Ithusa smirked, grabbed another finger, and bent it backward until it, too, snapped. “It’ll take a long time for those bones to heal before you can cast again,” she purred, leaning down to face him. “Lucky you. You’ll have plenty of time to consider my offer. Until then”—she booped his nose with her claw—“you can be my little plaything.”
His body lurched from the discomfort. Broken bones and puncture wounds, he didn’t know which hurt worse. But if he died again, the Catseye would heal him. He could wait it out until one of his hours passed. Surely, he was nearing the end of one. Or ...
Sikras’s focus fell to the dagger in his boot. He could take a cue from his old pal Vessik. All he needed to do was—
He snatched the dagger but too slowly to slit his throat. Ithusa caught his hand and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth in a chastising manner.
“Naughty human. That’s earned you another broken finger.” She ripped the blade from his hand, tossed it into the snow, and snapped his ring finger backward.
Despite his best efforts, Sikras screamed.
“I feel an emptiness in my jar.” Ithusa swung the chain in a circle. “You got your hands on your little cleric’s soul, didn’t you? A shame. But I still feel Vessik rattling around in here. The poor thing’s life was so hard. Don't you think he deserves eternal rest?”
Panting, rasping, Sikras said nothing.
“Speak, or I will make you speak.” A fourth finger broke under her grasp. “You must be considering my deal. So, tell me”—she stroked the side of his face—“what say you?”
Chest heaving, Sikras lifted his head. Between the uncontrollable muscle spasms in his face, he hoped he managed a convincing smirk. “I say”—he raised a quaking middle finger on his unbroken hand—“you missed one.”
“Oh, dear.” Ithusa shoved him backward and straightened her posture. “I expect those kinds of manners in Chthonia but not up here. If it’s Chthonian behavior you wish to emulate, let me give you a taste of what we do to those who misbehave.”
As she raised her hand, Sikras stared, unflinching, waiting for that arm to strike.
Instead, a flash of pink tore the arm from Ithusa’s torso, the force dragging the rest of her body to the ground.
A flurry of snow and blood exploded into the air as the colliding bodies carved a line into the icy powder. They tangled, twisted, Ithusa’s shrieks emitting between assaults as—Helspira? ... yes, Helspira—sank her fangs into Ithusa’s neck and jerked her head backward to peel away flesh and muscle, like red ribbons.
Ithusa screamed, tried to kick Helspira off, but it only seemed to make her latch tighter. In the turmoil of rolling bodies, Helspira ended up on top, Ithusa pinned between her thighs.
Helspira’s fingers seized Ithusa’s hair, and she smashed her head into a nearby boulder.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
Blood burst outward like fireworks with each slam. Ithusa wailed, the sound garbled, gagged by bubbling body fluids, as she grabbed Helspira’s face in desperation with the only hand she had left.
It was a move that, ironically, cost her a finger.
One sharp, sudden movement, and Helspira bit down to detach the long, jagged digit at the knuckle with a crunch. She spit the severed finger into her hand and—jab,jab,jab—utilized the sharp claw as a dagger, puncturing Ithusa’s eye, her cheek, her neck.
One-eyed, one-armed, dripping in blood, Ithusa bucked Helspira from her stomach and scrambled to her feet, only to be dragged back down when Helspira’s claws caught the paper-thin flesh of her wing.
She moved so fast that it was hard to keep up, hard to process, even without four broken fingers and a giant hole in his back. Sikras gawked as Helspira stretched out Ithusa’s wing. With one forceful kick where the humerus met the blade of the scapula, a sickening snap came.
Ithusa shrieked, back arching, as Helspira freed a war cry and ripped the broken wing from where it dangled by loose skin, exposing veins, tissue, and the serrated edge of the broken humerus.
Gasping, Ithusa spun without a chance to react, before Helspira turned the wing into a weapon, repositioning the barbed bone shard, and speared it into Ithusa’s torso.
Pinned to a rock, Ithusa coughed up a mouthful of blood, a one-winged, half-blind mass of viscera and tissue. She glimpsed the soul jar still clutched in the fingers of her severed arm and glowered down the length of the wing that pinned her. “A demon? Outside of Chthonia? Impossible.”
With her organic pupil nothing but a pinprick, Helspira hissed, looking more monster than mortal.
Sikras held his breath. Had she entered a feral state? He commanded his fingers to move, bend, anything, but he was incapable. For all the power of the Cat’s Eye, a caster was nothing without his hands. Frantic, he searched the snow for the discarded dagger.
Helspira released a deafening screech, the muscles in her arms straining. She shoved the wing-turned-spear deeper. “Touch him again, and I’ll reduce you to a torso, monster.”
