Chapter 30 #2
Across the chamber, Dario met the first rush with both blades drawn, steel flashing in bright, brutal arcs. Dominic’s Draoth flared, throwing two soldiers back before they could reach their line. Yoni slammed into another with a snarl Ivan felt more than heard.
Then a blade swept for Ivan’s ribs.
He turned with it instead of away, caught the soldier’s wrist, and slammed the man’s arm down across his knee. Bone cracked. Ivan buried the knife beneath the gap in his armor before the cry left his mouth.
Someone struck him from behind. His knees hit stone, pain bursting white behind his eyes.
He rolled before the second blow fell, hooked the chain at his wrists around a Legionnaire’s ankle, and yanked hard enough to drop him.
A boot came down where Ivan’s head had been.
He drove the knife through the leather above it.
There was no room to fight now, only bodies, elbows, blades, and black armor pressing in until the air itself seemed to vanish.
Beyond the crush, Bryn was a streak of red hair, dragging Gideon away from a soldier’s blade while Dario cut down the man reaching for her.
Dominic shouted something Ivan could not make out. The dying rift answered with a shudder.
He scanned the room until his eyes landed on Rolfe fighting Malak with all the graceless fury of a boy who had carried a nightmare within him half his life. His blade scraped off Malak’s armor once, twice—then found a gap beneath the pauldron.
Malak staggered.
Ivan tried to move toward them, but the second wave of soldiers surged through the breach before he could take three steps.
Black armor filled the room in a rush of smoke and glass, cutting across his path, driving him back toward the failing rift.
Dominic’s Draoth struck the floor hard enough to buckle the stone upward, throwing a dozen men into the ceiling, but more came through the gap before the bodies had finished falling.
Ivan slipped into shadow and came out behind a Legionnaire already swinging for Yoni, his blade driving through the soft place beneath the man’s helm.
Before the body hit the floor, Ivan was gone again, swallowed by the dark beneath the broken arch and spat out near the rift, where two soldiers had caught Dario by the cloak and were dragging him backward.
Ivan slammed into the first hard enough to send them both crashing into the wall, wrapped the chain around the second’s throat, and tore until the man’s knees gave.
He had one breath to see the lieutenant go down beneath three blades.
Pain flared somewhere in his side.
He did not look down.
The shadow hauled him across the chamber again, faster than thought, faster than fear, through smoke and falling grit and the stuttering light of the rift, surfacing across the chamber from Rolfe.
Gods, he was winning.
Rage had made him fast. Grief had made him stupid, but it had also made him strong.
Rolfe drove Malak backward through the dust, blade hammering again and again into the seams of that black armor.
Malak blocked the first three strikes, caught the fourth badly, and stumbled when Rolfe’s sword slid beneath his lower ribs. Blood darkened the glass.
Malak’s smile vanished.
Rolfe screamed and struck again.
Ivan jumped closer and cut one man down and slipped on his blood. The floor was moving beneath them. Not shaking now. Sinking. The fortress groaned like something ancient beginning to die.
“Rolfe!” Ivan shouted.
But he didn't hear him—he drove Malak to one knee.
For a breath, the chamber seemed to hold as Rolfe lifted his cryxis with both hands, face twisted, tears cutting tracks through the grime on his cheeks.
Then the smoke behind him opened.
Ivan saw the claws first.
Long. Black. Wet.
The shade unfolded from the breach with the dreadful silence of something that had never needed breath. Its gray limbs bent at wrong angles as it rose behind Rolfe, too quick for the dead, too silent for anything made of flesh. The chamber temperature plummeted.
Ivan tore across the room as claws punched through leather and flesh with a sound Ivan knew he would hear until the day he died. Rolfe’s body jerked. His sword slipped from his hand and struck the floor. For one impossible heartbeat, he remained standing, eyes wide, breath caught in his mouth.
Then the shade ripped upward and Rolfe’s stomach opened.
Bryn screamed.
Malak staggered back, one hand clamped to the wound at his side, and even through the dust Ivan saw the satisfaction returning to his face.
Rolfe’s gaze stayed locked on Malak, and Ivan understood, with a sick twist low in his gut, that Rolfe was no longer seeing the man before them.
He was seeing the stairway. The blood running between the stones.
His cousins with their throats opened beneath Malak’s hand while Rolfe screamed over what was left of them.
It all moved through Rolfe’s face—the horror, the recognition, the sick flash of triumph—because he had almost done it.
He had almost made it mean something.
Then Rolfe looked at Ivan.
His mouth moved. No sound came. Blood spilled over his lips instead as the shade dropped him.
Ivan vanished into darkness and came out between Rolfe and the creature with a snarl tearing through his teeth, the knife already buried in the shade’s throat.
It should have killed anything living. The shade only twisted, jaw unhinging, claws raking across Ivan’s chest. Pain burst hot and blinding, but the dark current surged harder, colder, and Ivan drove the blade again and again until the thing’s head split sideways and its body collapsed in a twitching heap.
Rolfe lay at his feet.
Ivan dropped beside him, knees striking the stone hard enough to jar pain up his spine, but there was nothing to press closed. Nothing to save. Rolfe’s hands fluttered uselessly over the ruin of himself, fingers slipping in blood, eyes searching Ivan’s face with a boy’s terror beneath all the red.
Ivan gripped his shoulder. “Look at me.”
Rolfe tried.
Behind him, Malak laughed. “Still collecting strays, Hunter?” he called. “You always did like things better once they were broken.”
Ivan lifted his head and the dark inside him went utterly still.
Dominic shouted something and the fortress cracked open above them, rain pouring through the split ceiling in silver sheets as soldiers screamed, but Ivan heard none of it clearly.
Only Malak breathing. Only Rolfe drowning in blood beneath his hand.
Only the old oath in his bones stirring awake like a chain being pulled taut.
“There it is,” Malak crooned. “Osin always did have a talent for making beasts out of pretty boys.”
Ivan stepped over Rolfe.
His knife hung loose in his hand.
Malak’s grin widened as blood darkened the seam of his armor where Rolfe had cut him. “Give it time, Hunter. Soon enough you’ll be crawling on all fours with the rest of them, licking blood off the floor and begging your master to—”
The dark took him between one breath and the next. Malak’s smile was still on his face when Ivan came out of the shadow in front of him, too close for the sword at Malak’s side.
Ivan opened his throat slowly and the man looked almost offended as blood spilled black over his teeth. Ivan caught him by the front of his armor before he could fall and held him there, close enough to watch the cruelty drain slowly from his eyes.