31. Where Gods Go to Bleed #2
The first one came at me and I opened it from shoulder to hip. The blade went through its body and the body came apart and the magic inside the blades pulled the remains through a gap that opened in the air behind it and sealed shut the moment the last fragment was through.
The second one died the same way. And the third.
I moved through the chamber with a speed and a certainty that did not belong to me.
I was fighting with instinct that was older than my body and I was sending each demon back through the door one by one, and each one that went back narrowed the portal above.
The corridor wall exploded inward and Draco and Vane came through it, locked together, and Vane saw me standing in the broken pentagram with the blades in my hands.
“You think those blades can take down a god?” His voice was layered with the souls he had consumed. A chorus speaking through a single mouth.
I raised the blades.
We fought him together. Draco from the left, me from the right, and the coordination was not trained.
Draco's pulse and mine synchronised through the remains of the connection, and we moved around Vane the way water moved around a stone, finding the gaps, exploiting the angles, each of us covering the opening the other left.
The blades cut him. The crystal edges found the seams between the absorbed souls and Vane's original body and they separated what had been fused, peeling the consumed power away from him layer by layer.
He screamed and the scream carried a hundred voices and each voice was a soul he had stolen and each cut freed one.
He was losing and he knew it.
Vane broke away from the fight. He moved with the speed of everything he had absorbed, faster than Draco, faster than me, and he crossed the chamber in a blur and his hand closed around my mother's throat.
Mom was at the corridor entrance. She had been holding the barrier with Dad, her magic flickering, her face grey with exhaustion. She never saw him coming.
He dropped her.
My mother fell to the stone floor and did not move and Dad screamed, a raw broken sound that filled the chamber and echoed off every wall and went on and on.
I felt the world go white.
“Nico.” Elara's voice, distant. “Nico, the blades. If you push too far, the threshold will consume you. Your body is still human. It cannot sustain this level of power. You will die.”
I didn't care.
I poured everything I had into the crystal daggers.
The blades ignited. The red crystal went white-hot in my hands and the heat of them should have burned my palms to the bone and it didn't because the gift was past pain now, past the body's limits, operating in a register that human blood was never designed to sustain.
I went after Vane.
He met me. His reshaped body met the blades and the impact of the collision sent a shockwave through the chamber that dropped everyone still standing. Dad went down over Mom’s body. Remy hit the wall. Helena's fae light guttered and died. Draco staggered.
I didn't stop.
I cut him. Again and again and again. Each strike peeled away another layer of stolen power.
Each strike sent another consumed soul screaming back through a threshold that opened and closed with the rhythm of a heartbeat.
Vane fought back and his strikes landed and I felt ribs break and I felt skin tear and I felt blood leave my body in quantities that my brain was no longer tracking because tracking was a function of self-preservation and self-preservation had become irrelevant.
The last of the consumed souls tore away from him.
The massive body contracted, shrank, and what was left was just Vane.
Old and pale and bleeding from a dozen threshold wounds and looking at me with the eyes of a man who had spent a thousand years building toward godhood and was watching it come apart in the hands of a thirty-year-old antique restorer from Brooklyn.
“You can't,” he said.
I took his head.
The right blade went through his neck and the left blade went through his chest and I felt the magic reach inside him and find his heart and stop it.
His head separated from his body and both fell and the sound they made on the stone floor was ordinary.
Not the sound of a god dying. The sound of a body hitting a floor.
The portal above the chamber shuddered. Without the Clavis feeding it, without the pentagram sustaining it, without Vane's absorbed power anchoring it, the dimensional tear began to close.
The edges drew together the way a wound drew together, slowly at first and then faster, and the red-black void above Manhattan sealed itself and the sky returned and the demons that remained in the chamber were pulled back through the narrowing gap like debris sucked through a closing drain.
The blades went dark in my hands and my knees gave out.
The stone floor came up to meet me and I heard the crystal daggers clatter against it and I heard Remy calling my name.
Draco caught me before I hit the ground.
His arms came around me and he pulled me against his chest and his skin was cold and his heartbeat was steady and I could feel it through the blood we shared, his pulse and mine, one slowing down and one refusing to let it.
“Nico. Stay with me.”
“I love you,” I said. My voice was thin. “I need you to know that. Because of you. Because you're a stubborn, impossible, beautiful disaster and I chose you. I choose you.”
“Nico.”
“Tell Remy I'm sorry about the shop.”
“You are not dying in my arms, do you understand me, you are not—”
“And tell Drake to get off the velvet chair. He knows what he did.”
My vision was going. The edges first, then the centre, the world narrowing to a point of light that contained Draco's face and nothing else. His eyes were dark and wet and his hands were on my face and I could feel his blood in my veins reaching for mine and not finding enough to hold.
“Bite him now,” Elara said. “Turn him. Do it now or you lose him the same way you lost Cassiel, and this time there will be no binding and no return and no door. He will be gone. Do it now.”
My eyes closed.
The last thing I felt was Draco's mouth at my throat, and then the dark came.
Somewhere very far away a child on a battlefield looked up from a faceless body and smiled.