Ithusa writhed against the makeshift weapon, her lone arm gripping her severed wing. “I am no more monstrous than anyone trying to live. I need souls to survive. I have lived among demons,” she coughed out, her words like hissing steam. “I’ve seen how your kind hungers. You and I are no different.”
“We’re nothing alike,” Helspira retorted, shoulders tensing. “You know what it is to feed your hunger. You havenoidea what it’s like to starve it.”
Despite the obvious pain it caused her, Ithusa leaned forward to sink the bone deeper into her body. “You stabbed me with a piece of my own skeleton, child. You entered a feral state. Your hunger seems quite sated to me.”
“You thinkthisis feral? I’m just protecting what’s mine. I assure you”—Helspira snarled as she jostled the wing to burrow it farther—“this is me holding back.”
Her confession nearly paralyzed Sikras’s efforts. Gone gods, if that was Helspiraholding back, he shuddered to imagine her feral state. He searched in vain for the dagger hiding in the snow. If only he could help her. Join her. If his damnable body had the good decency to just bleed out and die already.
“I am not without mercy.” Helspira ripped out the wing and tossed it aside. “I know your kind need souls to live. I could no sooner change you than demand a wolf survive off vegetation. But Nyllmas is under our protection. Free the souls you’ve captured and leave this place. If you return, we will kill you.”
Sikras snapped his head toward Ithusa and Helspira. He squinted, focus blurring, as he scoured the diavolos’s face for a reaction. Would she free the remaining souls? He doubted it. But knowing how hard Helspira fought to embody compassion and mercy despite her lineage, he could never, would never demand she abandon her ethics.
He would never demand anything of her. He loved her.
But that didn’t meanhecouldn’t kill Ithusa. If he could just find that damned dagger.
With her gaze on Helspira, Ithusa inched toward her severed arm. “I agree to your terms,” she said, caution lining her voice. “I will free the souls of those from Nyllmas.”
Lies. He was sure of it. Sikras was fluent in deceit. Excitement sizzled through him when the dagger’s stiff handle struck the palm of his one functioning hand. He lifted it from the snow just as Ithusa stooped to retrieve her soul jar. The two locked in eye contact, a wordless exchange between them.
Ithusa craved a fight. That much was certain. Violence danced across the only pupil she had left. But it would take time for her to consume enough souls to heal from the grievous injuries which Helspira had inflicted upon her.
It would take roughly the same amount of time for Sikras to ram his blade through his ear, die, and crawl back from Enos into a fresh, unhindered body.
Therein lied the gamble. She had many souls left in her jar to feed off, to fuel her, but was it enough to fight off the Cat’s Eyeanda demon? Did she even want to risk fighting Sikras when it was so clear that he would fight to the death, and she needed him alive for her plan?
“Well?” Helspira’s voice ended the silence. “Go on. Free them.”
Bloody and beaten, Ithusa raised her chin. She sent Sikras a final damning stare and murmured something in Chthonian. Around her, a circle of flames bloomed ten feet tall, reaching skyward and melting a ring of snow. When the flames vanished, so too did Ithusa.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Helspira
GONE? SHE COULDN’Tbe gone. Not without freeing the souls. Not without ...
