“So,” Ithusa purred with a smile, “what say you? Do we have a deal?”
A muscle twitched beneath Sikras’s eye, and he stood, Vessik’s blood dripping off his hands. “I hope you have a lot of souls in that jar to revive you, lady.”
One death wouldn’t do. One death wasn’t enough. He wanted to kill her until his muscles ached from exertion. Wanted to kill her until her blood drenched him like a monsoon’s rain. Wanted to snap her ribs, turn her bones into blades, carve her from neck to navel, fillet her, peel her, bend her, break her like he was butterflying a steak. Again. And again. And again.
He had spent nearly his entire life stifling the monster inside him, tempering the darkest parts of himself that Vessik’s kindness had subdued. Here, now, he unleashed it, ready to face Ithusa with all the power of the Cat’s Eye ... and all the madness of Sikras Nikabod.
Chapter Twenty-One
Helspira
HELSPIRA TORE HER BLADEthrough another body. Her grunt turned into a gasp when, around her, Sikras’s minions fell like dead leaves off a jostled branch. Their bodies, once keeping the onslaught of approaching enemies from passing the threshold into Vinepool, skidded into the snow with a clatter, unmoving.
He must have died again. Lost concentration on his spell. But they would rise when he crawled back from Enos. They had before.
Helspira held her breath, the battlefield draped in the illusion of silence, as she watched, waiting for them to get up.
“These things gonna help us or not?” Rowan shouted as he drove his sword through a manipulated sentinel’s chest.
“They’ll get up,” she yelled, pulse wild in her wrists and neck. “They always get back up.”
She waited.
Waited.
Gods, it felt like an eternity.
Still, they did not rise.
Helspira’s grip slipped on her blood-soaked handle when she lowered it. “Something’s wrong.”
Rowan freed a war cry as he detached the skull of another enemy from its spine. “Then, you better make sure that sonofabitch didn’t lose his last life before he finally came to his senses.”
The thought destroyed her, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t break her vow. “I can’t leave Ben.”
“His bones will be fine.”
