What was only a couple of seconds felt like minutes as they reachedthe kitchen door together. Everyone was inside, Quint guarding the opening. The soft lights of the kitchen illuminated the wrecks that they were—dirt and blood and death coating them as if the sky had rained with it.
Toran stood in the open doorway, a hand out to her. She didn’t take it.
“Stay inside,” she told him.
Then she turned her back on him, faced the mass of corpses. Toran shouted her name as the dead came between them. He tried fighting his way back to her, the slick swish of his blade against flesh a sound she couldn’t have tuned out if she tried. But she didn’t need him.
These corpses were moving because of magic. Magic Damari was controlling. Magic Damari had stolen. She didn’t have to steal it as Damari did. Inside or out, magic was a part of her. And if she summoned it, it would gladly heed her call.
The magic was the only living thing among the dead. It beat behind its prison of decaying flesh like fists on bars. She felt it as surely as she felt her own heartbeat in her chest. Her every sense focused on it as if she were a scope and it that one thing off in the distance she simply had to get a glimpse of.
She heard the corpses still. Nes closed her eyes and took a deep breath in.
No breath rushed her lungs. Only magic. The air was clogged with it—maple dressed with decay, pine sprinkled with bone dust, lemon sewn through rotting skin. It filled her every pore, snuck in every crevice. The rush of it was like a blizzard. Frigid and fierce and forceful. A blizzard caught in a bottle, her body nothing but glass holding it in.
She stood against it. She would not break.
She was not a husk. She was a prison. And she would lock up all the magic.
She could hold out against its storm.
One by one, the corpses in the dumpstreet fell. One by one, theycrumpled as she sucked the magic from them, drawing it into herself. The bodies dropped until there was only one left standing.
She opened her eyes.
Damari stood, dark eyes wide with shock. Or maybe it was fear.
The storm inside Nes roared with delight. She thrust a hand out and snatched Damari by the neck, her fingers wrapping around, pressing down on the girl’s throat. Damari made a choking sound, her hands clawing at Nes’s arm. But the girl couldn’t break her hold.
Nes squeezed, cutting off her airway. She lifted her, just enough for Damari’s toes to skim the ground, and slammed her head against the wall.
Stone met skull with a harsh thud. Nes pulled Damari back, checking the wound before throwing her to Toran and shoving them all back under the safety of the doorway.
Nes had just crossed the threshold when the rumbling began. She turned in time to see the large metal plow charge past, clearing the dumpstreet and taking the bodies away. When it was gone, all that was left were the bloodstains.
39
Toran
An unconscious girl lay at Toran’s feet.
He wished he could say it was the first time he’d been in such a situation. It was not. But it was the first time the girl was bleeding, her blood dripping onto the toe of his boot.
Quint bent down to inspect the wound. Toran watched him press two fingers to the cut. They came away red.
“She’ll be okay,” Quint said. “It’ll bruise, but the cut is shallow.”
“That’s a lot of blood for a shallow cut,” Genna piped up, staring down at Damari. “I thought the Witch was invincible.”
“Invulnerable.”
Heads whipped as attention shifted from the girl on the floor to the one standing in the open doorway. Toran stared at Nes, a trickling sense of dread making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
Her hair, as always, was a disaster. But there was something about the wildness of it that brought out a ferocity—a ferocity bordering on cruelty—in her blue eyes. It made him pause. Made him wary. And he wasn’t the only one who felt it. The entire kitchen felt charged. Like they’d just witnessed a close-range lightning strike.
“Nes?” It was Suri who spoke, the girl taking up so little space Toran had forgotten she was there.
Nes offered them all one swift nod. “You mean invulnerable. Invincible means you can’t be defeated. History has proven the Witch can be.”
