again, until she found some grand solution, some way to fulfill her crazed desire to bring her children back.
“Kill her,” I thought.
Vanitas didn’t even respond. The blade whistled through the air, verdigris and bronze and garnets glittering in the moonlight, the spike of his sword point sailing unerringly for Thea’s heart like a guided missile. She turned to meet him head-on. I commended her bravery in accepting her fate. Part of me mourned. A larger part of me celebrated. Justice.
Then it happened. So quickly, it happened. Thea raised her hand, her palm facing forward as she deftly sidestepped at the very last second. Her talons closed around the sword, snapping shut like the jaws of some great beast, each of her nails a glistening alabaster fang. The sword wavered in her clutches, Vanitas struggling to work his way out of her grasp, away from her sudden, monstrous strength.
How was she doing this? Cold sweat trickled down my back. The air whizzed as Vanitas’s scabbard flew straight at Thea’s head, but it happened again. This time, without even moving a step, she thrust her hand out, caught the scabbard, and held it at arm’s length.
“Vanitas? Come back.” I’d spoken those words out loud without realizing it.
“I can’t,” the sword said in my head. “Dustin, something’s wrong.”
Thea’s hands trembled as she fought to hold both pieces of the weapon, but her face was perfectly still and serene as she turned to me. Our eyes met, and she smiled. She clenched her fingers.
My head rang with a thunderous shattering. I clutched at my temples as a flash of green light emanated from Thea’s fingers. No one else could hear it, but the inside of my mind pealed with the agony in Vanitas’s screams. He had never sounded more human.
I crumbled to my knees as the broken pieces of the sword and scabbard fell to the ground. I couldn’t sense him anymore. Vanitas was just a pile of ruined, tarnished bronze, of dull and fractured garnets.
“Vanitas?”
Nothing.
A bead of something black dripped to the ground from Thea’s fingers. “Goodness,” she said. “It appears I’ve cut myself.”
“You killed him.”
Thea curled her fingers again, her knuckles cracking as she did, and she raised her head, stretched her neck back, sipping in the night air – savoring her kill. The blood simmered in my body. My scar ached. Behind it, the Dark Room clamored for release.
“This wouldn’t have happened if you’d bothered to learn any magic you might have used to hurt me. To kill me.”
Fuck. Fuck, but the burning truth of it only made it hurt so much more.
Her spine was loose, and she rolled her shoulders as she cocked her head, peering at me out of the corner of one obsidian eye. “When will you ever kill me, Dustin Graves? Does it upset you to see your plans blow up in your face?”
&nbs
p; My fists shook at my sides, but I said nothing. Cold air rushed over my skin as my blood simmered under the surface. The Dark Room. All I needed to do was open the door. The shrikes, Thea, all of them, gone. But Bastion, and Asher. I turned to look at them, to find them quailing under the assault of the abominations that had risen from the tunnels in the spire.
“Curious, isn’t this? The blood, the blade, and the surface of this tower of vines I’ve created, it’s much like a circle. Very much like a communion, is it not? But nothing quite like the circle I cast around the city. The communion with my true gods that you ruined.”
“The Eldest can’t give you what you need,” I said, swallowing the thick lump in my throat. “No one can. You’re insane.”
She gestured at the far end of the pedestal. “He can. That boy. The necromancer.”
The what? I turned to Asher again, his face pallid, frightened, nothing at all like a – did she say a necromancer? Which explained why he could heal the sickly, speak to ghosts, and –
“Raise the dead. You need him to raise your dead.”
Thea bared her teeth. “They aren’t dead. My babies are sleeping. That’s all. The boy has dominion over the energies of vitality, of life itself. He doesn’t understand how to direct it yet. But I do. I can siphon his power, hollow him out like a piece of fruit. Then I’ll have what I need.”
She raised her hand, every talon pointed in my direction, as a bulb of white luminescence grew in her palm. Her wrist remained trained on me, her entire body a loaded gun.
“Give me the boy.”
Fuck no. She’d killed Enrietta Boules, and she’d taken Vanitas, too. Fucking Vanitas. No more.
