Sandor tilted his head and wrapped his free hand around her throat. She pulled away and gagged, then doubled over at the sickening woosh and thud of a fist in her stomach. The snap of her small ribs made her gasp.
Ilan was shouting something, but she couldn’t hear through the blood-pounding nausea. Sandor grabbed her wrist and jerked her back upright. The Seal flared brighter for a moment in reaction, long enough for Csilla to half-form a prayer, a habit she was sure now she wouldn’t live long enough to break.
Sandor’s grin – the grin of whatever had him – widened, with large teeth and an outstretched tongue. The demon leeched from his skin, reaching for Csilla.
Behind him Ilan approached, eyes blood-smeared yet wild, alight with pain and anticipation. He had his own knife. It came down between Sandor’s shoulder blades with a crack, resistance as metal hit muscle and back ribs, a twist and push as he aimed for a lung. Sandor fell forward as Ilan stabbed again, quick andlethal. Merciful. If there was no longer a willing host, the demon would struggle.
A buzzing rose in the air, released by the pain of the host, twisting and darting between her and Mihály, seeking familiar skin.
Mihály was still weak. She stepped between as the cloud began to solidify, hovering and writhing. She outstretched a hand, and it buzzed over her skin like a tight swarm of gnats with wings made of cutting glass.
‘Leave him.’
The Shadow clumped more tightly. The air around her stung with needlepoints, and she could see the outline of some other creature, face masked by small, dark wings with trembling, oil-clumped feathers, and triplet eyes resting in the hollows of its collarbones. Pieces of a broken creation desperate to feel whole.
Darkness unfurled, and a hard pressure sucked at her lips as she went dizzy. To the side, Ilan wavered on his feet, and her own vision was dim. She wanted to scream for him to run, but her mouth was choked with tarry magic biting at her gums and tongue. It would take any opening it could find.
The thing smelled dead. Not in the rotting way of former life, but a nothingness. Clawed hands reached for her face. It wanted, and it wanted, and it wanted.
I didn’t do a miracle forthis.
She stretched her hands, only to have them sink into the corruption trying to take shape.
A crisp frostbite pain shot through her, and Csilla screamed with her freed voice, sudden and piercing enough that the demon stepped back with a shocked snarl. The lightning-white agony leeched into her pores, her lungs, even her teeth, every inch of her trembling. Something in her was waking with the fierceness of a sleeping creature jolted from its winter cave.
The blue of her veins, the pink under her fingernails, they glowed brighter than they ever had for Mihály, and the hovering creature in front of her reached to grasp.
‘Csilla!’ Before anyone else could move, Ilan had his arms around her waist to pull her back, but she shook her head.
‘It’s alright,’ she whispered. Inside she was painfully alive, her skin thin with the brittleness of a cicada shell waiting to be shed. She’d felt the crackle of divinity when Mihály had healed her, the sizzle of darkness on the bodies, her own erasure when she’d done her miracle, but this radiance was consuming. This was a power that had taken the unknowable and turned it into the physical world in an act of reckless yearning.
The darkness began to die on her skin, flaking into dry powder, consumed.
A presence surrounded her, vast and ancient and alive, lodging in her bones to root. The tears that came to her eyes were sharp like splinters of glass.
Sandor gurgled and lay twitching, hand clasped to his throat. Csilla stepped to help him, but her touch didn’t heal. Ilan was still bleeding.
‘Mihály.’
He froze from where he was struggling to his feet as if she’d spoken a word of magic and not merely his name. The whites around his eyes were visible, staring down at her as if she were a thing freshly consecrated.
She was.
The demon whispered a line of twisted creation, cutting through the raw power singing over her skin. She reached forward. Around her she could feel the pure energy of life, the people with her, the breath of the soil and the small things that crawled through it, the ageless crush of minerals that had led to the rocks that built their walls, the strength of her own bones.
The creature before her was none of that. It was a mistake, a corruption, nothing but endless need to be more than empty, and no means of making it so save stealing the lives of others and dragging them into Shadow with it.
A prick of pity, one fully Csilla and none of the greatness that filled her, lanced the dizziness of power. This thing, dead and hungry as it was, was equally close to humanity as the pure Brilliance around them. It had been created by the same hands, even unintentionally. There was a stain of it in every soul.
‘I understand. But you’re nothing meant to live. Here.’ She stretched out her glowing hand to the lumping darkness. ‘It’s alright.’ She gestured to the wound on her cheek in welcome. ‘I’m ready now. Please come in.’
Once again the creature slipped inside. The pure connection to creation echoed in a trillion invocations, stronger than every combined voice of the Union. A darkened haze surrounded her, smoke on her skin, her mind echoing with angry confusion.
All she felt inside was sorrow as it struggled to latch onto her and manipulate her flesh. It was only obeying its nature, and it wasn’t its fault its nature was antithetical to the divine. She brushed a finger over her lips as her mouth filled with tar.
I’m sorry.
She exhaled, and it fell to powder at her feet. One mistake of creation corrected.
