I snapped my wrists, and my thundervein ribbon whips coiled like living lightning, their storm-laced metal humming with energy.
I would not fail.
And I wasn’t alone.
Calla joined me, her bear form plunging claws of thundervein into its stomach. Auron stayed close to Blake, guarding him, but fire burst from his hands across the cavern toward the head of the Thirst demon. Vidor’s shadowsteel ice whips appeared and lashed out at the demon.
Sweat poured down my back, and I moved completely on instinct.
“Again, Rubi,” Auron shouted. “Its weak point is not the head, but the heart!”
I raised my arms with a fiery determination—one flaming ribbon whip wrapped around the demon’s neck while the other arched downward, slicing straight through its chest.
The impact sent a deafening boom through the cavern, thunder cracking. It let out one last, rasping wail before it finally died.
Calla nearly collapsed, shifting back to her human form, nodding at me in silent acknowledgment. The others started to pour in.
Malissa, blood-smeared but unbroken. Jace, his bow still drawn, Venom snarling underneath him. Lian and the other firens, flames flickering in their hands, the Azures battle-worn but standing. The other Onyx male. They all halted, their eyes locking onto me and the twin storm-laced whips still crackling with fire in my hands.
Malissa exhaled sharply as she spotted Blake and moved toward him, wiping her blade against her sleeve. Jace lowered his bow, looking at me with something like awe before the body of the giant dead demon withered to ash.
I rolled my shoulders, extinguishing the fire and letting the thundervein ribbons flick back into their coiled state, my breath coming hard and fast. “Blake—”
I didn’t get a chance to run toward him before a figure began to emerge from the ground.
54
“Holy gods,” someone muttered.
It was a slithering shift in the blackness, a suggestion of something awakening as it unfolded. The first to emerge were its limbs, spindly and wrong, bending at unnatural angles as it dragged itself upward. The bone white surface, slick and ridged, gleamed faintly as it pulled free from the dark. Its claws curled and twitched, clicking against the ground.
Then came the torso, stretched and emaciated, its rib cage grotesquely expanded as if its very structure had been warped by its endless hunger. Bone interlocked like a cage around something that should not be breathing, yet I heard it give a shallow, rasping inhalation, as if it could taste us already.
It unfolded further, rising, rising, until its full form stood silhouetted against the flickering firelight cast by the firens, grotesquely tall, impossibly thin. Its spine protruded in jagged ridges, flexing with every shift, its vertebrae clicking into place as if it hadbeen curled up in the void for eons and was only now remembering what it meant to move.
Its face was mostly a gaping maw, an abyss of shifting, jagged fangs that retracted and extended, ever moving, ever hungry. The edges of its gullet quivered, pulsing as though it could already feel the weight of flesh it had yet to devour.
A sound slithered from its throat. It was a low, guttural vibration.
It wasn’t just hungry.
“The Starved,” Vidor said, nostrils flaring.
He moved first, pale face twisted with determination. With a flick of his wrist, he unleashed a torrent of dark energy, his withering touch spreading like a deadly miasma toward the Starved. Shadows gathered around his hands, coiling like snakes, their venomous bite ready to consume whatever they touched. We heard the Onyx women cry out in the distance as Vidor drew on their magic to strengthen his own. The darkness expanded as it spread, shimmering with an unnatural black sheen.
The Starved responded with terrifying speed. One moment, the writhing black fog surged toward it, a tide of death meant to consume. The next, the creature’s grotesque maw split open in something that was not quite a scream.
And then it devoured.
The shadows, the tendrils of dark withering magic, the very air between them all collapsed inward, sucked into the yawning abyss of its mouth. The dark energy flickered, unraveled, and then vanished, as if it had never existed at all.
The Starved shuddered in monstrous pleasure, its elongated fingers twitching, its rib cage expanding, stretching as though it had just tasted something intoxicating. And then it lunged, hungry again.
It was a nightmare given motion, rushing at Vidor with the sick, jerking movements of something that had never been meant to walk in the light.
Vidor turned to face the monster, his eyes blazing with hatred, but even he couldn’t hide the fear that flickered in them.
Jace joined the fray, his arrows cutting through the air like streaks of light. When the arrows bounced off the bone, he started firing them into the demon’s many joints. The Starved only shook them off, still barreling forward with unstoppable momentum. But then I saw the bone around the arrowheads beginning to corrode, a dark, sickly green spreading outward from the impact points.
