30 Elle To Kill #3
Douglas, I call out within my mind, directing every word to his captivity in the knife. Those souls. Do you suppose they feel kindly toward Mr. Pratterman?
He laughs, shaking my arm with the resonance. That’s enough of an answer.
“I came here to do as you asked,” I tell Mr. Pratterman. “One more sacrifice. The first living nonkin that I saw after we bound the new contract.”
Mr. Pratterman’s eyes shine with glee. He grabs the back of Bridget’s dress and drags her up.
I don’t pray to God anymore. Mr. Pratterman’s parting words to me from our last meeting have haunted me too much. When she prays, do you think it’s only God who listens?
I think only to my ghost. The gentle man I’d say I loved if I were still capable of it. Take care of Liney if this fails.
Bridget opens her mouth to convince the ash-heart she believes me to be not to hurt her. Mr. Pratterman swipes his hand over her face. She tries again but no sound forms.
“Easier,” Mr. Pratterman says, winking at me. He calls me a hound dog, yet he’s the one frothing for murder.
I hold out my hand for him to pass Bridget to me.
I call on the spiral as he does. Flames lick up through my feet, crashing into Douglas’s cool presence like waves within me.
Oil and water, mixing inside me in a dangerous symphony.
I need enough fire to appear to perform one deed while preparing another.
“Find her,” I whisper into Bridget’s ear as she struggles against me. She stills, turning to me, twin blue eyes searching for hope.
Direction in the spiral isn’t like the world above. Down doesn’t mean down. In a realm outside ours, a compass’s rules don’t apply. And if Mr. Pratterman isn’t eternal, other aspects of this power may be mine to manipulate as much as his.
I draw a line with my foot beneath her. A seam in the spiral’s stone foundation opens with a crackle of sparks.
I forge a new link to the lighthouse here, the same as the entrance I made at the top of the stairs.
Bridget barely has enough time to open her mouth in shock before she falls through the floor and back into the living world.
I’d never have done this when I believed Mr. Pratterman’s facade. But now I see his slow, human reflexes. I feel how little power he holds in himself as the spiral chooses to fuel me instead. It knows me. Does it understand my change of heart?
I lunge at Mr. Pratterman. Every vengeful instinct I’ve suppressed crashes through me and into him. I knock him back. He falls. His head hits hard against the stone. He howls in pain. Only inches from the drowned ocean.
I straddle him, one hand on his throat and the other lifting the dagger high.
He splutters under me but can’t get any of his snake words out beneath my hand’s pressure. Good. All my muscles are full to bursting with the fuel of those sacrificed through me.
I can’t grant the damned peace. But revenge—I can do that.
He’s so weak. Bridget was much harder to subdue when I first attempted to kill her on the sands. Without the spiral’s power, he has nothing to rely on. Only a man.
No. A sacrifice.
“I give of this sacrifice to the damned,” I say through gritted teeth. “This man will be the last. Through this, our contract is complete.”
I lift my hand from his throat to clasp the dagger with both.
He opens his mouth, lifts his arms, but I’ve learned how to be quick.
My aim is true. No hesitation halts the blade as it performs the mercy strike he taught me.
What the stiletto knife was designed for.
Through his suit, through skin and bone, and through his heart.
Douglas’s blue-gray light spreads across Mr. Pratterman’s chest. I remove the blade.
Dark blood bubbles up from the wound. Ash spurts out, darkening as it wets.
And something else. I reach down and grasp a withered red petal.
Hibiscus. He tries again to say something.
To curse me, to damn me to hell, to decry my end of his nightmare.
Instead of words, blood flows from his lips.
I roll his body into the water. The souls swarm his still-twitching form and drag him under, into the depths.
The knife’s still in my hands, dripping but no longer glowing. I can’t hear Douglas in my mind or feel him in my blood. There’s only searing, ecstatic heat as the tyrant king of this realm is consumed by those he fed from.
I loosen my connection with the power until my body is once again solely mine. The surface of the water stills.
Only I remain.
Pratterman never meant to pass it down to me, or Thomas, or any other person.
No heirs. Does that make it safe to leave behind?
If this place was found once, it’ll be found again.
I inspect the walls around me. The meat has stopped its pulsing and is graying rapidly between the stones but not loosening the structure.
What will happen to the souls that powered these unhallowed halls? There is no true rest here. How can I leave them behind, vulnerable to the whims of whoever next poisons themselves for power?
I can’t linger in this victory against the would-be Devil. There’s one task left before I can rest.
I will end this place.