Chapter 3
Nyssa
My mouth falls open. “Goddess?”
“Hmm,” he says, moving closer, twirling something between his fingers, almost obsessively.
“Whoa,” I say, lifting the knife higher. “Stay right there.”
Stay right there? What the fuck? Stay right there while I what? Converse with you and not kill you?
His smirk widens, crinkling the corners of his silver eyes.
“I’m not here to hurt you.” He stops, a respectable distance away, but the space between us still crackles with an energy that makes my teeth ache.
He flips the thing in his hand—a silver coin, ancient and worn—and catches it without looking. “Trying to kill me would be a mistake.”
My grip on the blade is so tight that my knuckles are white.
I’m exhausted, bruised, and my brain feels like it’s been sloshed around in my skull.
I am in no mood for cryptic warnings from a supernatural being dressed for a GQ photoshoot.
“And letting you live isn’t? And I’d do more than try, arsehole.
I’d do it so hard, your head would spin. ”
His gaze turns from amused to heated. “Do it so hard,” he murmurs.
My cheeks practically set on fire as I realise what I said, or more like how he took what I said and made it sexual. Typical guy. At least, typical of the guys I know.
Clearing my throat, I glare at him. “What do you know about that bitch? Talk and then I’ll kill you.”
He laughs. It’s a soft chuckle that has darkness seeped into every beat. “Still with the killing.”
“It’s what I do. I kill monsters.”
“Who says I’m a monster?”
“You look like one and lurk around in graveyards after the apocalypse has just been averted, making snappy comments. Screams evil to me.”
“Ah, the apocalypse,” he says. “You’d better make sure that stays averted. Close the hole, slayer, before more creatures slither out of it that you will have to kill before they eat your face.”
“Close the hole?” I ask, moving a step closer, despite the warning signs to keep back. “How?”
He smiles again and turns on his heel, twiddling with the coin again. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” He stalks off and then vanishes. No puff of smoke, no magic, just simply walks off into nothingness.
“Great,” I mutter, lowering my weapon. “Close the fucking hole, slayer, but I’m not telling you how to do it,” I add, using a mocking tone that sounds absolutely nothing like his honey over melted chocolate voice.
A dark chuckle echoes around the graveyard, alerting me to the fact that he heard me.
I kick a loose stone, sending it skittering into the darkness. “Arsehole,” I mutter for good measure. My head is pounding, my ribs feel like they’ve been used for xylophone practice, and now I’ve got homework from a cryptic hot monster of an unknown variety.
Irritating doesn’t cover it.
There’s no point finishing my patrol now.
Not with an open gateway to who-knows-where sitting in the middle of the cemetery.
Turning on my heel, I trudge back towards the Blackfen crypt, my muddy trainers squelching a miserable rhythm on the wet grass.
The fog clings to me, cold and damp, a miserable shroud for a miserable night.
Pushing open the crypt door, I scan the darkness, relieved to find it still empty of goddesses.
The fissure in the ground is still a gaping maw, but as I move further into the crypt, the runes on my blade light up again. This has never happened before tonight. Somehow, they recognise what this shitshow is.
Before I can form another thought, the blade shakes in my hand with a violent tremor, like a thing possessed.
With a force that nearly makes me piss myself, it yanks my right hand over my left wrist, the cold steel pressing against the flesh peeking out from the sleeve of my hoodie.
I swallow carefully, my throat clicking in the silence.
“Blood?” I murmur, voice barely a whisper in the dank crypt air.
It answers me with a quick slash downwards, and a sharp, stinging pain bites into my skin, hot and immediate.
“Fuck!” I hiss, more out of surprise than anything else.
My blood, crimson-black in the wavering torchlight, wells up in fat beads before dripping from the fresh wound, falling in slow-motion droplets into the yawning blackness of the fissure.
The moment the first drop hits, the fissure screams. It’s not an audible sound, but a high-pitched vibration that rattles my bones and makes the ancient dust on the sarcophagi dance like miniature sandstorms. The jagged edges of the crack glow with a violent electric-blue light, pulling together like a wound being stitched by an invisible needle threading reality back together.
My blade hums in my hand, the runes etched into the metal glowing so blindingly bright they sear my retinas, leaving ghost images when I blink.
It’s drawing something from me, more than just blood.
It’s siphoning my essence. A wave of bone-deep exhaustion hits me so hard my knees buckle like wet cardboard, and I have to brace myself against the cold stone wall to stay upright.
I grit my teeth until my jaw aches, holding my wrist steady over the closing tear in reality, letting my lifeforce feed whatever dark, ancient magic this is, feeling it drain me like a parasite.
With a final, deafening crack that sounds like the two worlds colliding, the stone floor seals itself.
The light vanishes as if someone flipped a switch. The humming stops mid-note.
I’m left in the oppressive silence of the crypt, clutching my bleeding arm. The torch beam trembles in my hand. The floor is seamless, just old, dusty stone as if nothing had ever happened.
Inhaling deeply, I slowly exhale as the realisation hits me that I just used my blood, my mortal, yet slightly not quite all human blood, to close a hole in the ground that spat out a goddess after some madman’s ravings summoned her.
Why do I get the feeling this, along with the hot monster, is about to come back and bite me on my arse, good and proper?