Her words echoed in his head.
Heal me now.
A snap echoed through the hangar, as sharp and sudden as a gunshot.
Ezra fought to reinforce his mental shields even as he turned his head a fraction, and what he saw was enough to make his concentration waver.
A thin crack in the front of the reliquary glittered in blue and white, light escaping.
Morana was awake. Her power was immense, even dying, and her demand for healing meant their quest to get her to fade was for naught.
The reliquary was breaking.
He didn’t think they were meant to hold a deity to begin with, and he knew they had seconds left before it broke completely, as snow began to fall in the hangar.
Ezra pushed himself out of the chair even as he pushed mentally against Morana, and he stumbled to the reliquary. If it failed, the blizzard would explode free from the reliquary and Morana might kill everyone in the room in an attempt to harvest enough power to heal herself, as she had tried to do with Monica Blevins and the other graduate students at the dig site.
Her mental presence was fading from his mind, but the glow within the crack grew brighter, and more snaps echoed through the hangar as the marble and bronze broke and warped.
“Redmayne, get out of there!” Grendel shouted, running toward him.
Ezra landed on the reliquary and pushed out with his mind, erecting a shield around the reliquary, crimson and black swirls of energy coalescing in a half sphere over the top. He poured as much power into the shield as he could.
“Get them out of here!” Ezra shouted, pointing to Saemund and Raum. “Get them out and get under cover! Get out of the hangar!”
Harlan and Chase were right beside Grendel, but they listened to him and went for the two men on the floor. They were moving, and seemed to be okay, but Ezra couldn’t tell. He worried for Raum, and he was thankful that Harlan scooped Raum off the floor and carried the other man toward the exit at a jog. Grendel and Chase grabbed Saemund under his arms and lifted him off the floor, dragging him to the exit as well.
Lilith jumped from Chase’s other arm and ran to Ezra, meowing loudly.
“Dammit, Lilith, go back to Chase!” Ezra ordered, but she ignored him, winding around his ankles, her meows climbing to demanding yowls.
He sank to his knees in front of the reliquary, and reached for the latch. He poured more power into the shield even as he reached through it, knowing he would need to stop Morana from exploding free. If he opened the reliquary, he might be able to divert the death magics into the core of the earth again, where the primordial death magics dwelt. Now that she was awake she might listen to reason, but first he needed to stop her from bringing down a blizzard on Edmonton.
He flipped the latch and lifted the lid.
Incandescent power flashed so bright it nearly blinded him, leaving spots swimming in his eyes, and he cried out, arm over his face.
Wind howled through the hangar, tugging at his hair, stinging his face, icy cold tendrils seeping into his flesh. Lilith cowered beneath him where he crouched, yowling with the wind, and he knelt with his knees on the ground, pulling her between his legs and covering her with a small shield as she huddled in fear.
Ezra leaned forward and reached into the reliquary, dismissing the shield on it as he did. Cobalt fire danced over the skull of Morana, the long gash in the forehead his focus.
She was awake. The second his hands touched the skull he sensed her presence within it, thrumming through his skin and bones.
“Heal me, death mage!” Her words came from everywhere and nowhere. Demanding, desperate.
Death magic swelled within the skull, the ouroboros of life and death blazing before his eyes. The amount of death magic was almost incomprehensible.
He knew that the paradox of her existence lay in the wound across her brow. Cut down by a weapon that never failed to kill, striking an immortal being never meant to die. Life and death were fighting, forever trapped in a nightmarish cycle. To resolve the paradox, the wound itself needed to be healed.
He could heal a mortal wound. That much he knew. But how to restore a bare skull to flesh and muscle, organs and skin? Mortal necromancy had its limits. He could not regrow limbs lost to injury, only heal the great wound left by the loss of a limb.
The hangar shook, metal groaning. It was darker outside, and within the hangar the lights overhead swung precariously, threatening to fall.
“Heal me! Now!” She demanded again, voice like the howling wind, the blue flames around the skull growing larger, whipping about in the wind.
“I don’t know how!” he screamed back, hunching over Lilith as a burst of cold wind lashed at his back.
Morana was going to destroy the hangar and the base, and probably bury Edmonton in a massive blizzard if he didn’t figure out a solution. A light overhead finally fell from the ceiling, crashing to the hard floor, shattering in sparks and glass, bits of flying metal. Ezra turned his face away. “Fuck! Hecate’s spine, that was close!”
