I reach over to the bolt still sticking out of my arm. Fumble with fingers going numb until I find the metal head emerging from the back of my bicep, along with a couple inches of wooden shaft. I wrap my fingers around it and strain, but I’m growing weak with oxygen loss and the thing is fucking sturdy. My vision is starting to go black around the edges.
I summon every ounce of strength I can find, tighten my grip on the bolt, andpull. The blinding pain grants me a rush of adrenaline—and the shaft snaps in my hand.
As Louis’s mother turns back to me, her face pale but her gaze full of determined hatred, I reach up and shove the broken crossbow bolt into the side of her neck.
Chapter
Seventeen
Hot blood splatters over my face. Theodora gapes, choking out more blood, and releases my neck to reach for the wound. I shove her off me with a cry, yank the bolt out of her neck, and stab her again through the eye.
As I sit there panting in the snow—bloody, pained, victorious—I realize how quiet it is around me. There’s no sound other than the gurgles of Louis’s mother slowly dying. I turn to see Krampus standing, just as blood soaked as I am, over Louis’s father.
The once-proud man is on his back, bloody gouges torn through his face and chest, gasping for air as he stares up at the monster towering over him.
“You… cannot do this,” Louis’s father gasps out, the words bubbling from bloody lips. “You… are… bound to our family.”
“I am bound to ourpact,” Krampus snarls, his tail flicking. “A pact that your forefather made. We had a deal: I would reward goodness, notcowardice.Your family could have changed the world with the gifts I granted you. Instead, you cheated my game and used your wealth in pursuit of worse sins. Forgenerations,you have made a mockery of me. Glut yourself on wealth and pride.”
He reaches down, wraps his metal chain tight around one of the man’s arms. Louis’s father fights, but there is not much strength left in him.
“No more,” Krampus snarls. “Your greed ends here.”
He pulls hard, twists, muscles straining. With a roar of effort, he yanks the chain and rips the arm off the man’s body.
I squeeze my eyes shut and turn away, unable to stomach the screaming and the blood. I listen with a grimace to the clink of chain links and the subsequent shrieking as Krampus repeats the process with another arm.
The screams have gone silent by the time Krampus gets to Karl Kohler’s legs, but he finishes his bloody work nonetheless. By the time silence falls, Krampus stands, blood-soaked with his chest heaving, over a corpse in pieces.
Between the two of us, we’ve turned the white snow into a battlefield of red.
When it’s over, I struggle to my feet and yank what remains of the crossbow bolt out of my arm. Thankfully it went straight through the muscle, so while it hurts like hell, I can still use my arm. I lift my eyes to Krampus, who is staring at the body I left in the snow. His gaze snaps to mine. The look on his face is unreadable.
My own emotions are difficult for me to decipher, too. I’ve done a lot of terrible things in my life, but I’ve never killed someone before.
I’m a murderer.
It was self-defense, I tell myself. She was a horrible person. She deserved it.
None of that logic stops my hands from shaking.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to get a hold of myself. When I open them again, Krampus is in front of me. He presses ahandful of snow against the wound in my arm. I hiss at the shocking cold but don’t try to pull away. Part of me enjoys the pain. It chases away the confusing tangle of my feelings, and the thought running around and around in my head:murderer,murderer,murderer. The pain leaves no room to think or feel anything else.
I slowly lift my head to look at Krampus.
“Punish me,” I whisper.
Absolve me.
Krampus doesn’t look at me. He’s focused on brushing the snow off my wound and replacing it with a bloody strip of cloth he winds around my bicep.
“We aren’t done,” he says.
That’s right. Louis is still out there, because he ran, like he always does.
I study Krampus as he avoids my gaze. There’s tension in his shoulders, and he’s breathing hard. Mouth slightly open, chest rising and falling. When his red eyes finally shift to me, I see the hunger in his gaze. Killing Louis’s father wasn’t enough; he still craves more. He cravesme.
It makes me shiver to be looked at like that. Scented. Hunted. The feeling that fills my chest is somewhere between terror and excitement, a dark thrill that ripples through my senses.
