“Oh, he’ll be delighted, indeed,” Aysan said. The gleam in his smiling eyes was a terrifying promise. “We must tell him at once. But it has been a long day of travel. Perhaps ourcomradehere will invite us to dine with him.”
“I am not your comrade,” Kasik said through his teeth. “And you are not welcome here.”
“Oh, ho.” Kuna smirked sideways, his eyes alight with sport. “Then we will leave, of course, and—”
Kasik, working hard to control his breathing, felt the shift in Nina a split second too late. The heat of her body against his back disappeared, and then she was beside him. “You cannot leave,” she said, voice firm with authority. Kasik did not spare her a glance, did not dare to take his eyes off the men, even as his heart clawed at his chest. “You must stay. Come. There is plenty of food.”
The t’ira grinned at each other. “What manners,” Kuna said, taking a step closer, Aysan following close behind.
Kasik felt each of their steps like a fist to his chest. It was instinct that sent his arm out and across Nina’s abdomen. That pushed her back and braced for whatever came next.
Kuna faltered suddenly, a small stutter that looked almost like he had missed a step, and then he grunted. Aysan looked to his t’ira with a furrowed brow, an expression that mirrored Kasik’s own.
“What—” Aysan started, but then he stopped speaking, and his hand flew to his chest. He looked at it as if it didn’t belong to him. Asif something had taken up residence and was devouring him from the inside out. Beside him, Kuna fell to his knees, his neck craned back at an unnatural angle, mouth open and eyes wide toward the moonlit sky.
No more than a handful of heartbeats had passed, but Kasik felt as though the scene before him was trudging through mud. By the time he pulled Nina behind him again, blood that turned brackish in the moonlight was dripping down the t’ira’s faces. From their eyes and ears, sputtering from their lips as they gurgled nonsensically.
It was a scene from Kasik’s worst nightmare. Deaths just as cruel and vicious as the men before him. Their mouths opened and closed with phantom screams. Their hands clawed uselessly at their throats and chests. They gouged their flesh and tore at their hair.
Kasik’s muscles coiled to attack, but there was no enemy he could see. No monster he could slay. It was something only the gods could have done, a death so miserable that none but the most despicable of mortals deserved.
He shielded Nina, ready to absorb anything that came their way, but the men suffered in solitude until they fell to the ground, face down, necks at strange angles, arms and legs twisted at their sides.
Nothing but whimpering masses of flesh.
Not dead yet, Kasik realized with dread.
“Nina, we have to—” But his words were cut off as the weight of her body fell against him. He grabbed her and spun, heart in his throat, imagining the worst as he pushed her hair back from her face. But there was no blood leaking from her eyes. No agony etched onto her features. Her eyes were closed as if she had simply fallen asleep, and Kasik did the only thing he could think of.
He screamed for help.
23
Nina found the cords of their wills with little effort, but tearing the men apart was a much different task than mending. The intricacies of the body and mind were foreign to her and she remembered now that it required a certain kind of finesse. The boys in the alley had been naive practice. These men before her were the final test.
They hadn’t been expecting an attack. As they walked closer to Kasik, she had plunged into their minds with the ease of childish want and frustration. There had been a moment of resistance that had easily melted away with the first drops of blood soaking into the dry earth. And once their blood was spilled, it was as if Nina’s attay was boosted with satisfaction. It became brighter and simpler to wield. Easier to tear them apart from the inside out.
Truly, Nina hadn’t planned on killing them, but it was a delicious descent into darkness, one that had terrified her only because she had misunderstood it. This darkness wasn’t an absence of light—it was simply the choice to extinguish it. All the power lay in her hands, and the darkness was hers alone to command.
Finally, she understood what her mamay had tried to teach her. In this acceptance, there was calm and control, and her purpose was clearer than ever.
These men could not take what they knew to Emperor Maicu. It would ruin all her plans and consign them all to death, including Kasik. The only option wastheirdeath.
So, she refocused her attay on their hearts. Their blood. The vessels that carried it and the organs that carried them. She directed herwill to latch on to their threads of life, to suffocate, to twist and tear apart. Perhaps it was easy because she had half done it before, or perhaps because she wanted it more than she could remember wanting anything else. It was a desire that deserved further inspection but was squashed beneath the satisfaction that came with listening to their silent screams.
In hindsight, she could have gone straight for their hearts and saved them the suffering of a slow death, but it was over in such a short amount of time, their bodies collapsing to the ground surrounded by pools of blood, that it didn’t matter much at all.
What surprised her the most, however, was the fact that it was much easier to kill than to heal. She didn’t feel her life force draining away like she had when she had been feeding it to Kasik or Mika. Her mind felt present, clear, as if their deaths were feedingher. Nina wanted to be horrified, appalled by the prospect, but she felt nothing except pleased with herself.
Until their life forces were not enough to sustain, just shadows in her mind, and then she was weak and hungry for more. A despicable craving had awoken inside her, and as she fell to her knees, she couldn’t think of anything else but takingmore.
The glow of threads was so bright that she had to close her eyes against it. Kasik cradled her in his arms, his body warm and hard and welcome against hers. His threads were nowhere to be found. The achilla around his neck knew she meant all them harm, that the power inside her was frenzied with need.
Kasik gently lowered her to a bed in a nearby tent and crouched before her, blocking the sight of the others behind him. A voice asked a question, and Kasik responded.
“They just dropped. I don’t know what happened, but Nina, she—something’s not right here.”
There was terror in his eyes—an emotion Nina hadn’t seen from him before. Not when the achiyanga came after them, or when Hatun and his men had captured them. There had been fury and promise then. Resolve. She knew he was spiraling and that it was her fault.
