Every one of the stolas shrieked, feathers combusting into cinders. Thick, stinking smoke billowed outward, chasing the rising ash to the ceiling. Tendrils of smoking flesh sprinkle likerotten snow, infecting the air, gradually filling the cavern with the putrid aroma of roasting meat.
For a terrible second, I thought the heat would swallow me.
It would sear my skin, strip my face until nothing was left.
I braced for the impact, dropping to the ground and throwing my arms over my head. Instead, the flames turned inward, sucked out like a breath and gnawing at its own grotesque core.
The half-formed god contorted, shriveled, and then folded in on itself until nothing remained. Nothing but a wet clump of smoldering ash and a guttural, monstrous scream that withered and died on a gust of wind.
32
“… Ophelia… Ophelia!”
Someone was shouting my name vehemently in the smoky dark.
My eyes flew as wide as they could with the smog in the air, stinging and making them water. I unfurled from my tight, secure ball on the ground, muscles and joints complaining from the effort of moving. The powdery residue of warm cinders flaked off my skin and clothes as I pushed upright. Stutters in my heart echoed through my blood, pulsing uncomfortably in my veins.
A flurry of ash drifted carelessly and snow-like all around the darkened cavern. The blanket of warm embers left a metallic burn at the back of my tongue, and I swallowed hard despite my dry, raw throat.
“Ophelia…” My ears were ringing.
Half-catatonic, I nearly collapsed in a coughing fit while trying to stand. But I came up short, staring across the charred sanctum at the scorched, brutalized skeletal remains littering the ground within the blast radius of the fire pit. Malformed corpses were strewn in every direction, burnt and frozen in the agonizing position of their death. Some of the mangled bodies are still half-transformed and smoldering.
The stink of sulfuric smoke and roasting flesh clogged my nose and mouth. I slammed a hand over my face, staring horrified and nauseated, almost choking on the suffocatingrancid smell. Sour bile rose bitter and sharp in the back of my throat.
It took sheer force of will not to vomit.
They were dead—all of them. The stolas and whoever they were outside in the real world. Gone, decimated, their lives snuffed out as the consequence of whatever infernal thread had connected their power to their god. Moloch had bound his apostles so tightly to his essence that his destruction had wrecked and corrupted his servants. Entirely annihilated in one fell swoop.
The enormity of it all crashed into me.
Relieved as I might be that they were all dead, and the threat was seemingly gone, ragged sobs ripped from me. Part shock and part grief. I couldn’t hold my crumbling exterior together as I mentally and emotionally fell apart. I was terrified and stunned, straddling the line of what was real and how to continue living from this point on.
I was alone, drifting through the pillars of smoke obscuring the underground cavern. And Luther was nowhere to be seen.
My fragile heart shattered.
“Oh, god no… Luther… where…?” I inhaled sharply, turning dizzily and scouring the smoke and ash for any sign of life. Desperate for it.
I hadn’t seen evidence of him since he’d gone down with the monsters. He couldn’t have burned up with them. I refused to believe it.
“Lu-Luther,” his name escaped as a cracked whimper.
Exhaustion, despair, and the incessant stinging pain in my hand spun me through a whirlwind of panic until I stumbled.
A hard, sturdy bar curled around my waist, supporting me, and keeping me from dropping like a stone in still water. Struggling through the smoke muddying my mind, I fought the grasp until a familiar warmth and scent enveloped me.
“Ophelia, oh thank God.” Strong hands cupped my face, and his deep voice wrapped around me like a much-needed security blanket. Powerful arms kept me pulled close to his broad chest as if trying to tuck me into the cavern of himself where I’d remain safe and unharmed. I’d burrow against his beating heart if I could, if only to prove he was real, he was here, and he was alive. I melted into the feeling of him, sturdy and supportive, chest heaving and heart pounding in my ear.
“Are you-are you okay?” he asked, tone urgent.
“Yes—fine—just fine.” Only it was a lie, and he knew that.
Because I wasn’t fine, and neither was he.
But maybe we would be.
“You’re alive… Oh, God.” I sniffed and buried my face in his chest. “I thought the worst. I thought—” A ferocious shudder ripped through me, and I clenched my jaw against an onslaught of tears.
