Chapter 68 #4
When I tried to turn and run, a sharp pain tore through my back and the beast immediately threw its body onto mine, slamming us both to the ground.
I heard my femur crack as the weight nearly crushed me.
Kiara screamed even louder to draw its attention away from me, but the beast still turned its gaping jaws toward me.
Its jaws came at me wide open and, without thinking, I yanked the bow from my back and jammed it between its teeth.
It pinned me to the ground, a heavy paw on my chest, claws piercing my breasts.
Then, with a powerful wrench, it ripped the bow free while holding me down.
The bow flew away and this time I knew it was the end—I threw my arm in front of my face in one last desperate attempt to survive.
I felt the agonizing pain of its jaws clamping down.
Teeth sank into my flesh, bones snapped like dry twigs, and pain seared through me like hellfire.
In a panic, I grabbed the dagger embedded in its eye with my right hand, drew a deep breath and held it, reaching into the depths of my bones for every last remnant of energy in my blood.
I exhaled and a small light writhed inside me.
I poured every ounce of remaining power into the blade, leaving it faintly reddened.
It was all I had, and it would leave me vulnerable, but…
It wasn't enough.
I drove the dagger through the side of its skull just as the beast wrenched my forearm. I screamed—the dagger slid in quick and silent, but my arm made a horrendous sound as it was ripped away at the elbow. Bones shattered, muscles tore, and what remained was a bloody stump.
I fell back into the snow, screaming in pain.
My arm spurted incandescent blood, soaking my clothes, and there was nothing I could do—the power had vanished.
The beast collapsed on its side, howling, while the dagger hissed and smoked, filling the air with the stench of burnt flesh.
It was still alive, though—blind and unable to rise.
I dragged myself toward it with my one remaining arm.
My stump wouldn't heal; it was coated in saliva.
Only then did I realize the fluid contained some kind of poison—it burned like salt in the wound.
Struggling, I hauled myself onto the carniceal's body and straddled it. The beast tried to fight back, but I grabbed the dagger's handle and drove it into its throat. It yelped and its body shuddered.
“Enough!” I screamed at the monster. It thrashed and I drove the dagger into its thick hide, like cutting through a rubber tire.
“You think you can come and take what's mine?”
I tightened my grip on the dagger. If I kept cutting, eventually the neck would come free from the body. I prayed to the Gods that would be enough to keep it down. Even if it wasn't, I would kill this thing a million times over before it touched Kiara again.
The chimera's chest rose and fell in an unsteady rhythm as it lay in a pool of its own blood.
“You think you can steal from me again?”
I yanked out the dagger and plunged it into the rotten flesh, again and again.
I kept sawing for what felt like forever—cutting through hide, muscle, tendons like a butcher.
An artery spurted a cold jet of putrid blood onto my face, and even that didn't make me flinch, not even when the blade scraped bone with an agonizing screech.
I was so lost in my hatred that I didn't react to anything.
But the more I cut, the less the blade glowed.
The black blood tasted like ashes on my tongue, but I didn't care.
I was tired—the kind of bone-deep exhaustion that made every part of me ache and feel like lead—but I kept going frantically, as if it were the only thing my feeble body knew how to do.
The beast's neck already hung loose, cut halfway through, and my fingers were stiff from cold and effort, but the blade was losing power.
Just when I thought I might finally sever it completely, the carniceal began thrashing beneath me.
With a violent jerk, the beast threw me off, and without my other arm to catch myself, I collapsed helplessly beside it.
It growled, the blade still embedded in its eye, its neck savagely torn open, and then it rose over me.
I shielded my face with my good arm. I had nothing left.
The beast descended on me—three rows of teeth and supernatural, deadly force. My heart stuttered toward its final beat.
In one last act of defiance, I remembered the red star on my belt—the one I'd taken from Adele's hands.
In seconds, I pulled out the small device, soaked in my incandescent blood.
A sliver of hope sparked in my chest when I saw the latent power in that blood.
As the beast's jaws gaped wide over my face, I found the slippery trigger and shoved the device deep into its mouth.
The red star exploded in its throat, finishing what my blade couldn't—severing the rest of the neck. The blazing blood, mixed with the bright ammunition, consumed flesh and bone, and then the demonic skull exploded above me.
The ashes finally settled over my body, and with them, something round fell onto my chest.