“No. Gone. I can’t feel it.”
“I don’t like this,” Voren mutters, and then moves so swiftly, shoving me behind him, that I stumble and lose my focus.
The roar of the beast that rises in front of him, drowns out my complaint.
“Holy fuck!” I shout, but not even I can hear it as my gaze travels up, and up, and up. “What is that thing?”
No one answers me. None of them heard me over the chaos that unleashes. And not Dastian’s kind, but the kind where we are all about to die.
The thing isn’t just one beast; it’s a hundred of them, all stitched together in a shambling, roaring monument to my career. I see the gnarled horns of the gross demon I killed only a few days ago, the fangs of a hundred or more vampires, the furry pelt of a murderous werewolf I had to put down. It’s my personal greatest hits album of things I’ve put in the ground, and its roar is a chorus of their death rattles.
Voren doesn’t flinch. He’s a wall of ice. Dastian is already a blur of red-gold, launching himself at one of its mismatched legs with a manic grin. Dreven’s shadows lashout like whips, trying to find purchase on its shifting hide, but they slide off like water.
My blade feels like a toothpick. Standing still is how you get stepped on, but charging in is suicide. I sidestep a clumsy, club-like fist made of what looks like solidified bog-rot and try to find a weak point. There isn’t one. It’s all weak points, all mismatched parts with no coherent anatomy.
Then the beasts decide to reproduce, spawning mini beasts that surround us, and I have just entered the fight of my life. No time to wonder about anything except staying alive. Dreven goes right, Voren goes left, Dastian, of course, goes straight down the middle, distorting the air around us. I hack a beast with my blade as it lunges for me, claws and teeth bared, and ready to slice me into pieces. The blade sinks in, and the creature dissolves into a cloud of angry dust before another takes its place, a blur of borrowed fangs and familiar fury. I parry, sidestep, thrust. It’s muscle memory, the grim dance I’ve perfected over a decade of blood and bruises.
Around me, the gods are a symphony of destruction. Voren is a vortex of frost and spectral blades, his movements elegant and lethal. Dastian is a human firework, laughing as he turns a cluster of spawn into glittering ash. Dreven is everywhere, his shadows plucking beasts from the air and crushing them into oblivion. It’s magnificent. It’s terrifying. And it’s not working. For every one they obliterate, two more crawl out of the fractured ground, stitched together from my bloody past.
I duck as an arm, thick as a tree trunk, swings towards my head. I roll, the impact jarring my teeth as the fist whistles over my head. I scramble back, my blade slashing,cutting off limbs and spilling more blood than I’ve seen for a while.
“Nyssa!” Dastian roars, and I turn, just in time to see the main beast lurching towards me, its fist flying. It lands, and I fly backwards and slam into a pillar of fused bone. My head connects with the obsidian with a sickening crack, and the world dissolves into a kaleidoscope of bright, searing pain.
The ringing in my ears is a high-pitched scream. I taste blood. My face feels like a bag of broken twigs. Through a blurry, swimming haze, I see Dreven go from controlled fury to absolute annihilation. His shadows erupt, no longer whips but a solid tsunami of darkness that slams into the beast, forcing it back a step.
Voren is suddenly kneeling beside me, his hand hovering over my chest. A deep, numbing cold seeps into me, chasing away the worst of the fire in my lungs. “Stay with me,” he commands, his voice a low hiss of rage. “You’re not joining my ranks yet.”
That’s all well and good that I’m not dying, but this isn’t working. Every time they destroy a part of it, it reforms, pulling another memory from my head to patch the hole. We’re not fighting a monster; we’re fighting every monster I’ve ever killed, and then some.
The realisation is like a claw around my throat. “Every slayer,” I mutter, shoving Voren’s hovering hand away and sitting up.
“What is?”
“The kills from every single slayer. Ever. We can’t win this. It has an endless resource.”
“Not endless,” he says, rising and standing over me as Dreven loses his grip on the beast and it lunges again.
Shoving myself to my feet, my head feels like a kicked-in drum, but the adrenaline is a glorious, numbing poison. “It looks pretty fucking endless from where I’m standing.”
The beast roars, a sound stitched together from a thousand dying screams. Dastian is a comet of red-gold fury, punching holes in its hide that seal over with new, snarling faces. Dreven’s shadows are a vortex, but it’s like trying to drown the ocean.
“It has a core,” Voren says, calm in the chaos. “All this power has a source. It’s being anchored by something real. Find it.”
Find it? I can barely find my own arse with both hands right now. But I close my eyes, ignoring the spinning world and the symphony of slaughter as Voren launches at the beasts trying to kill us. I push past the pain, past the roaring, past the frantic thud of my own heart.
It echoes in my ears, and I frown, distracted.
Chapter 40
Nyssa
It amplifies, getting louder and louder.
“Mine,” I murmur. It’s my heartbeat, echoing through the beasts. All of them are powered by me.
By the First Slayers.
“Guys,” I shout, but a fist to my mouth makes me choke on my own blood. My eyes fly open to see that one of the mini beasts has slipped past the gods to reach me.
