It reemerged to her left.
She spun, manifesting a dark kris in her other palm, ready to carve into the monster’s chest.
A jagged, thorny spike tore up from the earth and ripped through the fiend’s flesh in a flash of crimson.
The Herald was thrown back from the impact into the brick exterior of the preschool. The structure crumbled around the creature.
The spiked, ruby briar twisted deeper into the base of its veiled throat, pinning it to the building. Its legs flailed, and a thick liquid that resembled crawling tar oozed from its chin and stained the frosted lawn.
The harsh stench of copper assaulted Marina’s nose.
Blood.
The glaring, red lights came into focus around the playground. Black SUVs surrounded the block.
Footfalls alarmed her from behind.
She whirled around.
A strong kick hit her calf and her knees buckled. Before she could regain her footing, a hand lurched her back by the shoulder. She landed harshly on the snow-covered ground. The air expunged from her lungs as a boot planted harshly across her ribcage, holding her down.
A man with ghostly white hair and a cloth mask hovered over her, the bottom half of his face obscured. The popping currents of electricity reflected like fireworks in the background. For a second, she thought Soren had returned, but she was gravely mistaken.
“Gotta say, just thesightof your face pisses me the fuck off.” The man propped his elbow up on his knee, narrowing his eyes in disgust. Silver hoops lined his earlobes.
He held his hand out to the side, and the snowflakes began metastasizing in the curl of his gloved fingers. They collected and formed into a transparent spike, its glinted end aiming down at her.
Not a man.
The winter god.
She recalled him from the time she and Solaris invaded the city for Naia. A middle deity and a leading member of the Blood Heretics.
“The upper half of your face doesn’t bring me much joy either,” Marina spat back, resisting the urge to plunge her heeled boot through his chest for laying a hand on her. “Is everyone too afraid to show their damn face these days?”
Another grotesque scream scraped out of the Herald’s maw. A viscous fountain of its rotted black blood splattered on the ground.
Theon snapped his head up.
Marina ground her molars, the horrid timbre of its last screech still polluting her mind.
Another barbed vine whipped past them like a hunter’s arrow and struck the monster straight where its mouth was, behind its shroud.
Marina’s heart pounded in her chest as she strained against Theon, an attempt to lift her head and find the origin of the briars.
Ronin approached them, hands stowed away in the pockets of his pants. The warning lights from the parked vehicles cast a cherry-red neon tint over his profile, an embellishment to his morbid power and its threat against her kind.
He came to a stop a few feet from the top of her head.
Marina’s pulse sprinted.
Ronin’s intensity sank through her skin like poison. His hatred for deities was palpable in the dark glint of his gaze as he regarded her. “It’s been a bit, Marina. Can’t say I’m thrilled to see you in my city, but here we are.”
A strike of annoyance bloomed in her.
He looked up at the destruction of the schoolyard and then over at the Herald tacked to the building. It no longer thrashed around in wild spasms. “Already took out my kid’s school too.Lovely.”
“It lingered in the alleyway, across the street,” Marina said.
