WRAITH DECREE #2
She gasped against the pain, and then laughed at it. Was this all it could do? Tear her up a little? She was the vessel of a deity. She was the conduit of cosmos and calamities and death. This spell was the work of a boy.
Bast-Kaumani was the scion of a goddess. It was time she returned to Her.
Esme came to a rib and, when the Bond wrapped around the bone to keep it straight, she smiled at the pathetic little thing wriggling around in her chest.
What? Did it think it had a choice?
She yanked her knife, cracking through her rib, and the Bond shrieked in pain.
When she met her second rib, the Bond wrapped around the bone like steel, and again Esme sliced through it. The Bond begged her to stop now, screeching at her to listen. It threatened and begged and burned and stung and choked and tortured and still.
This was her will, and it was the only one she truly followed.
Esme came to her heart. She might already be dead. She could feel almost nothing. Her vision was white with agony and triumph. It would be over soon, and then she could return home to her goddess and rest.
It was owed to her.
She angled her knife up to spear her heart and drag it out, but a sound pierced through her blindness. It was wet, like something splattering against a wall, and far off. There was a second of silence, and then the thudding of something on the ground, and the vibration of the floor with it.
The Bond leached its pain from her body.
Esme’s vision leaked back in. Gone was whatever extreme power that let her fight and win against the Bond, and now all of her was just loose, collapsing on the floor in an ocean of her own blood.
The room blurred out and refocused. Something was lying in a mess on the floor at the end of the table.
Yanor. Her pale gray eyes were lifeless.
Janos. He’d done it. He’d killed her.
Esme grabbed her knife again to restart her process, and then she saw the boots by Yanor’s body.
They were Bal’s.
Esme could only blink at the sight of his feet. He dropped the knife and it splashed soundlessly in Yanor’s blood. He staggered back until he slumped against the table, and then he dropped to the floor.
Bal had done it?
She opened her mouth, and some stupid sound came out. Bal’s face snapped up to hers and he lunged for her. Her blood soaked into the knees of his pants and spilled all over his lap as he held her to his chest. He cried into the gaping hole in her middle.
He’d been the one to do it?
Across the table, Urias clawed up Janos, slumped over in his chair.
He had his knife clutched to his chest. His cheeks were paling, and he seized as Magic beat against his weak human body.
He wasn’t going to stab Yanor. He’d kept his knife close to end his own life if he’d had to. He’d never planned to do it.
“What?” Isobel shook, eyes darting around all the blood and death and mess she’d caused. “Well, I—you made the wrong choice—”
Esme jolted forward and her wound coughed blood. “You just said—” How was she able to speak? Was it over? Was Yanor’s death the endpoint?
“I am queen and I say that Janos has won the third trial!” Isobel shrieked in complete panic.
Esme had never seen her so undone, but her spell wrung her out.
The queen stood, and the castle threw her back down.
It thrashed against her claim. A shower of smoke blew past the window, carrying screams on its wind.
The ground beneath her pitched a fit, and the Wyvern Sea behind them rioted, louder than Esme had never heard it.
And then something banged against the back of the castle like a god had kicked their little rock of a planet.
Wailing turned to gurgling, gurgling turned to the shriek of the sea—the Wyvern had clawed up from her shores to batter them.
Ahead, flame; behind, the drowning depths.
There was nothing between the two but violent death.
The Betrayer’s Serpent was going to kill them. Something was still wrong.
Esme struggled to give a shit. It didn’t even matter that the ceiling cracked; she’d probably be dead before some ancient piece of stone could fall on her anyway, and something told her this death would be different.
Normally when she died, she was lifted up only so high before the Bond shoved her back in, but this time wisps of her soul floated further and further away, in too many directions to chase. They wouldn’t be easily wrangled back.
She didn’t particularly care if she died for good. She had a goddess waiting for her. And Mina… well, Mina and Gia would be there too, and Ryukyhn, and all her Wraiths. What was so wrong with this kind of freedom? It was what they wanted, wasn’t it?
Bal yanked Esme under the table and arched over her body, his forehead balanced on hers.
His eyes practically glowed with determination, like there was no other option but for the two of them to survive this.
What was left of her gut locked up. Did he know they were doomed? Even worse, did he know she was?
“You should escape,” Esme muttered. “You might have time to get out of the city. Try.” Or the spell would kill him the second he stood. Either way, protecting her ruined body would do nothing for him.
“Can you walk?” he asked, like she could feel her feet.
“No. You go.”
“No.” Bal shook his head. “Either we go, or we don’t.
” The castle chattered. Bricks rained down from higher floors.
The building was collapsing. A shard of the ceiling crashed on the table above them, and Bal flinched closer to her.
She was already as good as dead, and still he braced himself to take whatever the spell would throw on them.
It bled on his neck, dripping into her own puddle of gore.
Her fingers were colder than ever, but they slid along his cheek.
Would he die for her? Esme was delirious and dead and freezing, but the notion of it—the silly notion of Bal sacrificing himself for someone doomed anyway—warmed her.
He was all she could see. His pretty brown eyes and curly hair.
The patch of stubble on his cheek that she’d missed when she’d shaved him yesterday.
This broken nose and these long lashes. This was going to be the last thing she ever saw.
The world would end and they would be buried under a city of rubble, and for all eternity their bodies would be tangled together just like this. He’d waste his eternity protecting her.
Esme grabbed his cheek and pulled his head down. They were going to die. He deserved a kiss.
He was warm—of course he was—but the feeling of her dying breath being into this living mouth made her heart hum in happiness.
He kissed her like his lips might fix her, stitch up every hole, and glue together every bone.
Balthazar refused to take Esme’s last breath.
He kissed her like he would give her his.
When they parted, her blood was smeared on his lips.
She cradled his face in her hands, and her eyes slipped down to his neck. And there was a phrase there, the only few words she could read:
The third trial will be decided by Wraith decree.
Could she really just do that? Could she just say a word and end this now?
She’d never know if she didn’t try.
“Bal,” Esme said with the last of her strength. “You’ve won the third trial. You’re king.”
The castle halted in its shaking. The Wyvern Sea hissed and slithered back to her home.
The smoke gusting through the window thinned.
A racket rose, but not of terror. Every crack and shatter and fault lifted back into place.
Parts of the city that had burned to ash were pressurized into wood and roofs and shingles.
Esme cackled as the words carved into her neck spat black Magic. Every joyous shake was torture, but how could she not? Not even Magic’s garroting grip could wipe the grin off her face.
The Betrayer’s Serpent had got its way, and now it was dying.
Magic spurted out of her throat, and she turned to find it doing the same on Bal and the rest of them.
The separate remnants of the spell clawed into a black mass on the floor, babbling indecipherably as it writhed and roiled.
The puddle bubbled until it turned belly up and fizzled out, leaving a smoking black splotch on the stone.
Esme grinned. She’d won.
Soon, the only sound in the room was her wheezing and Isobel’s sobbing.
Esme felt it coming. She was going to die. She’d lost too much blood. Knowing that whatever phrase she forced out in these next seconds would be her last words, she fake-pouted at the quivering failure of a woman named Isobel Asterou and said,
“Fuck you and your ugly-ass clothes.”
Unimpressed with her last words, Ojalla stole Esme’s soul away extra painfully.