Chapter 30 Hector #2
I fell to my knees. The world stilled. I gazed up at Arwyn’s charred corpse, no longer able to make out any distinguishing features. The fire continued to blaze until his remains peeled away in ash… until he was nothing but ruin.
“Hector,” Romy screamed for me, but I didn’t have it in me to look.
I couldn’t take my eyes from Arwyn’s corpse, as if any second the illusion would drop, and he would come back to tell me everything was alright.
But it wasn’t alright. Nothing about this was.
“Hector—help.”
I flinched as the third pyre suddenly blazed hot with fire beside Arwyn’s place of death. My hand lifted over my tear-filled eyes, shielding the light until I saw the person strapped inside the new fire.
Verena cocked her head back against the stake and screamed to the darkened sky. Her agony was a song to my soul, not pleasant nor enjoyable, but damning. I spun back, the world slow around me, my heart beating hard in my ears.
What had just happened?
Romy and Kai faced off a thinner crowd of undead. They clawed out of my sinkhole, pawing at the earth as they fought to get themselves free. One of them lay on the ground… actually dead. But beside it was a charred piece of earth.
I tried to move, but my body couldn’t respond. Perhaps it just didn’t want to.
I watched as a zombie clawed for Kai’s leg. His eyes flashed bright, the wind screeched as Kai commanded it, and then he too was swallowed by fire. Romy tried to reach for him, but it was pointless. In a blast of heat, Kai was gone, and the fourth pyre exploded in flame.
One by one, we were failing.
One by one, Bahmet was winning.
The demon was pulling the strings, forcing us to use old magic and thus fail the challenge.
Only Romy was left.
“Don’t. Use. It.” I tried but every word came out harsh, as if the hands of grief around my throat grew tighter and tighter. “It’s what… Bahmet wants. You can’t give in.”
There was only so much Romy’s fists and booted kicks could achieve. In the end, the dead clambered over her. Our gazes fixed together, a grimace fixed across her expression.
It was the look of a woman who wouldn’t go down without taking a few with her.
Peace…I guess that was what I could call it. It flooded over Romy just before her eyes flashed with the use of magic. The earth shuddered, a new crack forming out from beneath her splayed hand.
The four bodies atop her were thrust backwards as demonic fire flooded over her skin. Romy closed her glowing eyes, and then she was taken too. Just like Arwyn, Verena and Kai. Stolen away by Bahmet, transported onto a pyre and set ablaze.
I turned away, gagging on a sob, to find the fifth pyre bright with ruby flames. The night sang with the symphony of my friends as they burned, and the silence of the man I loved.
Just like that, they were all gone.
And I was alone.
“Not alone, my friend.” Emon coiled tighter, attempting to offer me some form of comfort. “For I am here.”
I looked down, catching the reflection of fire as it glinted off of Emon’s scales. The demon looked up at me.
“I’m scared,” I admitted, knowing the undead army was gathering again, and I would soon face my end.
“Do not be frightened of what you cannot control, Hector Briar. You are smart, if only you apply yourself. Surely you have worked out what Bahmet’s deception has been?”
I didn’t have the energy to reply. I bowed my head, struggling to breathe in without inhaling the scent of my loved ones’ burned flesh.
“If to fail means to burn, then why only set up six pyres, when far more contenders were placed into the trial?”
Emon’s question sparked something in me. An alertness that I didn’t think myself ever capable of again.
“Think, Hector. And think quickly.”
“I’m fucking thinking!” I bellowed, rage scalding my throat.
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
I couldn’t hold on to a single clear thought.
Not as Kai and Romy continued to plead for help, not when Verena fell into the same silence that had captured Arwyn.
Fire consumed me in different ways. It burned through my mind, eating up every possible thread of sense until I was left hunched over the ground.
“You must burn, Hector. For you are a witch. These are the Witch Trials, are they not? So burn. Burn like many have before you. Burn, so you can be freed.”
Verena, Romy and Kai had returned to the flames when they used their magic.
When I had used mine, it was Arwyn who suffered my fate.
Why… why… why…why.
One pyre was left.
“Burn. Hector. Now.”
I lifted a palm up, pictured the element I wanted until a small bud danced on my hand. In the seconds that passed, I waited for my punishment to come. But my fate did not end the same as those who had gone silent on their pyres.
“I can’t.” I could barely breathe. “Bahmet isn’t punishing me. It’s not fucking working!”
Something shifted out the corner of my eye. It could’ve been one of Bahmet’s undead, but I didn’t care. I had nothing left in me to give. What was the point in fighting against Bahmet when all he wanted to do was play with me. I was never going to win, not on the game board of a demon’s own making.
Emon hissed, loosening his grip on my arm and flinging himself in the direction of the movement. I followed to find a man, wide-eyed and very human, fumbling with something in his hands. I narrowed my gaze, trying to make out what it was.
“Burn. Burn. Burn,” Emon was screeching in my mind, words that I could barely understand. The serpent coiled, and then sprung himself into the air just as the human succeeded in what he was doing.
He was holding matches. One had been struck. Where he had found them was beyond me, but that didn’t matter.
“It worked for Father Tomin,” the Hunter said. “Saw it with my own eyes. He just…”
The Hunter couldn’t finish because he’d lifted the match to his skin and erupted in blessed fire.
“Buurrrrrnnn!” Emon cried out, his black-scaled body passing through a puff of smoke as the Hunter’s body was transported to the sixth and final pyre.
The darkness laughed again.
Bahmet’s enjoyment was a palpable thing.
I watched as the box of matches withered away to ash on the ground. As the ash floated upwards, it formed into a shape of shadow, which solidified into a monster.
Horns, the face of a goat set upon the shoulders of a broad man in a perfectly tailored suit.
Bahmet had come to congratulate me for losing, and claim my soul. He was clapping, the demon’s glee evident in every ounce of his body.
Emon slithered across the ground, narrowly missing the polished boot that stamped down over him. Our fear was shared. I scooped my familiar up, not hesitating as the tight coil of scales wrapped back around my wrist.
“You lied,” I spat at the demon lord. “You warned us not to use our magic.”
Mist burst out of Bahmet’s jaw as he emitted another throaty laugh.
“Hector Briar, I am surprised to be announcing this to you so early, as I expected you to last a little longer. But, as you likely understand, you have failed The Burning. In turn you have failed the Witch Trials, and for that you will be—”
I didn’t let Bahmet finish.
I spun on my heel, and threw myself into the burning pyres. If using the old magic wasn’t going to set me on fire, then I would cast myself into the demonic flames and force them to take me.
It must’ve been the right choice, because Bahmet’s panicked yell cut the night. The noise was a symphony of refusal, shock and fury. And it fuelled me.
I sunk my nails into the final Hunter’s burning flesh, anchoring myself to him, as we both burned alive.
All that existed was pain. Sheer and agonising hurt overcame me. I knew, beyond the adrenaline and desperation flooding my body, that the feeling wasn’t natural.
The demon lord wanted me to suffer.
The demon lord wanted me to beg to be saved.
As my skin blistered, and my organs shut down, I understood what desperation would drive a person to make a deal with a demon.
How Eleanor Letcombe used her dying breath to forever force witches and Bahmet to be joined.
I got it now. Because as the fire continued to eat away at me, I was prepared to give everything away…
prepared to sell my soul to the devil just to scorn the person who put me in this position.
“Hector Briar, I should not like those who cheat,” came a voice from beyond my dying, suffering body.
I pictured him in my mind, Bahmet, framed by his unholy fire as it devoured me, the warm light glinting off the velvet sheen of his black suit.
“However, I cannot help but admire it. This once I will allow it. Until the next time you fail…and you will be mine.”