Chapter 66 #2
Ivan wiped blood from his mouth with the back of one hand and shook his head once. The sea roared behind her. Somewhere farther down the rocks, men were still dying. Even still, her words found the place the entity had already opened in him and sank there.
The Sídhe were useful for what he could strip from them. Humans, too, once he grew less particular.
Everyone knew what Osin’s corrupted power did to a body before the end. They had seen enough shades, heard enough stories, watched enough men come back wrong in pieces before they stopped coming back at all.
Elara had not.
Because Ivan had made certain she never saw it.
He had kept the shadows buried deep beneath his skin whenever she was near, forced them down until his bones ached with the effort, because he had seen enough pain in her face that he had put there himself. He could not bear to add this to it.
“There’s nothing to be done about it.”
The moment the words left him, he knew them for a mistake.
Something flashed across her face, wounded and bright enough to cut.
She shoved him with both hands flat against his chest, driving him back down against the wet stone, and used the force of it to push herself upright.
For a second, she swayed above him, trembling with cold, rage, and exhaustion, seawater dripping from her hair as the dagger burned pale gold in her hand.
“Don’t.” The word hit harder than her hands had. “Don’t reduce yourself to something already lost just because it spares you the humiliation of needing someone. There is always something to be done. You just keep deciding the answer before anyone else is allowed to fight for you.”
Sea wind whipped strands of wet hair across her face. The dagger still burned in her hand, pale gold against the black shore, and there was grief all over her now, grief and fury tangled together tight.
“I am so tired,” she said, breathing hard, “of you deciding alone what parts of yourself are worth mourning.”
A shade dropped from the hull above.
It struck the rock beside them, seawater exploding around its limbs as it lunged.
Ivan pushed himself up from the stone, caught Elara’s arm, and yanked her behind him in the same motion he stepped forward, his knife already driving upward beneath the thing’s jaw.
The blade disrupted it just long enough for the body to jerk sideways—
—and Elara buried the Wound of Light through its center.
Gold flared across the shore.
The shade came apart in strips of black smoke and dissolving flesh, scattering into the sea wind around them. Elara looked at Ivan through the fading dark of it, still furious, still shaking, everything she had not finished saying written plainly across her face.
Then more shades came over the rail.
Bodies spilled from the ship in succession, hitting the rocks and shallows with that same wrong looseness before rising together.
More shapes climbed from the surf below them, pale hands finding stone, dragging themselves upward through the wash of black water while moonlight caught on dead eyes.
The nearest turned toward them immediately with the flat certainty of arrows released from a bow.
The argument died unfinished between one breath and the next.
Ivan stepped back until his spine met Elara’s. The contact lasted only a beat, but he felt the exact moment she settled there, adjusting her footing on the slick rock to cover his left without either of them speaking.
Then the shades reached them.
Ivan fought the way he knew how—half trained instinct, half whatever the shadows had made of him.
A shade lunged high. He slipped into darkness before its claws reached him, the world folding cold around his body as he vanished through a narrow seam between torchlight and surf.
He reappeared a few strides to Elara’s right, close enough to hear her breath, his knife already carving across the shade’s throat.
Ivan disappeared and returned in bursts of cold shadow, never straying far. One moment, he was at Elara’s back, the next at her flank, then in front of her, cutting down anything that broke through, moving as one across the rocks before they grabbed onto each other and ran.
Wet stone shifted beneath their boots, blood slicked their hands, and every breath burned cold in Ivan’s lungs, but they moved with the brutal efficiency of people who had nearly died beside one another too many times to hesitate.
Elara knew where he would go before he vanished.
Ivan felt the change in her weight before she drove forward, opening space for him to slip through shadow and strike from somewhere impossible.
Behind them, the shore disappeared beneath bodies as they pushed inland with the dead following, the fighting thickening with every step they took from the waterline toward the ground where the Vredians had been holding.
Had been.
A loose ring of Vredians strained near the rise where they had tried to make their stand, shoulders jammed together, blades rising and falling in frantic, blood-slick arcs as shades pressed in from every side.
There was no room to swing properly. No room to fall.
Men stumbled and stayed upright only because the bodies around them had nowhere to go, every inch of ground churned to mud beneath seawater, black blood, and the remains of those already dragged down.
A soldier cut a shade across the face and shoved it back with a hoarse cry, only for the thing to dissolve into the nearest shadow and re-form behind him.
Ivan saw the man turn too late. Saw the shade’s hand slide through his back and out beneath his ribs as if flesh had simply forgotten how to resist. The soldier’s mouth opened; no sound came.
His sword slipped from his hand, clattered against the rock, and vanished beneath trampling feet as the shade withdrew something dark and glistening from inside him.
Ivan was already moving.
Shadow took him between one stride and the next.
He came out behind the shade and drove his knife through the base of its skull just as Elara struck from the other side, the Wound of Light sweeping through its center in a burst of gold that ripped the creature apart.
The soldier folded sideways into the crush before Ivan could catch him, swallowed at once by boots, foam, and bodies still fighting because stopping meant joining the dead beneath them.
A Legion blade caught Ivan across the ribs from the right, a short, brutal strike that cracked something deep enough to make the world flare white.
He turned with the hit, used the momentum to close the distance, and drove his elbow into the soldier’s throat hard enough to drop him.
The knife followed before the man could reach the ground.
Brief. Necessary. Ivan pressed a hand to his side for one stride, felt the damage shift beneath his palm, and filed it away with everything else that would kill him later if the battle did not do it first.
Elara took a blade across her left arm and did not stop.
Ivan stepped into the gap before anything could exploit it.
She let him without looking, pivoting around his movement as if they had practiced this in some crueler life, her dagger flashing past his shoulder while his knife took the thing reaching for her from below.
They moved with no space between them and no mercy around them, forced forward by the bodies behind and the dead before.
The Fold pulsed overhead.
White-gold light swept across the shore in a broad, merciless arc, and for one terrible second, the battlefield became impossible to misunderstand.
Dominic was fighting near the broken rocks with blood down the side of his face, one arm hanging wrong and the other still swinging.
Yoni dragged a wounded Vredian out of the surf by the back of his armor while shades crawled after them through the foam.
Bryn knelt over a man whose hands were blackened from spent power, her mouth moving in a curse or prayer as she drove a knife backward into the skull of something reaching for her.
Dario had a shade’s fingers buried in his shoulder and was still trying to tear it loose.
Avis stood ankle-deep in upturned rock she had torn from the shore itself, her arms still raised.
Tristan held Sybil against him with one arm and fought with the other, his face stripped of every careless mask he had ever worn.
Every face. Every wound. Every corpse caught in merciless illumination.
Then the light vanished.
The dark that followed felt hungry for what it had been shown.
“Hold the rise!” Dominic roared somewhere ahead, his voice cutting through the chaos with enough force to make men turn toward it even as they bled. “Do not give them the rock!”
A shade lunged through the press at Elara’s flank. Ivan caught it by the hair, drove his knife up beneath its jaw, and shoved it into the path of her dagger. Light burst between them, hot enough to turn the rain into steam.
Then Yoni screamed.
The sound tore across the shore, raw enough that even the dying seemed to hear it.
Ivan turned.
Bryn was down near the lowest rocks.
She had fallen where the surf foamed black around her knees, one hand still clenched around a bloodied knife, her healer’s satchel torn open beside her with bandages spilling into the water like pale entrails.
Shades had closed around her in a writhing knot, too many bodies packed around one small place, their hands clawing and gripping and tearing while she fought from beneath them with the kind of furious, futile strength that made Ivan’s stomach turn to iron.
“Bryn!”
Yoni’s voice broke around her name. He lunged for her, but Dominic caught him by the back of his armor and hauled him into the line as three shades surged through the opening he had made.
Yoni fought him like an animal, teeth bared, blood streaking his face as he tried to tear free.