Chapter 57 | Sephania #2
Whip and sword wave and weave, beating my mates back further and further on the rooftop. Out the corner of my eye, I catch Skartovius grunting, rolling onto his side.
Healing. Agonizingly, I’m sure.
He watches the fight for a few seconds, grumbles a gout of blood down his chin, and tries to rise to his knees. Promptly falls onto his back again, sliding in the pool of his own blood.
It’s safe to say he’s going to remain incapacitated for the foreseeable future. He saved my mother though, twice in one night, and I can’t ask more from him than that.
I duck the cracking whip, roll up underneath the Night Judge, and try to jam my blades up into his balls.
He skitters to the side, and suddenly a black wall is rushing toward me—
The wing sends me flying. The air turns into the ground and I’m weightless . . . weightless . . .
“Sephania!” Lukain bellows.
I crash with a hard thud, sliding across the pavement. My face contorts with pain, but I’ve long since turned that setting off. No bones are broken, so I get right back up and charge over to the battle.
Aramastun decides he’s had enough of toying with us, flies high and over the arc of Vallan’s swing, and comes to land in front of me.
“Fuck,” I croak.
“Yes, fuck indeed.” He grins wickedly.
Vallan and Lukain sprint against all hope to get to me, but there’s no way they’ll get here in time.
I swing at him before he can swing at me. I’m suddenly fighting four appendages, all of them seeming like extensions of the bastard—wing, sword, wing, whip.
“I was hoping to find a needle in the haystack, you know,” he says calmly. “When I opened Nuhav’s gates. Find Loreblood without finding you. Turned out I needed to do the job myself.”
My brow furrows. That’s why he opened the gates? To try and find a human with Loreblood other than me? That’s it?!
I wonder if he’s distracting me while we parry blades. My training is high, and I’m the best human fighter I’ve ever known.
Still no match for this motherfucker.
When our blurring swords become too swift for my human eyes to keep track of, his sword gets me in the thigh—only a shallow cut, but from a sword that big it’s essentially a cut as wide as my wrist.
I gasp, fighting back agony as blood sprays warm across my leg, scoring my own hit unfathomably on his shoulder, and making him growl in discomfort.
His wing comes out to batten me aside again—
It thuds but never hits me.
Vallan is standing between us like a stone wall, taking the wing on his arms.
I stab, get him in the stomach this time, because Lukain has him distracted on his flank. Then Aramastun manages to noose the whip around Lukain’s sword and flings it from his hand, halfway across the rooftop.
Lukain growls, Aramastun tuts, thinking the vampire has become weaponless, but that only spurs Lukain on to attack with his teeth and claws like a fucking rabid animal.
The Lukain I remember from the Firehold, as my master, returns in full force.
And no one sees the lithe, small body of Palacia squeeze into the scene. Not even me.
Not until a sudden ripping sound and poke—
A small hole appears in the middle of Aramastun’s left wing.
He growls, hissing with pain. “You little bitch!”
The wing flies back and knocks Palacia away like a ragdoll.
Pissed off, the Night Judge flies off—a bit slower and more unsteady now in the air, bobbing on the wind with the hole in his wing—and lands in front of Palacia.
Lukain is nearest to them, gathering his sword.
“No, Pala!” I cry, sprinting with Vallan but, again, knowing we won’t get there in time.
Palacia crawls back on her butt and palms like a crab, wide-eyed but still frowning calmly even as the massive vampire-demon raises his weapons to end her.
A shlick of ripping flesh—
And then a flying leg.
Lukain goes down in an arc of blood. He stood in front of the girl he turned, to shield her, perhaps sensing some bloodbond at the last. Now he’s toppling over wordlessly as Aramastun cleaved his left leg sheer off at the thigh.
“AHH!” I scream, horrified, mortified.
Palacia uses the momentary distraction and does something with her fingers, placing one on her forehead. She’s still on her ass like a crab.
Aramastun lurches forward toward her—
And jerks. Quite abruptly. I see him furrowing his brow as I run up on him from the side, as if something has suddenly confused him.
Some kind of mind power?! I wonder about Pala.
It’s a split-second hesitation from Aramastun, and I pray to the True it’s all we need.
I raise my swords to get at Aramastun—
But Vallan is quicker. He’s already there on the other side. And rather than try to behead the distracted vampire lord because the wing is in the way of his neck, Vall digs his axe blade into the Night Judge’s back and forces a howl out of him.
My blades swing at air again as he lifts into the sky, getting himself out of danger—
But Vallan is attached to him now. Holding onto the axe wedged in the bastard’s shoulder blade. Climbing up it, wrapping his arms and legs around Aramastun as the demon tailspins through the air on one holey wing, corkscrewing on the wind.
“FUCK YOU!” Vallan roars. “Stop”—he punches Aramastun in the face, further confusing the Night Judge as the wind blows through his beard—“maiming”—he pulls something out of his tunic, small and spherical—“my family!”
Vallan shoves the thing against his lodged axe blade, cracking the shell of the pot, and I gasp. He holds it right there as a hiss wrenches through the air.
I wail, “Vallan, no!”—
An explosion of fire and brimstone brightens the sky. The heatwave slams me to the ground, and slides Palacia further back. Vallan and Aramastun are lost to the bright white light, the coruscating embers that arc in every direction like a cannonball slamming against a stone fortress during a siege.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?!” I scream when I sit up from my back, dazed and confused.
I catch Vallan’s smoking body billowing through the sky and plummeting like a heavy lead weight. He lands hard—on the rooftop, thankfully, rather than hundreds of feet down off the roof—doesn’t move, and continues to smoke.
Aramastun side-angles and crashes to the rooftop on the other side, separating the two by fifty feet. His wings are in smoky tatters, rips and tears and holes now singed through them.
I see my opportunity.
Run for the bastard, reaching into my tunic and tossing my shortsword away so I have a free hand.
I notch a Silverblood vial in my palm, pop the cork, and down it in one go.
When in Olhav, right? I’ve never had my own blood, so I don’t figure it can hurt. If anything, I’ve always wondered if it would do something extraordinary.
Turns out, it sort of does.
Maybe it’s the silver mixed in the tincture of my diluted Loreblood. Maybe it’s a placebo and I’m just very pissed off and feeling scorned after watching each of my mates meet a terrible, grisly fate.
I come up on Aramastun feeling elevated, like I’m the one with wings. My senses are enhanced, and the sharp reek of sulfur and burning flesh ripples through my nose.
I see the one shot I have, and my legs are churning faster than ever, even though I’m more tired than I thought possible.
Aramastun Wyvox struggles to rise from his stomach, onto his knees, and flounders to get to his feet with his ruined wings wafting a black halo of smoke around him.
I leap into the air—
His face twists suddenly, hearing me coming silently on him. His wings instinctively fold in on him to protect his back, to barricade him like a cocoon.
RIIIP—
My sword crunches through the cartilage of the wings, the leather webbing, pinning them against his back, impaling them—
And my longsword slides into his back.
There’s no way my sword would ever grind this deep without something empowering me.
I scream to the heavens and the smoke-filled sky.
Through flesh and muscle and bone it goes, past the resistance I feel in his spine, until my muscles flex and bulge and my veins distend and every fiber of my being is placed in that vicious stab into Aramastun’s back.
I only stop screaming and pushing when I hear the shlick of the sword tip meeting stone.
The Night Judge is impaled on my blade.
He lets out a wordless groan.
So I stab the motherfucker again. Not quite as hard, because I don’t think I could ever get the power behind that jumping spine-breaker again if I tried, but it’s enough to silence the vampire lord.
I go for a third stab for good measure. Then a fourth, because I’m still pissed. My blade rises and falls, slamming into the pulpy flesh until blood is spraying all over me, blackened and silvery with a demonic touch, covering me from head to toe.
“Sephania . . .” says a small voice.
It’s Palacia.
“. . . he’s dead.”
“Huh?” I look back blindly. Raise my sword and stab again without looking.
Wipe a sheet of blood from my eyes. Finally coming into focus, homing in on the mass of demonic flesh I’ve been stabbing into for the past minute.
The pool of blood surrounding the face-down overlord is wide and deep. “He is?” I ask mindlessly.
Slowly, I stumble back. I leave my sword impaled inside Aramastun, just in case he feels like trying to be alive, I’ll keep him pinned to the rooftop.
But he doesn’t move. He doesn’t stir. He doesn’t twitch. The wings are enfolding his body like a mummified tomb.
My knees buckle and I rasp a laugh. “W-We. We won?”
I collapse onto my back for the umpteenth time that night.