In the summoning circle, the Honghadda witches vanished in a puff of smoke. I couldn’t tell whether they’d been incinerated or escaped through the Veil. I only saw severe burns around their entire faces before the fire took over their enclosure.
Paulus and the mage to his left turned and cast a paralysis spell on the other two mages who had helped them summon the witches. They then turned towards the attendees and shouted a string of words of power. Too late, the cultists realized thatit wasn’t a protection spell but a deactivation one. The magic circles beneath them vanished.
Paulus didn’t betray Eleni. He was a mole!
But I couldn’t dwell on that for now. Even as I pulled out the daggers from my shoulders, I unleashed a nightmare on all the cultists aside from Paulus and his acolyte. I had assumed that the circlets they donned before they sprung their trap on us were meant to shield them from my mystifying powers. But despite the cultists still wearing them, I ensnared the fools effortlessly, now that my ability no longer bounced off the protection of the magic circles.
The cultists screamed, tearing their masks off before gouging their own eyes out. They clawed at their faces, tearing their skins off in a vain effort to remove the putrid parasites they believed to be crawling all over them, eating their flesh alive.
The Oracle and the twelve Elders by her side somehow managed to resist my compulsion, but barely. A handful of them were casting spells—I couldn’t say whether offensive or protective—while a few others were attempting to flee. Only then did I notice a different set of wards surrounding the area around the throne. They would dampen or flat out block certain types of magic, but not physical objects.
I tore the obsidian daggers out of my shoulders and threw them at the priestess. They flew unimpeded past the protective wards. One embedded itself just above her left breast, and the other found its mark in her belly, a few inches right of her navel. The Oracle’s scream of pain shifted into a screech when her skin erupted in huge blisters and boils. I blinked, confused as to how those magic dampening blades could cause such a violent adverse reaction. But I quickly realized my error when her skin started melting off her body like wax, leaving her muscles and ligaments exposed.
Although barely a minute had elapsed since Eleni had released her inner darkness, time appeared to move in slow motion with so many things happening simultaneously.
Before I could shift my attack to the Elders, my mate emitted a feral roar before charging the throne. My initial fear upon seeing her hair ablaze abated when I saw flames erupt around her hands. She raised them in front of her, and an inferno shot out of them. She didn’t aim at the Elders but directly at the stone floor. The flames appeared to sink into and under the stone tiles, racing at dizzying speed towards the throne. The remaining Elders ran in fear, two of them attempting to drag their flayed high priestess. But they never got a chance.
Eleni’s fire ran beneath the tile, past the wards, before exploding outward. It was like watching a volcano erupt, except it was burning spikes that shot out of the ground, impaling the Oracle, and the two Elders who were trying to save her. The spikes lifted high enough that their feet no longer touched the ground. They looked like cooled lava, even though red embers still glowed between the creases.
But the fire didn’t stop there. It continued running under the stone floor to blast outward once more, collapsing parts of the backwall including the doorway through which the other Elders were attempting to escape. Trapped and panicked, a couple of them threw down vellums to quickly form new protective wards before them as the others tried to reopen the way out. Father Paulus and his acolyte joined forces to thwart—or at least hinder—their efforts.
A glance at my mate filled me in equal measure with awe and worry. Eleni had been a powerful mage before, but now she was something else. Judging by the small set of horns that poked out between the fiery strands of her mane, a fire demon had lain dormant within her. Her forehead and the sides of her cheekbones were covered in cold lava-looking streaks. Like withthe spears impaling the cultists, fire glowed between the creases on her forehead. It further underlined the eeriness of her now completely obsidian eyes, devoid of sclera or irises. However, those mutations didn’t seem to be set in her flesh. It looked almost like an ethereal version of them hovering just above her skin.
Still, she was breathtaking. However, the savage expression of her face hinted that she was feral. I welcomed my mate embracing every aspect of her true nature. The almost palpable violence radiating from her rather aroused me. My female’s darkness beckoned mine. However, it was too early to tell if she would lose herself to its madness.
I couldn’t allow it.
Eleni ran towards the Oracle. I wanted to stop her from finishing them off too quickly as I wanted to gather as much information from them as possible. We still hadn’t found the missing clerics. And memories faded quickly from the target’s organs once they died. A still beating heart or a fresh brain provided the most in-depth insights—not that I particularly wanted to consume any part of that foul female. But two dozen constructs charging us demanded my attention.
I fired my lightning at them, hoping for the same outcome as their counterparts earlier by the altar. To my dismay, they didn’t shatter, my power having apparently reverted to its previous level. The electric blast made them falter, some of them even collapsing as it fried their mechanical brains.
Without the cultists using their magic to mend the constructs, I rampaged through them with unbridled savagery. They were fast, but compared to me, they were lumbering giants at best. Even their considerable strength paled against mine. With my claws extended to their maximum length, turning them into mini daggers, I stabbed and slashed at my enemies, butchering and eviscerating them.
No word could describe how orgasmic it felt severing their tendons, ripping their limbs off, and decapitating them before tossing their still bleeding parts towards their masters. Where the constructs ‘died’ quietly, their cultists masters filled the Sanctuary with their screams of terror and agony as they continued to self-mutilate. Half of them were now lying on the ground, either unconscious or dead, swimming in a pool of their own blood.
Their pain was the sweetest aphrodisiac—their just punishment for harming my woman.
In between two attacks, I glanced at Eleni to make sure she was still safe. At first, I’d feared that, in a blood rage, she might kill Paulus and his friend. But she completely ignored them as she focused her wrath on the Elders. She hadn’t killed the Oracle and her two helpers as I initially assumed she would. As they were incapacitated—and slowly bleeding out—the other trapped Elders remained the clear and present danger.
With Paulus and his friend weakening the Elders’ protective walls, Eleni was taking each of them out, one after the other. In a mesmerizingly horrible display of power, my mate would select one victim and throw her hand in their direction. The air blurred as an instant wave of heat shot out in a concentrated beam. The moment it hit her target, their chest would glow red, then she would cook them from the inside out. Their eyes ruptured, and boiling fluids bubbled out of their ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, while blisters spread all over their skins. They would collapse in seconds, their bodies quickly turning into charred husks.
She was magnificent.
Just as I was finishing the last of the constructs, a subtle ripple in the air had my head jerking towards the throne. My heart skipped a beat when a man appeared next to the spikes upon which the Oracle was impaled.
“Elliot!” I breathe out.
Busy slaying the last trapped Elder, Eleni and the two mages assisting her noticed the newcomer half a beat after I did. Before she could launch an attack on him, Elliot raised his open palm towards the staff upon which the medallion containing at least half of my mate’s soul still hung. He shouted a word of power, and the Amulet of Reaping flew towards him.
“NO!” Father Paulus yelled, mortal fear audible in his voice.
Without thinking, I unleashed my lightning. Although it wasn’t at lethal force, it was powerful enough to knock the medallion off course. It sent it flying to the right end of the room, past the pillar upon which Eleni had been shackled. My mate cried out and collapsed on the floor. She panted heavily, her eyes rolled to the back of her head as violent spasms wracked her body.
“Eleni!” I shouted, horrified that my attempt at protecting her had instead caused harm.
Running towards her, I simultaneously blasted a nightmare at Elliot to keep him from attempting to snag the Amulet again. But the wretch slapped his hand on the Oracle’s flayed shoulder, and they both vanished with a swoosh, the same way he’d escaped the crematorium.
“It’s too far from her. They cannot be separated!” Paulus shouted over his shoulder as he ran towards the Amulet.
