Dastian stops his pacing and drops into the armchair. He looks restless, his fingers drumming a frantic rhythm on the armrest. “Winning usually involves having weapons that actually work. Currently, we are outmatched.”
“Thanks for the optimism,” I mutter.
Voren turns from the window. The rain hammers against the glass, loud and relentless. “The dead have gone silent,” he notes. “Completely silent.”
“Maybe they are hiding,” I suggest.
“Wraiths don’t hide from rain,” he counters. “They hide from authority.”
A sharp knock at the door makes us all flinch.
Dastian stands instantly, red sparks flying from his fingertips. Dreven summons a blade of solidified shadow in his grip. I grab my steel and sit forward.
“Who knocks during an apocalypse?” Dastian asks.
“Someone polite?” I offer.
Dreven moves to the door but doesn’t touch the handle. “Identify yourself.”
“Open the bloody door,” a familiar voice snaps from the other side. “I’m getting drenched!”
“Tabitha,” I say, lowering my blade.
Dreven unlocks it. Tabitha stumbles in, soaking wet. Water pools around her boots as she straightens her coat. She looks annoyed.
“You took your time,” Dastian says. “Care to share why you didn’t follow us out of the Pantheon?”
“Care to share why you left me?” she clips out and with the snap of her fingers, dries herself into an orderly fashion.
That is starting to piss me off. Why can’t I do that?
“Left you?” I ask, shaking my head. “We didn’t leave you.”
“You hurtled towards, what I assume was a containment facility for the Devourer and then it escaped, and you went after it. You didn’t give me much of a chance to catch up with what was going on.”
“You don’t run?” Dastian says with a smirk.
“Running is unbecoming,” she says primly. “It suggests urgency, chaos.”
“It was both of those things, and more. Have you seen Cloudy McCloudFace up there?” I gesture with my blade.
She purses her lips. “Indeed, I have. Care to explain what it is doing?”
“If we knew that, we wouldn’t be hiding out in my cottage trying to figure out our next move.”
“Basically,” Dreven says, trying to steer the conversation towards some sort of strategy session. “It went up there, and the mortals came out to look at it. It sent them back inside with the mother of all thunderstorms.”
“It sent them away, didn’t eat them?”
I nod. “Weird, huh?”
“Weird doesn’t quite cover it. It’s waiting for something.”
“The Judge?”
She frowns. “No, it has no reason to wait for the Judge. The First Law was imposed because of you, not it.”
“It can’t sense me now because of that. In case you were wondering. It thinks I’ve done a runner.”
