Then his brow narrowed, and he shifted swiftly, grabbing her by the upper arms. Celeste gasped, stiffening. With the intensity of the noxscura hovering in the room, she could really do some damage, so she balled fists at her sides to be sure she didn’t accidentally blast him in two. That would have been very messy atop her, and his face was just too pretty to go lobbing off his head.
But hewassqueezing her rather tightly, and that inspired petrifying memories of much worse. She whimpered and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Oh, uh, sorry,” he said for maybe the fifth time, loosening but not letting go.
Celeste peeked open an eye again, his weight no longer crushing her, but she still found it hard to breathe. A holy knight had never apologized for hurting her before, let alone frightening her. “What are you planning to do to me?”
“I have been sent to this temple to vanquish the evil within,” he said with the conviction of a zealot, but then his eyes flicked across the room to where his sword had been thrown, losing all their intensity. “But I’ve never vanquished evil without a weapon. And never…ladyevil.”
That was, perhaps, a slight relief. “Well, while I’ve got you, er,”—she glanced down at his fingers holding her just above the elbows with a grip from which she could almost escape—“while you’ve got me, maybe you could let me explain?” It had never worked before, explaining, but she had also never come to this kind of stalemate in the midst of being attacked.
“Oh, well?” He sat back, straddling her. “I suppose that wouldn’t hurt.”
“Don’t let the witch worm into your mind!” A muffled voice called unseen from somewhere in the room.
His features flared with a hateful sharpness then, and when Celeste gasped pathetically at his tightening grip, he did not relent like before. “None of your dark manipulation,” he spat down at her. “The temple must be cleansed and reclaimed.”
A searing pain smoldered against her skin under his palms, divine magic singeing into her flesh.Not this, not again.
Noxscura leapt to her aid when her fingers unfurled. It wrapped around his body like chains as she shrieked, and it ripped him backward. Alarm replaced the lethal shroud over his features as he was restrained, and she scrambled right off the bed’s edge.
The man tried to thrash, but the noxscura had him bound, many tendrils of it wrapped tightly across his chest, his arms, and his legs, leaving him trapped on his knees on the bed. He could only maneuver slightly to face her as she got to her feet and backed away.
Celeste kept her hands up, arcana dancing at her fingertips. It strained against her will, wanting again to lash out, to squeeze, to kill. She shook her head at an errant shadow as she looked for the second voice’s owner, but only the two appeared inside the chamber.
“Who was that?” she asked raggedly, the panic of such familiar pain erupting within her. “Who else is here?”
“My sword,” he grunted, a hand wiggling at his side in the direction the weapon had been thrown.
Celeste craned her neck to see the obsidian steel wedged against the far wall. Strange, she thought, that the same rare metal had been listed in Delphine’s journal and then suddenly showed up at the temple. The noxscura had unraveled from around it, and she had seen enough cursed weapons to know the glint of the gem in its pommel was arcane. “That looks like Ukara Grave's work.”
“She knows Ukara?” the voice said, clearly coming from the sword. “Oh, buddy, you’ve got your work cut out for you with this one.”
“Just barely,” Celeste huffed. “I got stuck listening to her at Yvlcon one year, and she showed me about a hundred sketches of her wares. It took half the night, and I only got away when I pretended to have an allergic reaction to shellfish.”
“She’s been to Yvlcon,” the sword said. “She is truly villainous!”
“That wasn’t the part you were supposed to pay attention to.” She stomped a foot, and the man cried out as the arcane chains tightened abruptly.
“Sorry!” It was Celeste’s turn to apologize, but she was getting a little sick of feeling guilty for defending herself. “Listen, um,sir, you have things all wrong. I’m not—”
“Release me, foul witch!”
“I’m not a witch!” The room darkened as noxscura rose from every crevice, plumes of shadows pressing in, and the man’s face blanched under the horrid eclipse. “Oh, stop that,” she hissed, wiping the excessive darkness away, and the shadows darted back to their corners. “I just had a sort of accident a long time ago, and now I can do these witchy things.”
“You’ve still desecrated the Temple of Valcord, run off the priests and driven out divinity.”
“Well, no, see that’s the thing—my sister did most of that stuff.”
The man settled then, eyeing her. “And you?”
Celeste bit her lip under his gaze. He remained quiet and still, giving her the opportunity she had requested to explain. The temple was already in bad shape, no longer serving the village when they arrived, but that might not have been a very good excuse. Delphine had killed the two priests, in fact she had delighted in it, and Celeste merely cleaned up the mess, but she had stood by and watched. “Well, I only did what I was told.”
He growled—actually growled—and a divine light pulsed from beneath the tendrils of noxscura straining to hold him.
Celeste flicked her fingers through the air and doused his spell, surprised she had not needed to call in reinforcements from her locket. The noxscura in the room was more than enough to contain the divine mage, but then, the same bed chamber had held a mage in it once before.
She groaned in the back of her throat and shook her head. “Please, you must understand. I know this looks bad—”
