Growing impatient, Sikras stepped forward. “Genua,” he rasped. “Kneel!”
Ithusa buckled to the ground.
Hyper-focused on the vial, he advanced, until he stopped before her. “Dimittis,” he whispered, outstretching his hand upon the spell’s completion. “Hand it over.”
Ithusa’s arm quaked as she fought the magic’s compulsion. Her elbow snapped inward, her hand swallowing the vial. She screamed when her manipulated body ripped the chain from her neck and, trembling, unfurled to offer Sikras the vial. “I’ll consume them,” she threatened, snarling. “Imri and Vessik.”
“You won’t,” he said with calm confidence. “Only a fool would eat their one bargaining chip.”
He almost had it. Almost touched it with his fingers, before she beckoned forth souls from the vial. Glowing, slithering lights that squeezed through the impossible seal of the cork and snaked up her fingers, her arms, until they sank into her skin. With renewed vigor, she fought the spell’s influence, just enough to toss the vial from his reach.
Sikras recognized a desperate last-minute attempt at victory when he saw one. Discarding the soul jar wasn’t just a frantic ploy to avoid handing it over; it was a trap, a distraction to break his focus.
It worked like a charm.
No matter. He didn’t have time for regret. Not when it may well have been one of the only opportunities he was afforded to save Imri and Vessik.
A whispered spell stopped the soul jar mid-flight. “Claudicare.” With a jerk of his arm, it flew into his open palm.
Another incantation encased Sikras in a domed shield, just in time for Ithusa to crash into its side. She snarled, clawing at the translucent enclosure with everything she had.
Sikras inspected the jar with a considering hum. An arcane lock. He felt it. Kneeling, he placed the jar in the snow to free his hands to gesticulate a spell that would pop it. “Opertae.”
A loud click echoed inside the dome. Easy. With nothing to bind them, Sikras plucked the cork and waited for the souls to flee their prison.
They did not.
“Come on,” he muttered, then flinched when the structure of his dome rippled under Ithusa’s raw fury. It wouldn’t bar her long. Closing his eyes, he reached out with his mind to search the jar’s contents. He discovered, then, why the souls were not abandoning their cell.
Arcane locks. Arcane locks on every. Single. One. He would have to free them individually. The only issue with that being the pissy half-god clawing at the foundation of his protective barrier.
He felt the dome weakening and cursed. He could save one. Maybe. Even that was a gamble. Pouring his mental focus into the jar, he searched for her—Imri—as the sensation of a thousand desperate hands clawing at his metaphorical tunic, his skin, his arms, his legs struck his mind. Countless voices and screams rattled his brain. He shoved them aside, poor bastards they were, and felt for Imri’s soul amongst the masses.
There. He would recognize that sweet warmth anywhere. He called to her and, with the power of the Cat’s Eye, severed her arcane lock, separating her soul from the wriggling mass of the others.
A flash of guilt gutted him. Sikras risked losing her again if he took even the millisecond necessary to search for Vessik’s soul in the horde.
There just wasn’t enough time.
When the gentle heat of Imri’s soul filled his palm, Sikras blinked mind and spirit into Enos.
The off-blue blur of Enos’s landscape appeared in an instant, and Death stood before him, hand outstretched in anticipation.
Funny. Sikras’s physical body remained in Siaphara’s mortal plane, yet his palm still felt cold when Imri’s soul abandoned it to travel into Death’s waiting hold.
Every ounce of him craved to say something, any number of the practiced speeches he had rehearsed throughout the last four years. All the things he wanted to say to her and never got to. All the apologies he owed her. But there wasn’t even time for goodbyes.
Death cradled the soul against her chest. “She’s safe. You must go back. Hurry.”
The strain in Death’s tone implied concern. The illusion of Sikras’s body smirked. “If I didn't know any better, I’d say you were worried about”—Death grasped his face and shoved him backward, then his mind and soul reentered his physical body—“me.”
Shit. He tasted blood. He no longer held the soul jar. The rippling translucent waves of his protective dome were gone. And a hand was definitely wedged into his spine.
From behind him, Ithusa leaned in, her breath hot, as she whispered in his ear, “Don’t worry. I went around all the internal organs so you need only languish in pain instead of death. I need you to hold fast to those precious few lives of yours.”
He grunted when she ripped her claws from him. The agony dulled his movements when he spun to cast, but she caught his wrist in one hand and broke one of his fingers with the other.
Giving her the satisfaction of a scream did not rank high on Sikras’s to-do list, but an agonizing groan filtered through clenched teeth as he fell to his knees.
