A man approached, eyes unseeing. Kadra moved.
He kicked out at the closest one and sent him into another, gliding behind them to snap their necks in seconds. With the crook of a finger, lightning flared in his cramped quarters and arrowed through their corpses with precision, reaching ghostly, white-hot fingers for the others just beyond.
Fiery tendrils sank into each one, twisted through their skin and up to their screaming mouths. At least ten dropped to the ground within. Thick, branching burns bloomed red under their skin before their eyes rolled back in their heads and went unmoving.
That seemed to enrage the rest. Feet thudded toward him. Avoiding the teeth-laced arms on the ground, he incinerated a swarm of beetles with a lazy flick of his wrist, dispatching another group in a flash of heat and burning flesh. Behind him came the desperate smack of boots, elbows, and bodies against wood.
“Stay back you both. I might have it,” Anek yelled.
Waves of pressure coiled and uncoiled in the cellar as he razed everything that approached. Shrieks tore into the air, skin slid from flesh, smoke stung the air. Blood ran down the divots of the tiles. And a crack snapped through his focus. The door was down.
“Kadra!” Sarai yelled.
He dissipated the shield over the doorway in one breath, sprinted through it in the next, then re-erected it. Bodies howled as they struck the lightning barrier. He could do nothing else. They were too far gone down Death’s road to pull back.
He ran up two steps at a time and found Sarai and the others bruised from their exertions but otherwise unharmed. The doors into the Institute parted and Méherre stumbled in, blood dripping from a deep head wound. She frenetically pulled them shut behind her.
“Wisdom’s breath!” Anek ran to her. “What happened?”
“The Elsar only know. Someone knocked me over the head and the next thing I knew, I was outside.” She thrust a shaking hand at the doors. “We can’t leave. Beetle swarmseverywhere.”
“Dalvia.” Dread tautened Sarai’s voice. “What do you want to bet that Edessa’s under siege by a god right now?”
Convenient. Dalvia had always been a step ahead. She had known they were coming to the Institute.
“Ready a portal to Komis, Méherre.” He pushed the hospital doors open against the Bridger’s exclamations and welcomed the rush of winter air. Light from nearby braziers mirrored off snow and into his eyes, providing rich contrast to the thick crimson swarms undulating like wavesbetween the evergreens, venom sacs bulging. Some had already swallowed a few fleeing northern vigiles.
“Ruin’s tits, we’re fucked.” Anek skidded to a halt behind him, rucking up snow. “There must be thousands! Tens of thousands?”
Given the speed of their approach, they had all scented the blood Kadra had just spilled in the cellar.No matter.
His jaw clenched as he channeled more power into his palms and balled them into fists. Roving air currents warped to his command. The pressure dropped dangerously low. Sarai pressed her hands against her ears in discomfort when her eardrums popped. As the first wave of beetles neared, he brought both hands down into the snow.
Shield upon golden lightning shield flared around them like fishing nets, radiating cruel barbs outward. The insects sizzled and fell, unable to penetrate the weave. Venom sacs burst yellow onto the snow. Veins corded in Kadra’s temples as he kept up the barriers through assaults from every angle. A sea of red grew beyond their circumference. Then, long moments later, came quiet.
Kadra carefully dissipated the shields. The ground before them looked like scarlet, iridescent snow, rife with beetle carcasses. He turned to the dumbfounded group behind him. Noceo and Méherre had gone white.
“I’mneverliving in the north,” Anek whispered.
Sarai inclined her head with quiet awe. “Magus Supreme.” Her smile faded when Méherre made a frustrated sound.
“I can’t Bridge you into the city.” Lines bunched on her forehead as she strained. “Shit. It’ll have to be the city walls.”
It had begun then. Kadra lifted the edge of his sleeve and examined the crimson runes on his armilla. Sarai followed his gaze and paled.
“You fought a storm only hours ago too. And now this.” Red threaded her eyes. She’d lost weight over weeks of exhaustion. “I didn’t see it,” she confessed tautly. “I overlooked her entirely.”
Kadra sighed at the knowledge that he had been no different in his preoccupation with remorse.
Wrath had said as much, weeks ago. “Regret can be a dangerous thing for a mortal. It blinds them to the present in favor of what they wish had been possible. Too much escapes you while you atone for a past you believe should have been different and force a future you believe should have existed.”
As Sarai was so fond of saying…
“I may have an overblown sense of guilt,” he mused.
“Finally, you see it.”
“Stop blaming yourselves and leave some self-hatred for the rest of us!” Anek yelled. “I felt sorry for her too!”
