Chapter 26 Esme #2
I scramble backward, my hands digging into the cold, wet soil.
She lunges with a precise, disabling strike aimed at the nerve cluster in my shoulder.
It’s a move I’ve seen her use to drop clearblood guards twice her size without a sound.
I throw myself to the side, the blow glancing off my arm, sending a shock of numb fire down to my fingertips.
My mind flashes with an unwanted memory: Riona, laughing, her face flushed with exertion in the training yard, demonstrating that exact strike on a practice dummy. “See?” she’d said, her voice breathless. “Clean. Efficient. No need for spectral nonsense.”
Do I have to have memories to make this even worse?
Swearing, I roll, getting my feet under me, my body screaming in protest. She’s on me again, a whirlwind of calculated violence.
A block, a parry with my forearm that leaves the bone humming.
A kick that I barely dodge. Every move is familiar.
Every feint is one we practiced for hours until it was muscle memory.
It’s almost like fighting my own reflection, but one that feels no pain.
I feint left, then dive right, my fingers closing around the cold leather of my sword’s hilt. I feel a searing pain in my calf as her foot connects, but I have my blade. I spin around, bringing the sword up into a defensive posture, my breath coming in heavy gasps.
She stops, her head tilting slightly as she assesses the weapon.
The gesture is so perfectly her—analytical, calm, processing the new variable.
The scar on her jaw is a pale, jagged line in the moonlight, a permanent reminder of the mission where I almost lost her for real.
I remember stitching that wound myself in a dirty back alley, our hands shaking, her blood warm on my fingers as she tried to joke about getting a matching one on the other side.
She comes at me again, and this time there is a blade in her hand, a short, vicious combat knife that appears from a sheath on her thigh.
The clash of our steel rings out in the dead forest, like a terrible, intimate music.
We were the best sparring partners in our class because we moved in sync, we could anticipate each other’s thoughts.
Now, that same synergy is a trap. She knows where I’m going to strike before I do. I know the opening she’s looking for.
I create it, a deliberate mistake in my form that I know she’s trained to exploit. She takes it, lunging forward, her knife aimed for my ribs. At the last second, I pivot into her, trapping her knife-arm against my body.
“I’m sorry, Ri,” I can’t help whispering, as I push the blade through her.
Her empty eyes watch me, unblinking, as fine, pale light begins to seep from the wound. Her body goes rigid and her left hand lifts slowly, as if to touch my face. For a horrifying instant, I think I see a flicker of recognition, of my friend, trapped inside.
But her fingers just graze my cheek, cold as stone, before she dissolves.
Yeah… That’s going to need therapy.
I can’t help the dry, heaving sob that escapes me, a sound that’s swallowed by the oppressive silence. Riona’s dust settles around me, coating my clothes, my skin… This is… fine.
A sound cuts through the trees. A slow, deliberate scrape of a boot on stone. I look up, wiping the blur from my eyes.
No, not you bastards. Again.
Connor stands there, that same empty grin on his face.
Beside him, Isander materializes from the shadows.
And between them, the silver dust on the ground begins to swirl, to rise, to knit itself back together.
It re-forms, solidifying into a familiar shape, the curly brown hair, the scar on the jaw. Riona.
Ugh.
My mind scrambles for an option that doesn’t involve being hunted by an ever-growing collection of my dead friends. All I was told to do was survive. And in every game, there’s always a way to twist the rules. So why should this one be any different?
I close my eyes, drawing on the deepest, quietest part of my power. I don’t want to expend much magical energy, but now it feels justified. I pull the shadows from the trees, from the ground, from the starless sky, and wrap them around myself as a cloak.
When I open my eyes, the world is muted, gray. Then I turn and run, my footfalls silenced by the magic… a fugitive in a nightmare of my own coven’s making.
I keep running until my lungs are on fire.
The forest doesn’t thin out, doesn’t change.
It just keeps going. Twenty-two more hours of this.
Twenty-two hours of running, hiding, and murdering people I know.
Thrilling itinerary. And all to satisfy the whims of some long-dead ancestor who’s probably so twisted and insane he doesn’t even care if we live or die…
At least maybe next time I’ll get acquaintances instead of friends. I’ll even take people I don’t like. I’m flexible.
Anees would be fine. Or Rothmere. Or that Raelle bitch…
Dayn’s still technically on the roster, but somehow he’s slipped a few places down the list. Progress for him, I guess.
An hourly chime, a low, soul-deep thrum, drifts through the forest. Suddenly the trees around me are melting like wax, the ground hardening into cracked cobblestone.
I’m no longer in a forest. I’m in a ruined city, the skeletons of stone buildings clawing at a sky the color of a fresh bruise. The air is cold, smelling of dust and old rot.
I don’t have time to catch my breath. They are already here…
this time, not constructs of people I know, but things of pure nightmare.
Tall, mostly spindly demons with too many joints and skin like stretched leather, their mouths filled with needle-thin teeth.
They screech, a sound that scrapes at the inside of my skull.
Great. So you do mix it up. Just with hell monsters. Points at least for trying something new.
They swarm me. My exhaustion feels real, but I move, my body like a machine of pure muscle memory. I duck, weave, and slash. My blade becomes a blur of silver, severing limbs, cleaving heads. Black ichor splatters across my face and clothes, hot and acrid. Delicious.
They are fast, but at least they’re mindless and unfamiliar.
One of them gets a lucky shot, its claws raking across my ribs. Pain, white-hot and sharp, lances through my side. I grunt, spin, and drive my sword through its chest. It dissolves into dust. I kill the final one, my blade shearing it in half at the waist. It shrieks and vanishes.
I stand there, panting, leaning on my sword as my vision swims. The pain in my side is a fierce, rhythmic pulse.
I look down at the dissipating clouds of black dust. One of them, I realize with a jolt, held its shape for a fraction of a second longer than the others.
Long enough for me to see a flash of pale hair, of sharp, familiar features frozen in a silent snarl. Chad.
Shit. Sorry, man. But I swear they’re taking creative liberties here, because you don’t look like that in your demon form. You’re half-demon, yes, but also a different breed. Not sure which; I’m no demonology expert.
My stomach twists all the same. I stare at the empty space where his momentary corpse lay, my knuckles white on my sword hilt. Another face to add to the collection. I shove the feeling down, seal it away in the cold box I keep everything in. No room for this now. I have to move.
I push off my sword, straightening with a pained hiss, and turn to find a place to hide before the next wave comes.
And he is there.
Leaning against the crumbling archway of a ruined cathedral, barely ten feet away. Dayn.