I spin, driving my blade downward. It slices through the creature’s tough hide like a hot knife through butter, turning the beast’s shriek into a choked gurgle. It collapsesin a heap of dissolving shadow and ash before I’ve even batted an eye.
I stare at the fading stain on the grass, my chest heaving not from exertion, but from the surplus adrenaline still coursing through me. That should have been a struggle. That should have hurt. Instead, I feel like I could take on the entire graveyard without breaking a sweat.
I stare at my hands. They aren’t shaking. Usually, after a kill, there’s the adrenaline crash, the body remembering it’s mortal. Now? Nothing. My pulse is steady, slow even, thrumming with that cold, foreign rhythm Voren installed.
“Interfering prick,” I mutter, wiping the blade on the grass.
It feels wrong, like cheating. The fight is supposed to cost something. You pay in sweat, blood, or bruises. Getting a free pass because the Wraith God decided to play doctor doesn’t sit right with me. It feels like a debt, and I hate owing anyone anything, especially beings I was taught to never trust.
I sheathe the weapon and look around for more things to kill. Sadly, nothing pops out.
A flicker of light from Marrow House catches my attention, and I narrow my eyes at it before the world around me explodes with creatures bursting from the ground like it’s Thriller.
Chapter 18
Nyssa
“Be careful what you wish for, Vale,” I mutter as the soil erupts in a shower of wet earth and rotting turf. Suddenly, I’m the centre of attention for about twenty shambling nightmares. They’re messy, disjointed things with limbs stitched on backwards, jaws hanging loose, eyes glowing with that same red light as the boar-thing from earlier.
A skeletal hand claws at my ankle, and I stomp on it with enough force to shatter bone. I snarl, spinning into the fray.
Usually, a horde like this would have me looking for an exit strategy or at least a defensible bottleneck. But not tonight. The cold hum in my blood spikes, and I move.
My blade is a silver flash under the moonlight. I decapitate a ghoul before it can even moan, then pivot to drive my heel into the chest of a creature that looks suspiciously like a patchwork of local wildlife. It crunches satisfyingly. This new speed is intoxicating, and I absolutely loathe it. Every effortless kill is a reminder that I’m running on borrowed battery power from a god I explicitly told to piss off. It feelslike cheating, but since the other side isn’t playing fair either, I suppose I can’t be too picky.
A creature lunges for my throat. I don’t even blink. I duck under its clumsy swipe and sever its spine with a backhanded slash that feels frighteningly casual. It drops like a sack of potatoes.
Spinning, I catch a skeletal arm mid-swing. With a sharp twist, I snap the bone, then drive my boot into the thing’s chest, sending it flying back into its mates like a gruesome bowling ball. Strike.
The sheer efficiency of it is terrifying. My body is moving faster than my thoughts can keep up with. It’s like being a passenger in a car driven by a maniac, only the maniac is my own reflexes supercharged by whatever Voren lit up inside me. I slice through a neck, duck a rusted shovel wielded by a corpse in tattered overalls, and gut a wolf-thing that’s trying to shank me.
I cut through them like a slayer possessed. The horde thins. Fast. The ground is covered with disintegrating bodies. The glowing red eyes of the remaining few flicker with uncertainty.
“Is that it?” I ask, though I’m barely out of breath. “I was just getting warmed up.”
The last one, a lanky thing with its head sewn on crooked, screeches and charges. I meet it head-on, vaulting over its low sweep and driving my blade down through its skull before my feet even touch the muddy grass.
“Messy,” I mutter, wiping black sludge from my cheek. “But effective.”
I glance around and see that I’m alone again. The fight did nothing to ease the restlessness coursing through me. I need more. I need to hunt, to kill.
Marrow House catches my gaze again as it sweepsaround. With narrowed eyes, I move out of the cemetery, and ignoring the mud squelching around me, I march up the hill and kick the garden gate open. I’m halfway up the path when the front door swings open, and Voren looms in the doorway, looking infuriatingly calm, yet menacing at the same time. “I wondered how long it would take you to come back.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I snap, stalking closer. “You did something to me. Fix it.”
He tilts his head, pale blue eyes glinting with amusement. “Fix what, exactly? The fact that you’re not dying anymore? You’re welcome, by the way.”
“I don’t feel like myself.” The admission costs me, but I’m too wired to care about pride right now. “Everything’s too fast, too easy. I just carved through twenty of those stitched-together abominations like they were made of paper.”
“And the problem is? Sounds like a win to me.”
“The problem is I didn’t earn it!” My voice echoes across the hillside. “You can’t just upgrade people without their permission. Especially slayers. That’s not how this works.”
Voren’s expression shifts to something I can’t, or won’t, read. “You were dying, slayer. The corruption from that beast was unravelling your soul thread by thread. I stopped it. The side effects are temporary.”
“How temporary?”
“A few days. Maybe a week.” He shrugs. “Depends how quickly you use up the energy.”
