You think you’re so bad.It was laughable, how scared everyone was of this… thisthing.It was strong, yes.
But only if you gave it an opening.Temperament, genetics, or simply blind chance—and the deep soft warmth of the earth’s very heartbeat—denied it a hold on Liv.
I’m not dead yet, she realized.
The thing howled.Fresh strength poured into her, and there was a popping clatter she realized was gunfire.Another familiar sound, someone yelling her name over and over as the monsters realized they were not about to have a leisurely picnic.
A dripping point protruded from Ignatius’s chest.A razor-edged, crystalline blade, its tip gleaming starlike as thick, blackened blood welled.
The Father’s head turned, an eerie, lizardlike movement.“My Son,” he crooned, lips writhing harshly.“You were ever my favorite.Help me now.Hewill forgive us.”
Erik’s bloody, haggard face rose over his Father’s shoulder, almost close enough to kiss.His eyes blazed, the blue sparkle-points in his pupils gathering strength.Tiny cracks and veins of black began at the corners of Ignatius’s eyelids, spreading in horrifying fast-forward.
“There is,” Erik murmured softly, “no forgiveness for us,Father.”He shoved the knife deeper, and Ignatius’s body stiffened.The older man’s arm jerked, still trying to drive a black blade down through stiff, resisting air.
Liv willed Erik to look at her, willed the invisible force inside her to fill him, to close the shredded flesh on the left half of his face, the other injuries she couldfeelburning in him.There was something sharp stuck in his back, and for a dizzying moment, she was occupying her own familiar body and somehow inside his at the same time, marveling at the pain he apparently didn’t notice as it crashed through nerve endings, sliced and twisted muscles in his back twitching as a blue-eyed nightmare monster drove a slender spear in deeper.The thing stabbing him howled as warm invisible power rayed out from alirai, and the splitting of her focus gave Ignatius the opening he needed.
The curved, tarry-bladed knife flashed down.
A Gift
A gift,given with open hands as theliraiwere shown in ancient codices and mosaics.A Dreamer’s force poured into him like hot cocoa into a thick china mug, warmth flooding his skin and running through the marrow-canals of heavy, reinforced bones.Liv lay, small and glowing and terribly vulnerable, her eyes alive with far more than a mere echo of the Flame.She stared at him; he longed to meet her gaze, longed to glance down and mouthyou’re all right, longed to let her know that her touch was welcome, filling all the broken and battered places in his body with light, the scorched wasteland of his mind with deep calm.
But he had the bastard pinned, and even thesarnakidigging its little toy into his back could wait.He stabbed once more, driving a second crystalline blade deep.The thing inside his teacher, his friend, his Father writhed, attempting to worm-twist away.He denied it—the rest of the beasts might descend upon him and tear him to pieces, but dispensing with this threat would give theliraitime to slide free of the altar into a jumble of bones and husks rotting on the other side, where scavengers would return between sacrifices to crunch and lick.
And maybe, just possibly, his death would give her the slimmest chance of getting away.
He felt her attention shift for a tiny gap in time, a slice of a mortal second.
It was enough.The thing that had been Ignatius howled with glee and brought the knife down.
So Erik did the only thing he could.He drove himself backward onto thesarnaki’s spear, dragging Ignatius with him, and the black-bladed knife sank into the altar’s surface as the spear-point shivered, sank deeper, and found Erik’s quaking, hammering heart.
Never Missed
A poisoned daggersank hilt-deep into crusted stone, cracks cringe-radiating in every direction, and Liv surged upright—or tried to; her arms wouldn’t quite work and the cuff on her left ankle hurt atrociously, something smeared on cold blackened metal eating at her skin.
The Ignatius-thing, dragged backward, clawed for her with empty hands.Liv stared at it, that warm, soft, invisible force filling her again.The metal clasping on her ankle chimed, then shattered, sending jagged slivers flying; Ignatius howled, still scrabbling.
But she had him now, and the force roared through her, amplified by dark, disciplined whirlpools at the far end of the giant cavern.Monster-noises bounced against the ceiling, shivered the stalactites into free air, and smacked the stone walls.Mental noise from the city overhead turned jagged and discordant as nightmares filtered into dreaming heads, slipping for a brief moment over the border into reality—and faded, snow blowing through tattered reflections.
Ignatius let out a single wrecked, massive sound, more a train-siren than a scream.The thing inside him, stung, retreated like oil slipping down a drain, leaving behind only a choked gurgle.Black cracks veined through the Father; he was a statue made of ancient discolored porcelain, his boots drumming as he was held, spitted, upon a pair of knives.The hair-thin crevices became streamlets, the streamlets rivers, and a rag of rotting bone and zombie-putrid flesh still kept trying to force itself onto the altar and toward Liv.
The noise, both physical and mental, was overwhelming.Gunfire boomed, andthatmeant the Sons had found her.Liv jerked her knees up, ignoring a flare of red pain from her abused ankle, and as the dead, rotting thing slid from Erik’s blades her heart gave a giant singing leap.She didn’t care about being smack-dab in the middle of a pitched battle, didn’t care that her ankle was bleeding and her hair full of crap from the altar’s crusted surface, didn’t care that she was trembling-weak as a kitten and her neck ached after the jolting, jouncing ride down here.
Erik stood with his chin slightly tucked, gazing down at the wreck man he probably loved, corpse turning into a twitching mass of rot.Erik’s face was healing in fast-forward, but just as she was about to slide off the altar and fling herself at him, he swayed.
The thing behind him had blue eyes, a wide wound of a mouth locked in a rictus, and it held a long, frail-looking, stained ivory spear with glittering red gems dripping from its gold-chained haft.
It had stabbed him right through the heart, and as Erik folded down, going to one knee with a jolt Liv felt in her own legs, it leered and lifted the dripping spear, staring right at her.
No.Everything inside Liv stilled, came to a single hot point.
No, you son of a bitch.You can’t have him.
The blue-eyed thing pitched forward; the next item on its agenda was clearly to stab her.She sensed its weight shift, dropping slightly before a lunge, and the point of brilliance inside her expanded, sensing amplifiers close—but not close enough.
This fight was hers alone.
