Chapter Thirty-One
It happened so quickly that I missed the first lunge entirely.
The estries launched herself at Silas, sword-first. She dove as if he was a pool, ready to breaststroke her way through his torso, bathing in his blood as his abdomen gave way. Her wings tucked to her side as she plunged, which gave her enough forward momentum that she couldn’t deviate from the course once she’d committed. He held his footing until the absolute last second, then dove for the arena floor, tucking and rolling into the space she’d abandoned.
A high, wild viola and its army of violins mimicked the estries’s savage twists and turns. The low, powerful double bass and accompanying cellos answered as the instruments danced, calling and responding in their freeform interpretation of the opening moves.
“He understands her timing,” I said on an exhale, breathing for the first time.
Silas understood wings. He was unfairly bound, yes, but he was no hapless pedestrian. He knew birds of prey, of their course, of their pitfalls, whether animal or fae. If anyone could take a winged nemesis, it was an angel.
He was on his feet without missing a beat. Despite the evidence of his mistreatment, he moved with no limp. He held his ground as if he were in peak fighting condition, brandishing his sword as he faced her once more. He moved his head slightly, shaking the dust from his hair.
The flicker of a smile flashed as she registered his evasion. The estries channeled her fury into her spin as she rounded on the angel.
She looked at him for a moment before setting off into the sky, hovering with several powerful backbeats of the wide, stretched leather of her membranous wingspan. A chorus of violins created harmonies and fierce counter-harmonies as they paced themselves with the hovering flaps of her wings, every bow in the string section working to mirror the fear she instilled with as she treaded air just above him.
Silas took a few careful steps until he was directly below her. She cried out as she sliced through the air, committed to the death of her prey. This time, Silas didn’t roll, but spun with his sword outstretched in a slicing downward arc. He evaded her with the expert timing of someone who was no stranger to battle. The cello cried out with deep commanding notes as the violins trilled and fell.
Perhaps the estries was unrestrained and her bloodthirst was stronger, but it seemed she’d been away from war for a long, long time.
His sword wasn’t sharp enough for the clean slice he might have hoped, but the blunt force of the blade crunched as it connected with a hollow primary bone in the wings she’d failed to fold in time. He rolled as she hit the ground, unable to recover from the blow before it was too late.
Silas took the barest of seconds allotted by her downfall to take the sword to his restraints, but cried out in unmistakable frustration as the blade was too dull to cut even the ropes that bound him. The audience understood at the same moment as he, that Silas held little more than a long metallic club.
The orchestra responded in kind. A deep drum joined as Silas’s musical companion, the instrument creating impact with each swing.
Between his bound wings, his useless weapon, and the metallic cuff that caught the spotlight and contained any power he might hope to wield, he was little more than a well-trained human facing an estries in her full glory.
My eyes watered, dry and begging for me to blink, but I couldn’t look away.
He abandoned his attempt at his restraints and readied himself for another round as she grunted. She’d managed to maintain hold of her weapon as she’d hit the ground, wing clearly impaired by his successful blow. She didn’t bother to wipe the dust from her face as she got to her feet and snarled. Her teeth seemed sharper, somehow. Her eyes were brighter. Her sword glittered with more might.
Anticipatory, vibrational strumming rang through the opposing instrumental parties as they waited to clash once more. The fight would have been horrible in and of itself, but the dramatic intensity of the music made it unbearable.
I wondered if fear had begun to take on hallucinogenic properties. My heart thundered. My vision struggled to stay fixed on the man I’d come to see not only as a savior, but as a friend. A bastard who’d been reluctant as fuck to save me, but he’d still saved me, and helped me, and healed me.
He’d given me his angelic poppet, not because he’d been forced to, not because I’d been bound to him, not because I belonged to Heaven, but because he’d chosen to help me. He’d entered a god-catcher in Bellfield and answered my call when I’d called out to him. And he didn’t deserve to die. Not bound and sabotaged. Not taking the fall for a crime he hadn’t committed. And not because he’d helped a human who he had no loyalty or allegiance to. Not like this.
The estries cocked her head, braided ponytail flicking to the side like a whip as she goaded him forward. She brandished her sword.
Silas was not just quick on his feet, but quick to adapt. The audience responded to the way in which he’d shifted his grip on his sword once he understood it was little more than a bat. He switched to a two-handed hold, both on the pommel. He accepted her goad, but not in the way she expected. The estries grinned as he sprinted for her, drums matching his every thundering step, waiting until the last second to leap into the air so he might miss.
I gasped, my intake of breath audibly shared by the Nordes at my side.
A creature of the sky himself, Silas had anticipated as much. The moment she jumped, so did he. The estries leapt upward, intent on evasion. The angel lunged forward, wielding his metallic club toward her knee. The blunt rod connected with loud crack, shuddering against her shin. If we hadn’t heard steel on bone, the agonizing shriek that tore from her would have been unmistakable enough.
The estries dropped from the air like a bird of prey felled by an arrow. The violins scarcely had time to switch to the rushed, panicked high notes I’d expect to hear if Norman Bates approached me in the shower with a knife. The audience cried out as their champion tumbled.
Silas advanced on her, undoubtedly with the knowledge that he had a tiny window wherein she was blinded by pain to strike. He sprinted to the estries, the enormous, brown-black expanse of her wings shielding the audience from seeing her full fallen form. We heard the impact of metal before understanding what had happened. Her wings shuddered in response and I looked to Caliban, then to Fauna.
Both were glued in frozen, motionless shock at the battle.
I opened my mouth to speak, but Caliban anticipated my demand.
“He’s got it,” he whispered.
From the orchestra pit, the cellist must have had a vantage point, for he did not quit. His powerful bass notes continued to intertwine with the violin as they saw something we could not.
I was drawn to the center of the ring with horror as the estries’s wings did not wilt in defeat, but flexed inward as new fight filled her in a way that blinded the audience. Onlookers cried out in support, in disappointment, in hope, in anticipation as everyone waited to see who would emerge from the wall of wings.
A flash of metal.
A woman’s scream.
An agonized cry.
The estries’s own razor-sharp blade sliced through her wing, leaving a gaping window of just their faces. Her weapon soared toward the audience, clattering to the earth and kicking up a cloud of sparkling dust just short of the seats as everyone cried out in surprise. The murmurs of unrest were quelled only by the intensity of the fight as, through the punched hole in the wing, I was scarcely able to discern the two-handed grip the estries had on the blade. Its steel chewed into her palms, crimson streams running from her fingers down her forearms as she cowed in submission. Silas held it parallel to the earth, forcing it downward toward her throat.
Stars danced before my eyes. I hadn’t taken a breath in more than thirty seconds. He’d won. My heart swelled as I stared down at the angel. Relief and pride wrestled one another as my eyes lined with inexplicable tears. He’d overcome the impossible. He’d gone toe to toe with—
My hope died the moment the cellos took the lead, the deep reverberations of the standing double bass carving a musical path for Silas. Its commanding strokes overpowered the violins as he fought.
I couldn’t be certain what had happened. It was wind and spirit and horror all at once as what remained of her wings, her legs, her very essence swept up the dust around them in a flurry of legs and limbs. It was as if a storm had descended on the arena, concentrated to their fight alone.
“Hey!” Caliban snarled at my side, jumping up in indignation.
I waited for this to be it—this to be the moment he would stop the fight—but the battle went on.
Just above him, Dorian was on his feet, hands in the air as he shouted at the injustice.
I told myself I didn’t understand what was happening, but in my gut, I knew: Silas had been stripped of his wings, his sword, and his supernatural power. The estries had been allowed to keep all three. It was the third she wielded at long last.
If I needed any further confirmation, I had it. It wasn’t just the initial soloists and the duets and trios that had been born from their accompaniment, but new instruments, new notes, new highs and lows added to emphasize the estries. Cellos abandoned their allegiance with his music as they symbolized her usurping power. She was given a symphony. He, a drum and the relentless bass notes. He was alone. She had it all.
Caliban had said he would start a war for me. He’d promised me he wouldn’t let Silas die. I yanked at his arm, pleading with him to do something.
This time when he answered, it wasn’t with words.
Like Fenrir, like the cave, he spoke into my mind.
“Trust me.”
I was so startled by his response that I stumbled into Fauna. She braced for my impact as we watched glittering, sooty dust fill the stadium. Coughing was something I’d imagined would be below the gods, but even they were not spared from the sparkling, unholy winds of malice that caked the arena.
When the cloud of wind and fury subsided, I wiped the debris from my eyes to see two bat-like wings pointed straight into the air, strenuously flexed as they mirrored the corded muscles and tendons of her body. She was no longer smiling. A vein popped from her forehead. Her fangs were bared for blood and animalistic need rather than any pleasure. Her arms, her neck, her legs were tensed in a total-body commitment to smiting the life below her.
Something in the gust of power had knocked Silas’s sword from his hands. He was flat on his back, forearms crossed above him as he held on to what he could of his strength against the powerful vampiric succubus. He grunted, the gloss of his sweat catching in the light as it covered any bit of face that wasn’t caked in dust. His lips were peeled back, teeth bared as he mirrored her expression, his of strenuous, grunting desperation.
Silas was losing.
This time, I shouted to him in my mind. “Caliban, he needs our help!”
“Wait,” came the silent response.
She beat her wings to help counteract any weight he might hold against her. She could force herself down on him if she tried. She would get her teeth into his neck, suck him clean, leave him an empty shell—a symbolic, bloodless sacrifice where an angel once had lain. Her battle cry chilled me as Fauna and I joined the others on their feet.
I felt so helpless. I wanted to tear through the audience, to sprint across the arena floor, to shove my weak mortal arms between them. I had no power. I had nothing. Just blind faith that my demon had a plan.
What if he didn’t?
Was I willing to gamble with Silas’s life?
I forced myself to keep my eyes on Silas no matter how desperately I wished to look away. I clung to every one of the cellist’s notes, absorbing the winces, the reddening shade of his face, the shaking of his limbs as he fought with everything he had to keep her at bay.
Caliban carried the guilt, the pain of everything that happened, everything my demon, the Prince, blamed himself for. I was not cowardly enough to avert my eyes. If Silas was to perish, then I was to earn the shame, the ghosts, the misery that haunted me. If he fell to the fangs of the estries, it would be me who was to blame, and it would be me who would never forget it.
The drum— his drum—made the sadistic choice of mimicking his dwindling life, representing his heart as he ticked away on borrowed time.
Another flap of her wings and she was closer.
My hand flew to my chest, clutching at my own heart through my gown as if to hold it together to keep from bleeding out.
His arms trembled. His body was giving out. He had nothing on his side. No weapons. No wings. No magic. He was on unfamiliar territory, in a kingdom that wanted him dead. His elbows buckled, and the audience gasped. Perhaps some had begun to root for him—whether because they wanted a longer fight, or because they viewed him as a worthy opponent, who was I to say? All I knew was that I would not be a coward.
If Silas died, part of me deserved to die with him.
Another beat of her powerful wings, grit and debris kicking up around her.
The orchestra was hers to command as the swelling crescendo sang her impending victory.
We lost our collective breath as we had in the moment before the fight began.
Another beat.
His eyes changed, and I knew I couldn’t be the only one who saw it. He’d lost whatever hold he’d had on his upper body strength. Surely, he had to be thinking what we were all thinking. The cards had been stacked against him from the start. They’d never intended to give him a fair fight.
His drum slowed. Slower, and slower, and slower as it scored his death.
The moment I saw resignation in his eyes, a strangled, teary sound escaped me. Fauna began screaming obscenities. I was certain I heard even Poppy and Ella in the protests, but they were so muddied by the celebratory cheers that it was impossible to tell.
“Caliban! You promised!”
Silence in return.
“You swore! You said he wouldn’t die! You told me to trust you! You—”
Everything screeched to a halt as a powerful woman’s voice rang through the stadium.
“Stop!”
Estrid was on her feet. The booming voice belonged to the valkyrie, sacred chooser of the slain. Her command was louder than Silas’s cry, than the estries’s hungry howl, than the shock and excitement of the onlookers. Dissonant murmurs rippled through the crowd.
The world moved in slow motion as Ella swung to grab for her. Fauna’s hair moved in a blur as her head whipped to watch the horror unfurl. As I curled toward the Nordes, I saw Poppy’s wide eyes and Dorian’s clenched jaw from my periphery. Caliban’s hand was at my back. The world turned to regard the valkyrie as she stood against Baal.
“They call me valkyrie, as I know who has earned Valhalla. I was once known as Gondul, the wand-wielder, chooser of the slain. I was created by Odin to deem those worthy to live and die in battle, and I cannot stand idle as you cast a death sentence on one who has earned his life.”