Chapter 43
A beast roars in the distance, and something wet laps at my arms and legs. An animal licking my wounds perhaps, savoring the red juice before it sinks its teeth into my meat.
Metal wafts into my nose.
Rust and earth and iron, the scent so familiar, but I can’t place it. It washes over me, timed with each delayed lap of the creature’s tongue, and my fingers clench in response.
Arrows embed into my chest, my thighs, my back— gods , my back. More wetness pools beneath me, and then there’s a—a tightness —like my clothes are suddenly suffocating me.
They’re drenched, clinging to my skin, and salt seasons my exposed muscle. A deep sting claws at my chest, and my hand twitches again, grasping for the beast to shove it off me.
More of that familiar scent sweeps over me, and I force my head to slowly turn, my tongue darting out in search of that mouthwatering aroma.
Blood flows into my mouth.
Blood and salt and sea.
My eyes fly open. No wild animal hovers above me. No arrows protrude from my spine. There is only the steady bellow of waves as they rush up the beach and wash me in garnet foam. I spit out the sea water and regret the action immediately, the movement spearing my chest with pain.
The chest Singard plunged a dagger into.
As the blood of the dead rushes into my own slits and tears, so do the memories. I couldn’t allow Sin to heal me, couldn’t allow him to drain his god magic when we desperately needed divine intervention. He never would have agreed, so I did the only thing I could.
I took myself out of the equation.
Remnants of Adelphia’s magic still writhed in my veins when I went over the cliff. I called on it as I fell, desperately trying to weave a shield around me in those split moments in which I plummeted to rock, slowing my fall for a few critical seconds to lessen my impact.
Because I did not want to die.
I would have. And I still might. But I really don’t fucking want to.
Pressing my palms into the saturated sand, another wave rushing up the beach to crest around me, I use the last of my magic to pull the blood from the foam. I siphon it into my own, directing most of it into the valves of my heart, flooding it with the blood of the dead to keep the organ beating.
I push myself upright, hissing as pain sears through me, and I look down. The fucking dagger is still in my chest, and as much as the sight disturbs me, I resist the urge to pull it out. At least that is one fucking hole in my body that is partially plugged.
Gritting my teeth, I rock forward to put my weight over my feet, and my right leg scalds in agony. I collapse to my back once more, and a half-hearted scream tears from my throat. The bones in my calf are broken, maybe even in my thigh.
Fuck , the aftermath of trying to stand on them sends a jolt through my entire body, and I turn, scanning for enemies on the beach.
My only company are corpses.
Soldiers lay strewn across the sand and rocks, their bodies covered in both kingdoms’ uniforms. The scent of their suffering is vapor in the air, and my lips part, desperate to inhale it down my throat.
Whatever threads of morality I have left quickly unravel from its spool as I turn myself over on my stomach and claw my way through the sand, inching closer and closer to the nearest body.
It’s one of our own, and I don’t know if that makes it better or worse. I don’t think I much care either way. Slowly, I pull myself through the black sand until my hands twist into his uniform, and I heave myself up to rest my upper body on his stomach. I reach across him and grab his arm, ripping his gauntlet off.
And then I bite.
His juice spurts across my teeth, and I suck and suck and suck, his blood thick and sweet in my throat. It settles into my chest, and I command it to move to my heart, to keep it pumping, even with blood that is not my own. His fluid salves my ruined chest for a moment, but I need more. I need to get to the others. I need to get off this fucking beach.
I need to get to my Mate .
I dig my elbows into his stomach and pull myself up farther, now partially propped on his chest. I grab his head and angle it, exposing the side of his neck.
My teeth sink into his flesh, and I drain him from his most vital pressure point. The pain ebbs the more I drink, and I guide the blood through my system, as if it were a rope I was snaking through my body. I command it into my legs, and it obeys, sloshing around the severed fragments of bone. It won’t heal them, and I’m a far cry from being experienced in bone setting, but even if I were, I’m in no condition to expel that amount of energy.
It won’t snap the bones back in place, but it will force them to move .
When his flow of blood dwindles to a slow trickle, I release him, exhaling deeply as his essence boons my hurts. And then I’m pushing up to my feet, stumbling for several seconds while I find my balance on a leg whose bones are anywhere but where they’re supposed to be.
That’s when I turn towards the battle, and I traipse across the beach, my movements sharp and disjointed as my right leg serves the purpose of walking without any of its tools in the right place. I keep my hands at my sides with my palms outward, drawing on the blood of each corpse I pass, thieving it from their bodies and pocketing it into my own.
With each essence I steal, the pain quiets further, and my stare sharpens to slits as my eyes set on the war raging ahead. Where Torin’s men continue to storm the beach, chucking their thousands upon thousands of soldiers into ours. Fighting their way up the beach to where the shifters run wild, where they fight to buy our own army time to retreat from the Horde of Wasps and the ballistae.
Ironic, that it is the blood of their fallen that has brought about their most feared nightmare. It will not be the Black Art’s prized pet they face. Not his captive or his wife, his leech or his Mate, or whatever names they call me these days.
No.
They will be facing the bloodwitch .
If they came here to slaughter us in her name, then it will be she that is their undoing. This malignant side of myself, the part of me that thirsts for blood and yearns for the power intertwined with torment. The part of me that smiles as my head falls back, as I spritz the air with the blood of corpses, rip it from their dark hearts and pump it into mine. Each drain quickening the magic in my veins, each lap of my tongue in the air darkening my mind to a starless sky. One where I’m the moon, and the sea undulates beneath me with the blood of the ones that tried to hurt my Mate.
As I draw closer to the fighting, each cry of our fallen sends my pulse hammering against my wrists, and I let out another screech, this one louder than what I could muster when I was stuck laying on the beach. A part of me registers that it must mean my chest is healing, and I yank the dagger free, tossing the now worthless thing to the sand. My mind becomes a void, one that responds only to blood and damnation, and dark power thrums through me.
I scan the corpses that lie desecrated amongst the onyx sand. Their bodies now nothing more than costumes of flesh and bone, and a malevolent thought sinks claws the color of murder into my mind.
I stop walking and turn towards the water, at the hundreds of bodies that litter the shore. With an outstretched hand, I listen for the song of their blood, feel for the surface of their consciousnesses. And then my hand snaps closed, my nails digging into my palm, and I shoot my arm straight up as if I were yanking on a string.
The dead begin to wake.
A wicked smile curves my lips as their bodies react, following that string like marionettes, their feet finding purchase in the sand as their legs begin to move. Their movements are monstrous. Jerky and strained, like their joints are encased in ice, they move forward, and with another pull of my wrist, they reach for their weapons.
They’re not actually alive. In fact, they aren’t sentient at all. But with their spirits gone, there is nothing left of their bodies but muscle and bone. A body doesn’t need life to move, to swing a sword, to kill. They just need muscles to manipulate, which means they need blood . And I just so happen to have a surplus of it.
One by one, then ten by ten, their bodies obey me. Their bones snap, and their heads pivot as I manipulate the blood in their flesh, commanding their physical forms to march beside me. I continue down the beach then, raising more and more of the dead to join in behind me until I reach the fighting.
They don’t notice us approaching until we’re close. Far too close, and goddess , the way their eyes bulge in their sockets as they behold the sight of their greatest fear. The legacy of the bloodwitch incarnate. Every tale spun of our terror woven into my gown of blood, my body sticky and warm with their anguish.
Time slows, and the clanking of metal-on-metal slowly quiets as more and more heads snap to where we’ve stopped, where I take a moment to admire my feast before I indulge. A few point to me with trembling fingers, and that’s when I smile.
I don’t give them time to move on us before I spread my arms to either side of me, and with another abominable cry, my beautiful, decrepit army charges forward. I linger here, tugging on the strings binding their blood to my will, manipulating their movements as one collective consciousness.
A nefarious laugh bubbles out of my lungs as Torin’s men are swarmed with my creatures. What a disadvantage, to be alive. To feel the pain as their flesh splits beneath steel, to feel fear as their friends and loved ones brutally attack them. To witness their dilemma as they hesitate to fight back against their own men, those few seconds of vacillation their undoing as I yank on my puppets’ strings and drive their weapons forward. My monsters’ arms never tiring, their lungs never robbed of breath.
I move forward again, following my army into our battle. With a few flicks of my wrist, I send several of my creations diving to all fours and scrambling towards the soldiers, many of them now turning and rushing for the sea, willing to risk the lethal waves in place of being ripped apart by the fiends I’ve created.
When they reach their targets, I flex my hand, and the dead rupture in an explosion of limbs and blood and steel. Metal lodges into throats, limbs thwack into heads, and blood… blood coats everything .
We clear a path forward like this, carving out everything in a Baelliarah uniform. And then I reanimate them, snatching their essence and binding them to my will, another bloom in my bouquet. Every single kill thickening my power, staining my sight to the darkest red, and using their spillage to clot my heart with vengeance.
Until we finally break through the last of those that had congregated on the beach, and we meet a wall of fire. Shifters bound across the rock, tearing into men and chucking their mutilated bodies with a swing of their giant heads. There were hundreds of soldiers on the beach, but there are even more up here, most of Torin’s army having already cleaved their way through our early defenses.
I command the fire to part for me, and it tingles in my flesh as I step through it. I would recognize Sin’s power anywhere, and it bows for me at once, as if the magic mastering the flames honored my own.
That’s when I see him.
Desire crests through me painfully at the sight of the warlord atop his horse, wielding death and darkness as if he commanded shadows themselves. Adelphia’s magic may be intertwined with his, but Sin’s power has always been something entirely his own. Something as cold and dark and ruinous as his spirit, and as I watch as men lunge for him, a devastating cold hardens my bleeding heart to stone.
No one touches my Mate.
Backed with the voices of the slain, I unleash a shriek as eldritch as the very legends of the bloodwitch.