Chapter Twenty-One #2
He felt the dome weakening and cursed. He could save one.
Maybe. Even that was a gamble. Pouring his mental focus into the jar, he searched for her—Imri—as the sensation of a thousand desperate hands clawing at his metaphorical tunic, his skin, his arms, his legs struck his mind.
Countless voices and screams rattled his brain.
He shoved them aside, poor bastards they were, and felt for Imri’s soul amongst the masses.
There. He would recognize that sweet warmth anywhere. He called to her and, with the power of the Cat’s Eye, severed her arcane lock, separating her soul from the wriggling mass of the others.
A flash of guilt gutted him. Sikras risked losing her again if he took even the millisecond necessary to search for Vessik’s soul in the horde.
There just wasn’t enough time.
When the gentle heat of Imri’s soul filled his palm, Sikras blinked mind and spirit into Enos.
The off-blue blur of Enos’s landscape appeared in an instant, and Death stood before him, hand outstretched in anticipation.
Funny. Sikras’s physical body remained in Siaphara’s mortal plane, yet his palm still felt cold when Imri’s soul abandoned it to travel into Death’s waiting hold.
Every ounce of him craved to say something, any number of the practiced speeches he had rehearsed throughout the last four years. All the things he wanted to say to her and never got to. All the apologies he owed her. But there wasn’t even time for goodbyes.
Death cradled the soul against her chest. “She’s safe. You must go back. Hurry.”
The strain in Death’s tone implied concern. The illusion of Sikras’s body smirked. “If I didn't know any better, I’d say you were worried about”—Death grasped his face and shoved him backward, then his mind and soul reentered his physical body—“me.”
Shit. He tasted blood. He no longer held the soul jar. The rippling translucent waves of his protective dome were gone. And a hand was definitely wedged into his spine.
From behind him, Ithusa leaned in, her breath hot, as she whispered in his ear, “Don’t worry. I went around all the internal organs so you need only languish in pain instead of death. I need you to hold fast to those precious few lives of yours.”
He grunted when she ripped her claws from him. The agony dulled his movements when he spun to cast, but she caught his wrist in one hand and broke one of his fingers with the other.
Giving her the satisfaction of a scream did not rank high on Sikras’s to-do list, but an agonizing groan filtered through clenched teeth as he fell to his knees.
Ithusa smirked, grabbed another finger, and bent it backward until it, too, snapped.
“It’ll take a long time for those bones to heal before you can cast again,” she purred, leaning down to face him.
“Lucky you. You’ll have plenty of time to consider my offer.
Until then”—she booped his nose with her claw—“you can be my little plaything.”
His body lurched from the discomfort. Broken bones and puncture wounds, he didn’t know which hurt worse. But if he died again, the Catseye would heal him. He could wait it out until one of his hours passed. Surely, he was nearing the end of one. Or ...
Sikras’s focus fell to the dagger in his boot. He could take a cue from his old pal Vessik. All he needed to do was—
He snatched the dagger but too slowly to slit his throat. Ithusa caught his hand and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth in a chastising manner.
“Naughty human. That’s earned you another broken finger.” She ripped the blade from his hand, tossed it into the snow, and snapped his ring finger backward.
Despite his best efforts, Sikras screamed.
“I feel an emptiness in my jar.” Ithusa swung the chain in a circle. “You got your hands on your little cleric’s soul, didn’t you? A shame. But I still feel Vessik rattling around in here. The poor thing’s life was so hard. Don't you think he deserves eternal rest?”
Panting, rasping, Sikras said nothing.
“Speak, or I will make you speak.” A fourth finger broke under her grasp. “You must be considering my deal. So, tell me”—she stroked the side of his face—“what say you?”
Chest heaving, Sikras lifted his head. Between the uncontrollable muscle spasms in his face, he hoped he managed a convincing smirk. “I say”—he raised a quaking middle finger on his unbroken hand—“you missed one.”
“Oh, dear.” Ithusa shoved him backward and straightened her posture. “I expect those kinds of manners in Chthonia but not up here. If it’s Chthonian behavior you wish to emulate, let me give you a taste of what we do to those who misbehave.”
As she raised her hand, Sikras stared, unflinching, waiting for that arm to strike.
Instead, a flash of pink tore the arm from Ithusa’s torso, the force dragging the rest of her body to the ground.
A flurry of snow and blood exploded into the air as the colliding bodies carved a line into the icy powder.
They tangled, twisted, Ithusa’s shrieks emitting between assaults as—Helspira?
... yes, Helspira—sank her fangs into Ithusa’s neck and jerked her head backward to peel away flesh and muscle, like red ribbons.
Ithusa screamed, tried to kick Helspira off, but it only seemed to make her latch tighter. In the turmoil of rolling bodies, Helspira ended up on top, Ithusa pinned between her thighs.
Helspira’s fingers seized Ithusa’s hair, and she smashed her head into a nearby boulder.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
Blood burst outward like fireworks with each slam. Ithusa wailed, the sound garbled, gagged by bubbling body fluids, as she grabbed Helspira’s face in desperation with the only hand she had left.
It was a move that, ironically, cost her a finger.
One sharp, sudden movement, and Helspira bit down to detach the long, jagged digit at the knuckle with a crunch. She spit the severed finger into her hand and—jab, jab, jab—utilized the sharp claw as a dagger, puncturing Ithusa’s eye, her cheek, her neck.
One-eyed, one-armed, dripping in blood, Ithusa bucked Helspira from her stomach and scrambled to her feet, only to be dragged back down when Helspira’s claws caught the paper-thin flesh of her wing.
She moved so fast that it was hard to keep up, hard to process, even without four broken fingers and a giant hole in his back. Sikras gawked as Helspira stretched out Ithusa’s wing. With one forceful kick where the humerus met the blade of the scapula, a sickening snap came.
Ithusa shrieked, back arching, as Helspira freed a war cry and ripped the broken wing from where it dangled by loose skin, exposing veins, tissue, and the serrated edge of the broken humerus.
Gasping, Ithusa spun without a chance to react, before Helspira turned the wing into a weapon, repositioning the barbed bone shard, and speared it into Ithusa’s torso.
Pinned to a rock, Ithusa coughed up a mouthful of blood, a one-winged, half-blind mass of viscera and tissue. She glimpsed the soul jar still clutched in the fingers of her severed arm and glowered down the length of the wing that pinned her. “A demon? Outside of Chthonia? Impossible.”
With her organic pupil nothing but a pinprick, Helspira hissed, looking more monster than mortal.
Sikras held his breath. Had she entered a feral state? He commanded his fingers to move, bend, anything, but he was incapable. For all the power of the Cat’s Eye, a caster was nothing without his hands. Frantic, he searched the snow for the discarded dagger.
Helspira released a deafening screech, the muscles in her arms straining. She shoved the wing-turned-spear deeper. “Touch him again, and I’ll reduce you to a torso, monster.”
Ithusa writhed against the makeshift weapon, her lone arm gripping her severed wing. “I am no more monstrous than anyone trying to live. I need souls to survive. I have lived among demons,” she coughed out, her words like hissing steam. “I’ve seen how your kind hungers. You and I are no different.”
“We’re nothing alike,” Helspira retorted, shoulders tensing. “You know what it is to feed your hunger. You have no idea what it’s like to starve it.”
Despite the obvious pain it caused her, Ithusa leaned forward to sink the bone deeper into her body. “You stabbed me with a piece of my own skeleton, child. You entered a feral state. Your hunger seems quite sated to me.”
“You think this is feral? I’m just protecting what’s mine. I assure you”—Helspira snarled as she jostled the wing to burrow it farther—“this is me holding back.”
Her confession nearly paralyzed Sikras’s efforts.
Gone gods, if that was Helspira holding back, he shuddered to imagine her feral state.
He searched in vain for the dagger hiding in the snow.
If only he could help her. Join her. If his damnable body had the good decency to just bleed out and die already.
“I am not without mercy.” Helspira ripped out the wing and tossed it aside.
“I know your kind need souls to live. I could no sooner change you than demand a wolf survive off vegetation. But Nyllmas is under our protection. Free the souls you’ve captured and leave this place. If you return, we will kill you.”
Sikras snapped his head toward Ithusa and Helspira.
He squinted, focus blurring, as he scoured the diavolos’s face for a reaction.
Would she free the remaining souls? He doubted it.
But knowing how hard Helspira fought to embody compassion and mercy despite her lineage, he could never, would never demand she abandon her ethics.
He would never demand anything of her. He loved her.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t kill Ithusa. If he could just find that damned dagger.
With her gaze on Helspira, Ithusa inched toward her severed arm. “I agree to your terms,” she said, caution lining her voice. “I will free the souls of those from Nyllmas.”
Lies. He was sure of it. Sikras was fluent in deceit.
Excitement sizzled through him when the dagger’s stiff handle struck the palm of his one functioning hand.
He lifted it from the snow just as Ithusa stooped to retrieve her soul jar.
The two locked in eye contact, a wordless exchange between them.
Ithusa craved a fight. That much was certain. Violence danced across the only pupil she had left. But it would take time for her to consume enough souls to heal from the grievous injuries which Helspira had inflicted upon her.
It would take roughly the same amount of time for Sikras to ram his blade through his ear, die, and crawl back from Enos into a fresh, unhindered body.
Therein lied the gamble. She had many souls left in her jar to feed off, to fuel her, but was it enough to fight off the Cat’s Eye and a demon? Did she even want to risk fighting Sikras when it was so clear that he would fight to the death, and she needed him alive for her plan?
“Well?” Helspira’s voice ended the silence. “Go on. Free them.”
Bloody and beaten, Ithusa raised her chin. She sent Sikras a final damning stare and murmured something in Chthonian. Around her, a circle of flames bloomed ten feet tall, reaching skyward and melting a ring of snow. When the flames vanished, so too did Ithusa.