Chapter 40
Nyssa
It amplifies, getting louder and louder.
“Mine,” I murmur. It’s my heartbeat, echoing through the beasts. All of them are powered by me.
By the First Slayers.
“Guys,” I shout, but a fist to my mouth makes me choke on my own blood. My eyes fly open to see that one of the mini beasts has slipped past the gods to reach me.
Pain explodes across my face. My head snaps back, and the world goes white for a second.
The coppery taste of blood floods my mouth.
My blade is already moving by instinct. It takes over, a clean arc that severs the beast’s arm at the elbow before it can swing again.
It shrieks, a sound that grates on my teeth, and dissolves into dust that smells like my own sweat and fear.
“Nyssa!” Dreven’s roar is pure annihilation. A tidal wave of shadow slams into the space where the beast was, obliterating two more that are scuttling towards me.
I spit a mouthful of blood onto the cracked stone.
“It’s me,” I gasp, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
But they can’t hear me over the din of battle.
It’s getting worse. More mini beasts are forming around us, more creatures that I have never seen before flood the chamber, surrounding us. There is no time to think, only fight.
I go into a thrall, my movements mechanical as I hack away.
My arm moves. My feet follow. Parry, thrust, pivot.
Another beast dissolves. The movements are automatic, a dance drilled into my muscles by a decade of death.
But it’s not enough. For every one I cut down, another shambles forward.
We are being pushed back; they are herding us, surrounding us.
My heartbeat pounds in my ears, a frantic, desperate rhythm.
Thump-thump.
A beast lunges.
Thump-thump.
Another one reforms from the dust. It’s a war drum, and I’m the one beating it.
“Stop!” I scream, even as I mechanically fight my way through the stream of beasts, but the word is swallowed by a crackle of chaos as Dastian vaporises another wave of spawn. They don’t get it. They’re gods; their solution to everything is overwhelming force.
But there’s only one way out of this.
It’s strange how quickly I come to terms with it. I always thought I’d fight until the bitter end, but there is no bitter end this time.
There is only time.
There is only the power of the First Slayers. The group of young women who were beholden to the gods and gave up everything to sever their tie and imprison them. They forced all of their power into one girl. One slayer.
A power that would be passed down generation by generation, family to family, blood to blood. My aunt died and gave me this power when I was sixteen. Still just a girl whose parents couldn’t handle it.
If you take up the power of the slayer, we will leave, Nyssa. We won’t stand by and watch you die.
Like I had a choice. They didn’t get it. They never did.
“Nyssa!” Dastian throws out a warning as I stop fighting.
“Voren,” I say quietly.
I don’t need to raise my voice. He hears me this time.
There is power in my voice that wasn’t there before.
He turns to me, his gaze fixed on mine.
“It’s me,” I say.
“What is you?” he asks, and time seems to stand still around us. Or maybe that’s the wall of wraiths that are pressing in, surrounding us.
“I’m powering the beast. There is only one way to stop it.” I give him a sad smile.
His pale blue eyes narrow with fury, but he understands. Of course he does. He’s the God of Wraiths; he speaks the language of endings fluently.
“No,” Voren states, the word a crack of frost in the chaotic air. The wall of wraiths he summoned shimmers, faltering for a heartbeat.
The beast takes advantage, its roar shaking the foundations of the ruin.
“My power is the anchor,” I say, my voice flat, devoid of the emotion churning in my gut. “My life force. You can’t kill an idea, but you can kill the person having it.” It’s slayer maths. Simple. Brutal.
I take his hand and place it on my chest over my heart.
“Nyssa, no,” he says, a frantic anger growing in his gaze. “We will find another way.”
“There is no other way. I trust you.”
Those three words ring out, drawing Dreven and Dastian’s attention.
“Nyssa?” Dreven asks, blasting another beast to hell.
“Don’t ask me to kill you,” he says.
“Do it. You’re the only one who can.”
“This is not how you die.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I swore I would protect you.” His gaze locks onto mine, pouring every ounce of whatever it is he feels for me into it. Lust, desire, fury, possessiveness. It’s all there for me to see, but something else joins it. Sorrow.
He knows he has to do it.
“I’ll find a way to bring you back.”
“I trust you,” I say again.
“You shouldn’t,” he says bitterly, but then he closes his eyes and hooks his fingers.
The tips dig into the flesh over my heart.
The agony that rips through me as he sinks his hand past flesh is enough to make the chamber spin wildly.
My knees buckle. The world narrows to the impossible sight of his knuckles disappearing into my chest, the cold of his magic freezing against the hot agony.
A roar tears through the air, from Dastian, a sound of pure, unrestrained chaos.
I can feel the air crackle, the ground shake with his rage.
Dreven’s presence is close, battering against the wraiths.
“Voren!” he roars.
He ignores them both.
The great beast stumbles. Its form wavers like a heat haze, one of its many heads dissolving into a shower of dust as a tremor runs through its mismatched limbs. It’s working. My heartbeat, the engine of this nightmare, is faltering.
Voren holds me steady, his other arm a band of ice around my waist. His pale blue eyes are the last thing I see, filled with a sorrow so deep it feels like mine.
“Finish it,” I choke out.
His expression cracks. He pulls me closer, his lips brushing my ear. “I’ll bring you back,” he promises, his voice a raw whisper against the fading roar of the world. “I swear it on my fucking soul.”
Then he squeezes.
The world doesn’t fade. It shatters in a divine roar of pure rage. One moment I am, the next I am nothing but his promise echoing in the dark.