It was the charcoal shadow. It formed into a vaguely humanoid shape. Female. Small. The shape of a child. The... the soul of a child. His sister. She opened her mouth and laughed silently. She touched the flayed strip on my shoulder and slid into me. Inside of me.
She ripped and tore at my mind, her claws leaving flashes of the two millennia of memories, of the slavery that been her life: pain and blood and violence and pleasure and torture shackled to her brother. Quick still shots of torture chambers, of pleasure temples, of dying enemies, of war and misery. Men and women broken on the rack, dead by plague, skinned, dissected while screaming. Dismembered. Roasted to death. Thousands and thousands of humans and vampires and witches and weres she had helped to kill, against her will, at first. But later with glee, dancing on their mangled bodies.
And further back, to the beginning. The sacrifice thathad brought her father back from the dead. Her brothers bending over her as she bled out on the holy trees. Shimon. Eating her alive. Stealing her magic. Stealing her soul.
Her manacles were broken now, her mind a mad, gibbering violence with the freedom to destroy. Her hatred wanted vengeance on the world that had allowed her to suffer so long.
I shoved the horror called the shadow back. Away from my mind.
And we fell into my soul home. Beast and I were suddenly there, in the cavern. With her.
She was human-shaped, naked, spindly, with wild red sclera and huge pupils like a vamped-out vamp, but she had no fangs. She was... Not. Not a human. Not a vamp. I didn’t know what she was, but I was stunned from the images of her past, and I hesitated a second too long.
She slashed at me with claws that hadn’t been there a moment past. Blood flew from my forehead. I dodged. Far too late. Hit the stone floor in a rolling fall.
She was spirit made flesh, here in this place. She was the sister of the Sons of Darkness, sacrificed to bring Judas Iscariot back from the dead. She was the power the Sons of Darkness used to create vampires. She was the beginning. TheOrigination. The title thrummed through her mind and into mine.
She was trapped in my soul home with me. With Beast. Here we could die. But that meant so could she. Too slow, I moved to my feet.
Beast attacked the shadow. Claws and fangs and solid muscle of killing energy. She dragged the wild girl to the floor of the cave and savaged her. Snarling and growling.
The girl grew talons and stabbed them all into Beast’s body. Impaling my other half.
Beast screamed.
I tried to move toward them but my feet were stuck to the cave floor. My body wouldn’t move. I looked down. Dudley was hanging out of my middle, from the wound given me on the surface. Dudley was a glowing star-shaped tumor. It stank like a charnel house, an open sewer, and rotting fish, all at once. I gagged.
Beast screamed again.
The shadow was killing Beast. If Beast died here, then Beast was lost to me forever. I’d be alone. And I’d die of Dudley. Moving fast, I shoved Dudley back into my abdominal cavity with one hand and held my insides in place. This had the added advantage of stopping the bleeding as I applied pressure. In the other hand, I was already holding the blade I had used to kill a man when I was five years old. The handle was antler, crosshatched, the blade of good honed steel. But like in a bad dream, I was paralyzed; I couldn’t fight. I could only hold Dudley and the knife.
Beast screamed again.
Desperate, instinctively, I drew on my skinwalker energies and wiped my blade through my blood. Splatted it onto my feet and legs. A peculiar heat raced through me. Flicking the knife, I flung my blood onto my torso and arms and face. I could move but I had taken too long. Beast was dying. I lurched to the fighting pair and brought down my blade into the throat of the girl. She pulled her talons out of Beast and stuck them into me. I couldn’t breathe. I was dying. Beast was dying. In the physical world, the Son of Shadows was wrenching my head. My vertebrae popped. He was killing me. But here in my soul home, we’d take the shadow with us.
Letting go of Dudley, using both hands, I cut through the shadow’s throat. Oddly, there wasn’t much blood. Her eyes met mine in surprise. As if she hadn’t known she could be hurt. She snapped her hands, breaking off the talons. Leaving them inside me. She scrabbled on my hands. Plucking at my fingers.
I levered the blade through her spine. Bearing down. We fell to the floor. My blood puddled over her as my blade ground through. Clinked on the cave floor beneath. The light in her eyes faded, dimmed, and went out. I grabbed the head by the hair and swiveled on my knees to Beast. My Beast was breathing fast and shallow. Her blood ran in hot rivulets everywhere. I pulled Beast’s warm body onto my lap, grunting with pain as we bumped Dudley and he fell out of me. Beast’s blood drenched me, mixed with mine. The scarlet pool beneath us spread.
“You can’t die,” I said to her. Beast’s eyes began to glaze over. “Hayyel,” I called. “Do something! She can’t die!”
“Beast killed you, and you killed her, when you took her body that first time,” his soft voice said. Hayyel stood at the mouth of the tunnel that led to the underground waterfall. He was beautiful and gentle and glowing. “That first mass change was too great for either of you to survive. But you merged and found accord. You both lived.” He stood there, unmoving, hands clasped behind his back, wings folded and invisible. I wanted to kill him for the lack of help he gave.
Beast panted, her breath softer, faster, in time with mine. Her blood stopped running. So did mine. The world swirled and darkened. We were sitting in a sticky pool of her life force and mine, mixed and cooling and growing tacky. We... we were both dying. I collapsed to the side, pulling her dying body with me.
“Don’t go,” I whispered, raking my fingers through her pelt.
The memory of the first time I saw Beast blossomed in the air between us.
I reached in and yanked open the Gray Between.
Tossed the head of the shadow to Hayyel. Startled, he caught it, his eyes going wide. His wings spread and shook. He curled his fingers around the head of the shadow.
I sank into Beast.
Blinked. Tried to focus.
I was in two places at once. I was in my soul home, dying with my Beast. And I was on the cold stone of the crevasse, with the Flayer of Mithrans, dying. He was standing over me, his body broken and bleeding, the Glob still in his brain. My vamp-killer was in his hand. He lifted it high, arm back. Ready to take my head. My throat was crushed, my neck broken. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel my body. Couldn’t do anything.
