Chapter 58 A Gift
A Gift
A gift, given with open hands as the lirai were shown in ancient codices and mosaics.
A Dreamer’s force poured into him like hot cocoa into a thick china mug, warmth flooding his skin and running through the marrow-canals of heavy, reinforced bones.
Liv lay, small and glowing and terribly vulnerable, her eyes alive with far more than a mere echo of the Flame.
She stared at him; he longed to meet her gaze, longed to glance down and mouth you’re all right, longed to let her know that her touch was welcome, filling all the broken and battered places in his body with light, the scorched wasteland of his mind with deep calm.
But he had the bastard pinned, and even the sarnaki digging its little toy into his back could wait.
He stabbed once more, driving a second crystalline blade deep.
The thing inside his teacher, his friend, his Father writhed, attempting to worm-twist away.
He denied it—the rest of the beasts might descend upon him and tear him to pieces, but dispensing with this threat would give the lirai time to slide free of the altar into a jumble of bones and husks rotting on the other side, where scavengers would return between sacrifices to crunch and lick.
And maybe, just possibly, his death would give her the slimmest chance of getting away.
He felt her attention shift for a tiny gap in time, a slice of a mortal second.
It was enough. The thing that had been Ignatius howled with glee and brought the knife down.
So Erik did the only thing he could. He drove himself backward onto the sarnaki’s spear, dragging Ignatius with him, and the black-bladed knife sank into the altar’s surface as the spear-point shivered, sank deeper, and found Erik’s quaking, hammering heart.