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X was a giant, a devil taller than some of the buildings around him and he wasn’t causing the darkness—hewasthe darkness. No one was screaming nearby, so I figured he remained invisible to humans.
When he heard Elyse, he turned around and locked on her with fiery red eyes that were nothing other than the depths of hell. As he laughed, the noise rumbled all around us, a sound that scraped at the very core of my being, and I shivered. I was immortal—death was not an option for me—but the sound gave me a taste of what it might be like to die.
And I didn’t want any of it for Elyse.
“You’re back,” X teased. “Don’t you learn?”
“You’ve devoured your last soul!” Elyse cried out.
His power was so strong, it pushed right through me. How was she still standing under that kind of pressure? Didn’t she realize what it meant that this overwhelming force wasn’t already putting her on the floor?
She attacked X without giving him a chance to respond. She wasn’t here for back-and-forth banter. Thank Zeus, because the sound of his voice chewed at me like nothing I’d ever felt before.
When Elyse launched at X, he shrunk in size until more like a human, to be corporeal. She hit him in the solar plexus with a punch and a cry that echoed for miles. It should have done something to him. The wave of power that came from her crashed into me like a storm, rocking me on my heels.
But X just laughed, and the same thing he’d wrapped around Elyse the first time, the magic that stopped anyone from homing in on the fight that was about to happen, closed in a bubble around us. We were shielded from the others; they wouldn’t know we were in this fight. Not that humans could help against death personified.
“Is that all you’ve got, human?” X spat. “You can’t tell me this is how you’re planning on saving the world.”
He lifted a hand and brought it down. He struck Elyse without even touching her, and she fell back with a cry. He hadn’t even laid a finger on her.
I jumped in, wielding a sword that appeared from thin air, forged of my anger and the power that ran through my veins. The blade whistled as it swung through the air and sunk into X’s arm.
He looked at me with those eyes, and I looked away. Nothing was going to happen to me if I stared at him; I wasn’t going to die. But I had no intention of feeling what the humans felt every time they fell into that bottomless pit of despair. The sensation of losing everything. I didn’t need to have those memories haunt me.
“You shouldn’t get involved in fights that aren’t your business,” X barked, and he shook his arm, yanking the sword free from my hands with ease. The sword fell to the ground, X’s black blood staining the blade, but he brushed off the injury as if it were nothing more than a bee sting.
What the fuck?
He turned to Elyse.
Shit, I needed backup. We weren’t going to be able to do this, not with just the two of us. I reached for my phone. I had to call the others if I wanted help at all. They wouldn’t know we were fighting, they wouldn’t know what was happening here, and that we were in way over our heads.
I didn’t get around to making the call for backup. X picked up the sword he’d pulled out of my hands and turned it to Elyse. The tip was sharp, the blade glimmering despite the darkness.
Elyse’s confusion was clear as day. I ran toward her, my arms reaching for her. But X was faster than me, and everything happened in slow motion, so I witnessed every single movement. Time passed, and it all took place in the space between one heartbeat and the next. I jumped for the sword, my arm stretched out, willing to stop it with my bare hands if I had to.
The blade’s whistle was like a scream in my ears, and I felt it at the very depth of my soul when the blade plunged into Elyse’s chest. My heart splintered, and breaths jammed in my lungs, as if I’d been stabbed myself.
She turned her eyes to me, and they were filled with pain, anger, regret. A moment later, her eyes became dull and then they rolled back in her head. She fell to the ground, the sword still lodged between her ribs.
X chortled, the sound like a jackhammer in my ears.
By the time I reached her, she’d just hit the ground.
“I love killing,” sneered X, “but this death is particularly rewarding.”
I wasn’t even going to respond to him because I needed to know she wasn’t dead.Please, Elyse. Don’t you dare leave me.Pressing my fingers against her neck, I prayed to Zeus, or whoever the fuck was willing to listen, that this wasn’t the end. If Elyse died now, I could easily lie down and die, too.
This couldn’t be the end. Her skin was so fucking pale, her eyes seemed sunken. And her body lay frail on the sidewalk. The pressure of a ragged rage burned me alive, hungry for destruction.
But a moment later a pulse fluttered under my fingers. It was the slightest feeling, nothing more than a tremor. But it was there. She wasn’t dead yet.
“It will only be a matter of time,” X explained as if he knew what I’d discovered. Of course he did. He would have known the moment Elyse was dead, even though her soul would never belong to him.
I picked her up, not pulling out the sword for fear of what more damage I’d cause. Her head lolled against my shoulder and even though she weighed nothing, I lifted a burden heavier than anything I, as a god, could handle. The reality of Elyse’s dire state passed through me like a tornado. Everything she’d worked for, us trying to protect her, lay in ruins, and the horror of losing her ripped through every inch of me. But I couldn’t think like that when I had to get her out of here and keep her safe.
X lifted his hand, ready to strike me down so Elyse would fall, because it would be what I’d do in his position. His intention was to do this all again and again until she was dead for good. Well, that wasn’t fucking going to happen.
