Chapter 39
Nyssa
The doorway doesn’t open so much as detonate.
The seam splits, and a thunderclap punches the breath out of me.
The corridor buckles, doors rattling in their frames like teeth in a skull.
The hum turns into a howl, and the howling becomes voices.
Hundreds. Thousands. All of them are mine and not mine.
“Company,” I croak.
They pour out of the dark like smoke given claws with shapes that wear memories like skin.
I see Cormac’s frown on a thing with too many elbows.
Taye’s prim mouth over a split mandible.
Rynna’s laugh from a throat cut ear to ear.
Training drills stitched into spidery bodies with blades for fingers. They rush us across the broken floor.
Dreven is already moving, shadows shooting out of him in ribbons that snare the first wave and shred them into ash.
Dastian hurls a crackling arc that ricochets off nothing and explodes in everything.
Voren steps in front of me, one hand raised, and the wraiths hesitate mid-lunge like someone pressed pause on a nightmare.
“They’re not alive,” he says coolly. “They’re appetites wearing your past.”
“They still look stab-able,” I reply, and oblige. My blade meets the nearest thing, and it screams like a whistle kettle. The runes on my steel flare, drinking whatever passes for its essence. It collapses into dust.
The floor drops three feet without warning.
I stagger. Dreven’s hand clamps around my bicep, anchoring me as a chasm tears open under the path like the realm has decided gravity is optional again.
“Move,” Dreven orders, all ice and command, and I do because he’s right and because the yawning dark below us is starting to whisper sweet nothings about surrender.
The open door calls me like a migraine. Beyond it, the air feels older. The tug in my gut goes from polite to feral.
“No!” I shout and try to turn, but Dreven’s grip is solid. “It’s moved.”
“What?” Dastian asks, bending reality around us in a wave of chaos that makes my stomach lurch.
“The crown. It was there, and now it’s not. It moved. It doesn’t want to be found.”
“Are you sure?” Dreven snaps as a thousand tiny birds that look like they’re made out of paper come flying at us, shredding skin.
Even theirs. They slice like razors. Tiny cuts light my skin like constellations.
I raise my forearm to protect my face and slash blindly.
Paper screams. Ink sprays. It smells like old books and salt.
“Stop hitting them,” I bark, spitting a feather of pulp off my tongue. “They’re memories on paper. They’ll keep tearing.”
“Not if they’re ash,” Dastian replies, and the air around us flashes red-gold.
“Wait—”
Too late. Red lightning races out. The birds ignite in a chain, flaring, dying, flaring again as the realm snatches the heat and turns it cold mid-spark.
They keep coming, embers remade into new paper wings.
Voren lifts his hand. The temperature drops.
Snow blossoms from nowhere, heavy, wet, and sudden.
The birds hit it, sodden and stupid, dropping like drunk confetti.
“Better,” I gasp, wiping blood from my cheek. “Thank you.”
“Always,” he murmurs.
The pull in my gut jerks left. Then right. Then stops. It feels like a heartbeat the wrong way round. I freeze, breath caught halfway to panic.
“Don’t chase it,” I say. My voice sounds thin and far. “It’s moving because we are.”
Dreven’s hand tightens on my arm. “Explain.”
“It’s testing me,” I answer, and I know it, bone-deep. “It’s feeding on pursuit. It senses movement and reacts.”
“So how the fuck do we find it if we have to stay still?” Dastian asks.
“We don’t. I do.”
Three divine glares land on me. I ignore them.
“Don’t follow. Don’t flinch. Don’t even sneeze,” I tell them, and the look on Dastian’s face says he’s absolutely going to sneeze just to be contrary. “I mean it. It’s reacting to motion. If you move, it moves. If I move wrong, it bolts.”
Dreven’s fingers flex on my arm. “Define ‘wrong’.”
“Anything that isn’t perfect,” I mutter. “So shut up.”
I ease out of his hold. The pull in my gut throbs once, like it’s listening.
Fine. Listen to this, then. I plant my feet and close my eyes.
Inhale. Exhale. I let my grip on the blade loosen a fraction.
Let the noise of the realm slide past. Paper wings.
Distant whispers. Dastian’s crackle. Voren’s frost. Dreven’s shadows pressing on my skin like a storm about to break.
My slayer training kicks in. Stealth. Stillness. Strength.
The pull eases. Then settles. It isn’t left or right anymore. It’s not ahead. It’s gone.
“Fuck,” I breathe out.
“What?” Dastian whispers. It’s like his go-to word of the day.
“It’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone where?” Dreven asks. “Moved again?”
“No. Gone. I can’t feel it.”
“I don’t like this,” Voren mutters, and then moves so swiftly, shoving me behind him, that I stumble and lose my focus.
The roar of the beast that rises in front of him, drowns out my complaint.
“Holy fuck!” I shout, but not even I can hear it as my gaze travels up, and up, and up. “What is that thing?”
No one answers me. None of them heard me over the chaos that unleashes. And not Dastian’s kind, but the kind where we are all about to die.
The thing isn’t just one beast; it’s a hundred of them, all stitched together in a shambling, roaring monument to my career.
I see the gnarled horns of the gross demon I killed only a few days ago, the fangs of a hundred or more vampires, the furry pelt of a murderous werewolf I had to put down.
It’s my personal greatest hits album of things I’ve put in the ground, and its roar is a chorus of their death rattles.
Voren doesn’t flinch. He’s a wall of ice. Dastian is already a blur of red-gold, launching himself at one of its mismatched legs with a manic grin. Dreven’s shadows lash out like whips, trying to find purchase on its shifting hide, but they slide off like water.
My blade feels like a toothpick. Standing still is how you get stepped on, but charging in is suicide. I sidestep a clumsy, club-like fist made of what looks like solidified bog-rot and try to find a weak point. There isn’t one. It’s all weak points, all mismatched parts with no coherent anatomy.
Then the beasts decide to reproduce, spawning mini beasts that surround us, and I have just entered the fight of my life.
No time to wonder about anything except staying alive.
Dreven goes right, Voren goes left, Dastian, of course, goes straight down the middle, distorting the air around us.
I hack a beast with my blade as it lunges for me, claws and teeth bared, and ready to slice me into pieces.
The blade sinks in, and the creature dissolves into a cloud of angry dust before another takes its place, a blur of borrowed fangs and familiar fury.
I parry, sidestep, thrust. It’s muscle memory, the grim dance I’ve perfected over a decade of blood and bruises.
Around me, the gods are a symphony of destruction.
Voren is a vortex of frost and spectral blades, his movements elegant and lethal.
Dastian is a human firework, laughing as he turns a cluster of spawn into glittering ash.
Dreven is everywhere, his shadows plucking beasts from the air and crushing them into oblivion.
It’s magnificent. It’s terrifying. And it’s not working.
For every one they obliterate, two more crawl out of the fractured ground, stitched together from my bloody past.
I duck as an arm, thick as a tree trunk, swings towards my head. I roll, the impact jarring my teeth as the fist whistles over my head. I scramble back, my blade slashing, cutting off limbs and spilling more blood than I’ve seen for a while.
“Nyssa!” Dastian roars, and I turn, just in time to see the main beast lurching towards me, its fist flying.
It lands, and I fly backwards and slam into a pillar of fused bone.
My head connects with the obsidian with a sickening crack, and the world dissolves into a kaleidoscope of bright, searing pain.
The ringing in my ears is a high-pitched scream.
I taste blood. My face feels like a bag of broken twigs.
Through a blurry, swimming haze, I see Dreven go from controlled fury to absolute annihilation.
His shadows erupt, no longer whips but a solid tsunami of darkness that slams into the beast, forcing it back a step.
Voren is suddenly kneeling beside me, his hand hovering over my chest. A deep, numbing cold seeps into me, chasing away the worst of the fire in my lungs. “Stay with me,” he commands, his voice a low hiss of rage. “You’re not joining my ranks yet.”
That’s all well and good that I’m not dying, but this isn’t working. Every time they destroy a part of it, it reforms, pulling another memory from my head to patch the hole. We’re not fighting a monster; we’re fighting every monster I’ve ever killed, and then some.
The realisation is like a claw around my throat. “Every slayer,” I mutter, shoving Voren’s hovering hand away and sitting up.
“What is?”
“The kills from every single slayer. Ever. We can’t win this. It has an endless resource.”
“Not endless,” he says, rising and standing over me as Dreven loses his grip on the beast and it lunges again.
Shoving myself to my feet, my head feels like a kicked-in drum, but the adrenaline is a glorious, numbing poison. “It looks pretty fucking endless from where I’m standing.”
The beast roars, a sound stitched together from a thousand dying screams. Dastian is a comet of red-gold fury, punching holes in its hide that seal over with new, snarling faces. Dreven’s shadows are a vortex, but it’s like trying to drown the ocean.
“It has a core,” Voren says, calm in the chaos. “All this power has a source. It’s being anchored by something real. Find it.”
Find it? I can barely find my own arse with both hands right now. But I close my eyes, ignoring the spinning world and the symphony of slaughter as Voren launches at the beasts trying to kill us. I push past the pain, past the roaring, past the frantic thud of my own heart.
It echoes in my ears, and I frown, distracted.