Chapter 37 My Fucking Cat #2
“Thanks for the assist,” Elyria told Thraigg, shuddering as she shimmied out of the rest of the blood mage’s binding ribbons, which fluttered limply like they were unsure of what to do or where to go with their master so suddenly disposed of.
Elyria closed the rift in the ground with a shudder, her eyes searching the surrounding scene. At her back, Shep still worked on Sephone, Jocelyn looming protectively over the pair, Ollie fighting off a single cultist.
Several yards away, Cedric moved like a firestorm.
Ashrender was a silver blur in his hands as he continued dueling the pepper-haired man.
The man who wasn’t aiming to kill, Elyria realized.
His strikes were defensive, blocking, parrying, trying to get around Cedric.
To get to him. And any relief she might have felt at that realization was suddenly snuffed out by the deeper implications.
“He is not to be harmed!”
The innkeeper’s outraged cry rang in Elyria’s memory, and fury flared against the thread in her chest, questions battering her mind.
What did they want with Cedric? Was that why they had cordoned them off together?
The innkeeper was to take care of Elyria and then what? What had his plan been for the knight?
The possibilities had shadows leaking from Elyria as she continued watching Cedric fight. The innkeeper may have been the one sent to take her out, but it seemed like this man here was the one calling the shots.
Was this Malchior’s conspirator, Audaxus? He was clearly a seasoned fighter, wielding a wicked, serrated blade that had likely spilled far too much blood in its time—even if he wasn’t aiming to spill the knight’s at present.
But Cedric was a wicked force all his own.
Raising Ashrender with a vicious swing that forced the man back several more steps, his face was vengeance incarnate as he hissed a single word. “Why?”
The man surveyed Cedric with a sneer. “You ask the wrong questions, boy. And you ask them of the wrong people.” He waved his blade in the air as if trying to illustrate a point. “You’re on the wrong side of this war, but it’s not too late to come back to the light.”
Cedric scoffed. “There is no more war. Both sides want peace. And there is nothing but darkness on the path you walk. I’ll have no part of it.”
The man laughed, a maniacal, twisted sound. “One way or another, you will.”
Elyria’s heart clenched as he lunged again, feinting to the right then darting to the left in another attempt to get past Cedric, get behind him.
But her knight was faster. Better.
Cedric twisted in place, using his elbow to knock the man off-balance before spinning behind him. In one smooth motion—almost elegant in its execution—Cedric hooked a boot around the man’s leg, pulled him backward, and drove Ashrender through his spine.
The man crumpled without a sound, folding in on himself like a piece of paper.
“No,” Cedric said, something dark and dangerous shimmering down the thread that had warmth pooling in Elyria’s core, “I won’t.”
His gaze locked with hers, and he immediately moved toward her—just as a strangled scream came from behind them. Like it was synchronized, they both spun in time to see Ollie pull his icy spear from the chest of the final sanguinagi, who collapsed with a pitiful cry.
Nearby, Young Shep sank back on his ankles, looking like himself again.
The green hue of his skin had returned, his ears sharpened back into pointed tips, ginger hair swapped for forest green.
Even if his faltering glamour hadn’t been a clear enough sign, his exhaustion was written all over his face.
It was scrawled into the furrow of his brow and the bags under his eyes as he kept a loose hand on Sephone’s wrist, as if unwilling to stop counting the beats of her pulse.
“She’ll be all right,” he whispered, and Elyria didn’t know if he was telling them . . . or trying to convince himself.
Ollie sucked in a deep breath. “Is that all of them?”
“I thought there were more.” Elyria took in the bodies littering the ground around them, the stench of blood and death sour in the air. “Perhaps a few of them got smart and ran.”
Jocelyn braced her hands on her knees, as though she was trying to stave off the urge to vomit. “Did we slaughter an entire village tonight?”
“They signed their own fates in blood,” Cedric said, his words surging down the tether in Elyria’s chest as much as they cut across her ears.
“Lit’rally,” said Thraigg.
“And surely this wasn’t the entire village,” Ollie offered. “I’m sure plenty more people cower in their beds as we speak, just waiting for the bloodshed to be over.”
“Will they be relieved or disappointed when they find out exactly whose blood was shed tonight, do you think?” Elyria asked.
Nobody replied. They didn’t have to. For a moment, the world was nothing but breath and blood and silence.
Too much silence.
Elyria’s gaze darted from Thraigg to his hammer and back again. “When you ran back inside for that, did you see the others? Tristan? Thibault and Hargrave?”
Thraigg shook his head. “Place was empty. The arseholes must’ve—”
A sudden shout echoed from around the side of the building, but that wasn’t what caught Elyria’s attention.
It was the whimper that followed—a pitiful, mewling sound.
Elyria ran.
She didn’t wait to see if anyone followed, didn’t listen for footsteps or hissed words of caution.
Her vision narrowed to a single point as she rounded the corner of the inn, taking in the sight of one final cultist standing near the stable entrance—a desperate and wild-eyed man.
Moonlight reflected off the crystal dagger he held by his face, painting his features a sickly shade of red.
Sid whimpered again, cowering against the stable door, shadows gushing from one of her legs like blood from a wound.
“Unnatural creature,” the sanguinagi rasped, raising the dagger.
Rage snapped through Elyria’s bones.
She barely registered Cedric running up behind her as she threw out her hand. “Leave my fucking cat alone, you son of a bitch.”
Shadows and wild magic combined in Elyria’s veins, weaving together. A massive spike erupted from the earth, the color of night, slamming through the cultist’s chest and pinning him to the stable door—an insect on a pinboard.
Sid slunk out from beneath the corpse’s dangling feet, then stopped to calmly lick her paw.
Cedric let out a low whistle. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.” Sid limped over and wove herself between the knight’s legs. “Either of yours.”
Elyria barked out a laugh—the sound of relief. “You’d do well to remember it,” she said, chest heaving.
Another shout rang from the far side of the stables.
“By the fucking Five, what now?” Elyria spun on the spot, but Cedric was already in motion.
Because there—finally, blessedly—was Tristan, half-dragging a slumped Hargrave toward them.
“They drugged us,” Tristan shouted. “Woke up locked in the stars-damned pantry. Took us forever to—”
Cedric froze, and Elyria could feel the fear paralyzing him, gripping him by the back of the neck as a blood-red crystal axe suddenly soared through the air in front of them, hurtling toward Tristan. They’d missed another cultist somewhere.
A grunt of pain sounded behind them, followed by the squelch of flesh being pierced, and Elyria knew that someone else had just taken care of the threat.
But it didn’t stop the axe.
Elyria launched herself into the air, wings materializing mid-leap, soaring toward Tristan and Hargrave with an outstretched hand, shadows spinning from her fingertips. But she was still too slow. Too far. She wouldn’t get to them in time. And Tristan—
A jet of water blasted ahead of her, crashing into the axe, tearing it from its path just in time to narrowly avoid Tristan and Hargrave, sending it crashing into the side of the building.
“You owe me a drink, Hale,” panted Ollie, water still dripping from the tideweaver’s fingers as he ran to the knight’s side.
Elyria touched back down, relief spreading through her chest with such fervor that she didn’t quite know if it belonged to her, or to Cedric.
Tristan’s blue eyes widened as he looked at the axe embedded in the wall, less than a foot from his face. “I think I owe you more than that, Oleander.”
“Done. Dinner, too, in that case. Fair warning, I’m a notoriously poor sharer of food,” Ollie said, grinning. “And I don’t do mushrooms.”
“Flirt later,” Elyria hissed at the two of them, darting forward.
Cedric was already at Tristan’s side, face wan as he looped Hargrave’s other arm over his shoulder. “Where is Thibault?”
Tristan looked equally stricken. “I don’t know. We all woke in the pantry together, but once we broke out, it was bedlam. We lost him in the fray. I haven’t seen him since—”
“We’ll find him,” Cedric said solemnly.
“So, do we think now that’s all of ’em?” Thraigg said, catching up to the group.
“Er, yes, about that . . .”
Elyria didn’t understand Tristan’s grimace, the hesitation in his voice. Not until he turned to the side, revealing the figure trailing several feet behind. Not until her eyes narrowed on a trembling Avery, carrying a bloody steel dagger in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” Avery said, voice shaking. His eyes landed on Elyria, and he let out a squeak of fear, the dagger falling from his grip and landing with a dull thud.
Elyria suppressed the urge to laugh. Wings flared, shadowy armor still swirling over her skin, cultist blood spattered across her face, she imagined she looked every bit the nightmarish Revenant she was rumored to be.
Tears streamed down Avery’s young face when he continued. “I’m so sorry. I—I didn’t mean to. I thought you were them when you—I swear, I would never want to . . . But they said—they said if I didn’t . . .”
“Spit it out, boyo,” Thraigg growled.
“They said it had to be done. Said it was the only way. And that we all had to go along with it, had to help, or they’d kill us anyway.”
“Us?” Cedric asked, shifting Hargrave’s weight on his shoulder, urging Tristan back into motion. As a group, they all started moving back toward the front of the inn.
Avery made a sad sort of sound as he followed, leaving the bloody dagger laying in the dirt.
“Everyone. Me, my mother. The whole village. Please understand, we’re not all like them.
None of us wanted this. But when they came—when he came—there was no resisting.
Not unless we wanted to end up”—his voice lowered to a whisper—“dead.”
“Then how exactly did you help them?” Elyria asked. “Are you the one who left that lovely containment rune under my bed?”
“No!” Avery protested, his hands lifted in surrender. “I’m not sanguinagi, I swear it!”
“Yeah, you’re just the one who fucking stabbed me,” Hargrave muttered.
“Well, to be fair, you did sneak up behind him,” Tristan tutted. “And the boy did apologize.”
Hargrave groaned as they rounded the corner once more, and Elyria beckoned Young Shep over with a whistle. And then a groan of a different kind crawled into her eardrums—a pathetic, wheezing sort of sound.
Several yards to the right, a body twitched.
Sid hissed with displeasure, trailing after Elyria as she strolled over to where the innkeeper lay. His body was broken, but the man was miraculously alive and had even managed to crawl a few feet from the spot where he’d landed after falling from her window.
Claw marks decorated the innkeeper’s neck and chest, and Elyria gave Sid a look of approval as she took in the state of the man. He had hauled himself up into a halfway-sitting position, his elbows caked with dirt from slithering along the ground, one leg twisted at a horrible angle.
“Have somewhere to be?” Elyria asked, planting the sole of her boot against his mangled knee.
Pain flashed across his face as she leaned just a fraction of her weight on him, but he did not scream or yell.
In an act just as miraculous as his surviving the fall in the first place, the crazy bastard smirked.
He began muttering and mumbling anew, just as he had during their confrontation in Elyria’s room.
“The sun must rise,” he said, then he laughed, like some kind of shock-induced mania had overtaken him. “Let the sun rise. The sun will rise.”
Elyria’s fingers quivered at her side.
“Of course the fucking sun’s going to rise, you fool,” Tristan said, propping Hargrave against the wall. “Avery, what is he talking about?”
“That’s what he kept saying. What he told us. That our job—all of us, not just us here in the village—is to ensure that the sun will rise.”
“All of us? As in, what, all humans?”
Avery nodded. “And in order for that to happen, you all had to die.” He pointed a tremulous finger at Elyria. “Especially her.”
Elyria’s heart was a thunderous beat in her ears. “And especially not him, right?” She jerked her head at Cedric, and Avery nodded once more.
A flicker of something unreadable crossed the knight’s face. Shimmered down their bond. Something colder than a question, like he was afraid to ask, Why me?
So, he said nothing. But he didn’t need to. Elyria would ask for him.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” The boy’s voice shook with every word, his eyes darting back and forth between Cedric and everyone else. “He only told us not to harm the Lord Victor. He—”
“Varyth Malchior.”
Avery didn’t say yes. Didn’t nod. But the way the color drained from his young face was all the confirmation Elyria needed.
“He said, “He is required.’ ”
“What does that—”
“The sun must rise.” The innkeeper’s voice was garbled, wet, even as he laughed through the words. “The dark vessel is nearly ready. The sun will rise . . . A new dawn comes.”
Elyria looked down at him, her lip curling.
Her fingers tightened around her staff. Shadows slid down her arm, winding around the weapon in a spiral, consolidating into a sharp, focused point at the tip.
“He will never have him,” she whispered, drawing close.
The innkeeper smiled, teeth bloody, lips pale.
And Elyria drove a spike of shadow through his chest.