“She’s luring something after her,” Agrippina whispers in my ear from where we’re crouched. I swallow, tightening my grip on my cane. “Someone.”
The next moment, a tall, narrow figure steps out from the battle. Its head swivels beneath a draped veil like a bloodhound. My stomach sours. Another figure follows, pauldrons winking in the firelight, gauntlet-covered hands looking more like claws. Their vestments are tattered, soiled around the hems. My throat closes off as I watch them, moving pack-like through the dust. The tiny glimmer of hope I dared to harbor flickers, a single flame in a gust of wind.
“The High Ecclesia,” I whisper, my stomach twisting when a third stalks out from the fray, dragging someone by the scruff. A Sepulchyre soldier. The High Ecclesia, still facing forward, in the direction Nyatrix galloped, takes one hand and rends the soldier’s head from her body.
Agrippina chokes behind me, and I swallow back the nausea, trying to track Nyatrix through the chaos. Hoofbeats echo on stone somewhere nearby, but there’s so much dust, the Godwinds pouring in from the Sundered Lands and bringing that thick black sand with them. Soot and blood and despair fill my nose.
I’m so focused on finding Nyatrix that when hands close around my shoulders, I can’t imagine that it’s anyone but Agrippina—until I’m pulled from behind the rubble and tossed onto the shattered slate stones below. I roll and cough, spitting out blood, trying to pull myself up with my cane. Before I can, my gaze alights on something that strikes horror into me.
“Agrippina!” I shout, trying to crawl toward where the woman who loved my mother, who claimed me as her own, is bleeding out on the street. With a howl, I steady my cane on the broken stone and haul myself to my feet. Then I break into a staggering run, the quickest I can make this body move, toward her.
“No, no, no,” I whisper, placing my hand against the hole torn into her throat. Her chest flutters like a moth’s wings, her mouth open and gaping. I rip the hem of her robes off, applying pressure to her throat. Tears race down my face, and a scream barrels out from my chest.
Cold, metal claws close around the back of my neck, and I’m pulled from Agrippina, dangled in the air like a ragdoll. The chain of my Saintess Lucia medallion snaps—I do not even know why I still wear it—and the golden trinket plummets to the ground. I slide my hand down the length of my cane, tighten my fingers, and stab backwards with all my might. But I only meet more metal, more undead flesh.
Smoke and screams surround me, my eyes burning from the foul air, as the veiled face of a High Ecclesian appears before me.
“Good,” They say in a hoarse whisper that makes my skin crawl. “Let Us dangle her, Our pretty little bait.”
“Nyatrix!” I scream, swinging my cane in every direction I can. “Stay away. Nyatrix, if you can hear me,stay away. He wants to make you a weapon.” My throat burns with the words. There’s no time to explain the gestalt, no time for my theories, but this she will understand above all else.
This, I know, she fears above all else.
Gauntleted fingers slide into my mouth, gagging me. I writhe and kick, desperately trying to evade the High Ecclesian, but it’s no use. I am a single crippled foundling trying to disobey God.
Two more High Ecclesians appear from the billowing smoke. There are ten, I know. If I’m right—if my racing, tumbling mindhas produced anything of value—They won’t all be here. He’ll hold some back, keep Them in Lumendei, preparing to devour Nyatrix in that same failed ritual I disrupted. With her, He’d reach eleven Ecclesians—terribly close to the subject of His pursuit, the perfect and sacred Twelve. My stomach roils as I wonder if there might be some wretched way for the First Son to force Nyatrix into birthing His last and final Ecclesian.
A messiah, the Catechemisa would surely say. Bile surges up my throat.
I thrash harder as that perverted Mysterium—the same thrum but the frequency of it all wrong—washes over me. One High Ecclesian, taller than the rest, the outline of Their corpse almost visible through Their veil, hefts a massive spear.
I try to scream Nyatrix’s name again, try to tell her to stay away; I want more than anything for Them to impale me with the spear instead and for all of this to end. I want to say that They can have me, that I’ll endure the rest of my life under His and Renault’s thumb. I’ll repent. I’ll undergo the Baptisma again.
Anything if it means she lives.
But the truth of it is all over so fast. I never realized this from Physica Hall, not truly. It takes me so long to mend wounds, to heal bones, to nurse someone back from the brink. It’s astounding, I understand now, how quickly a body can be broken. Even one as glorious as hers.
Nyatrix bursts from the smoke on foot, more magnificent than ever. Two beats of her inky black wings send dust and rubble flying into the High Ecclesians. They stumble back, and she flips the blade in her hands, its darkened silver length shining in the light of the fires like the only truth in this world of lies.
Her gaze slips to me. Just for a moment. The barest of seconds. It should be inconsequential. It should mean nothing atall. But, I suppose, so should have the first time she looked into my eyes and I into hers. And that was anything but meaningless.
All I see is her, glorious and indomitable in her fury. But then the spear, that horrible thrum, that elegantly engraved breastplate shattering into pieces. She collapses to the ground.
I scream, I think. Someone is screaming. Everyone should be screaming.
The High Ecclesian closes Their cold hand around my throat as I fight to race to her, my wolf of a woman. Even with a horrible weapon sprouting from her chest, Nyatrix manages to pull herself up to her knees. Sweat races down the side of her face, that silky dark hair matted to her skull like a helm.
With a scream, she lurches up onto one knee, balancing herself to stand. My apocalypse. My salvation.
Two of the High Ecclesians approach, slowly, deliberately, Their vestments flowing in the roar of the Godwinds.
“We won’t damage her too much,” comes a voice at my ear. Bile churns in my throat. “You’ll see her again. But she must die first, so she can be remade in Our image. As you all must.”
The towering frames and rippling cloth of the High Ecclesians block my last view of the Lupa Nox, the woman who freed me, the woman whom I should’ve admitted to loving. It would have been an easy thing, cradled in her arms, her hands on my body. Just three words. But I held them back.
And now she’s gone, another corpse on the street. Just more bones in a city of death.
The High Ecclesian holding me tosses me to the ground and, by my hair, drags me over to Nyatrix’s body. Up close, her eyes are empty, her beautiful skin already paling. I pull myself onto my elbows, reaching for her. The heavy hand of a High Ecclesian shoves me back down into the rubble, my chin bouncing off a cobblestone so hard my vision goes black for a moment.
