Chapter Forty Nine
MILA
The arcane brewed in Mila like a boiling cauldron.
The moment Onskar’s arcane blast touched her skin, her body came alive in a riot. Unleashed power wheeled through her limbs in hot surges. She could barely tolerate the raging heat. Her heart kicked to life at a surprising gallop that pumped blood and obstinancy, filling the empty vessel within.
Along with these unexpected ministrations, a familiar, dark entity stirred to life in her chest. Distant screeches activated in her ears.
Her siren awakened.
Mila’s growled invitation—show me what you’ve got, Onskar—set the Arcanist of Souls into a tirade. He spun into a funnel before her eyes, shouted, and a flare exploded through the room. She ducked, arm tossed up to protect her face from the brilliant light.
When she lowered her arm, Onskar stood amidst dissipating clouds with a familiar reliquary hovering above his palm. Prisms shed from the brilliant glass in low lines, twisting like wriggling worms. She recognized the smell, the intensity.
Pedr’s reliquary.
The idea of Onskar touching Pedr’s soul vessel, so sacred and good, brought acid to the back of her throat.
An urge to sing clawed up with it, accompanied by a thirst for violence, destruction, and agony.
She would rip Onskar to tatters. His soul would bear scars, wounds, and holes when she finished her song.
“Your lover’s soul, Mila,” Onskar sang, “isn’t this what you sought?”
His eyes glittered, highlighting undisguised malevolence.
She wrestled the siren, forcing herself to tolerate Onskar’s darkly obsessive stare before she lost control.
Her protectiveness for Pedr swelled. Once she transitioned to a siren, she didn’t know how to return.
With this much arcane alive in her, she could destroy everyone, everything, and continue without ceasing.
The enjoyment in Onskar’s tilted lips as he watched her internal struggle inflamed her. He knew she didn’t have control. He’d been goading her all along. Had this been his plan?
Had she played into it?
Who cared? With Siren Mila wide awake, his world would burn.
Her lungs demanded air in order to sing, but untransitioned Mila clamped her lips tight. If she breathed in, she’d lose the battle.
And everything.
Onskar reverently elevated Pedr’s reliquary.
“This reliquary is such a lovely work of pure arcane. Complicated, like the man himself. The reliquaries often reflect the soul within. The soul arcane cannot help but appear as a rainbow—it is so magnanimous, so gorgeous, that it must shed light wherever it exists. Granted, not all souls are equal. Pedr’s is . . . particularly pungent.”
Risking a peep of her mouth, Mila shouted, “Give it to me!”
Onskar beckoned with a challenging smile. “Why don’t you come and get him?”
Mila lunged.
A laugh ranged through the room as he twirled into a thundercloud and zipped behind her. Thunderclaps cracked in her ears, bouncing off the time-frozen reliquaries. Onskar reformed in a pillar-like slate cloud similar to her aunts.
“A brave attempt, Mila, but not good enough. You reveal your own ignorance, attempting to touch a reliquary. They only listen to me.”
She snarled, whirled to the side, and shouted, “Leave, Himmel!”
“She can’t,” he sang, his voice a syrupy song. “I have control over her broken soul, you fool. You really don’t know anything.”
Her song wrestled past the blocks in her throat, nearly breaking. She panted as the note began in her mind. She heard it. Felt it. The urge to complete the song by belting it through her voice almost became too much to withstand.
Onskar flicked his wrist with a lecherous grin. The reliquary vaulted into the air, plummeted . . .
. . . shattered. Mila’s song turned to a horrified scream. Glass sprayed. Arcs of light cut through the air in whipping rainbows as Pedr’s soul vessel crumbled. Time slowed. The word ripped out of her mouth too late.
“No!”
Every glimmering reliquary piece slowed mid-spray. They stopped, forming a frozen, brittle wreath along the floor and in the air. Each delicate section pointed a whetted angle right at her. Onskar loured from behind the protective screen.
“Defend yourself, you fool!” Onskar thundered. “Stop the arcane. Can you not defend yourself?”
Mila released that foul, livid beast within.
The siren.
Her transition rippled in a shiver. Lips elongated, lungs expanded, chest swelled. Sirens could hold a single note for minutes without end—their body changed to accommodate the wild song—but Mila felt a near-endless expanse.
She could do more.
The changes paused when a glass shard charged across the space and sliced the front of her neck. Shrieking, she whipped around. Her hair swung, absorbing the whetted missiles. Two others embedded into her skin, oozing blood.
A barrage followed.
She ducked, rolled across the floor, and escaped the tinkling pieces.
With blood-slippery fingers, she wrenched them out of her skin.
Blood saturated her palm. Glass shards melted into sand and dissipated within her skin.
The wounds sealed over in moments. With each arcane shard that pierced, the arcane inside of her expanded.
Her inner siren curled to a stop, startled into quiet. The halted transition made her face ache, as if she’d stretched the skin too far.
Onskar laughed from far behind. Duly reminded, Mila ducked behind a shelf. More shards tinkled as they hit reliquaries, chasing after her. Several hit her arms, her neck. Like the soil from before, she accepted them.
The arcane built with every single hit.
Her resolve to send a percussive wave of air at Onskar failed to materialize. She attempted to turn the glass shards to harmless puffs, but nothing changed. The arcane came into her, and she couldn’t use it.
But . . . why?
She kept moving. Follow me, she silently urged Onskar. Follow me and forget Einar.
“Mila, Mila,” Onskar sang. He stalked her, moving quickly across crunching glass.
Please, she pleaded to the arcane, please respond!
A third attempt to fight back yielded nothing.
Mila raced down the aisles between the shelves, hair soaring like banners.
Only in her escape did she notice Himmel was missing.
Fled? Released? Hopefully, Einar made his way to her.
The questions led her to consider what would happen if Onskar chased her between the shelves.
What if she ran into Einar and revealed his presence?
Their tentative plan had already dissolved.
While running, she attempted to summon up the same wrath to pull the siren free, but her panic got in the way. At the end of a shelf, she spun, dodged to the side, and hurried down a corridor. Onskar appeared in front of her. She ducked, rolled beneath an empty shelf, and sprinted another way.
“You cannot run forever!” he bellowed.
Gritting her teeth, she lunged for the next break in the curving shelves and raced to the circle interior. She spun, shouting, “I’m in here!”
His voice came from behind her.
“I know.”
Mila whipped around, holding a gasp. Onskar bore down on her with his horrible smile, mere steps away.
She positioned herself in the exact middle, with nothing at her back, allowing Einar’s instructions from earlier to play out.
If she side-stepped, Onskar would follow, bringing him closer to the shelves, though no sign of Einar existed in the room.
Not one.
But she had to do it. Just in case.
Mila quickly shuffled to the left, vaguely aware that all hints of dry humor had hardened to murderous intent. His curiosity wouldn’t save her any longer, and what use was absorbing his arcane if she couldn’t use it?
As she approached a shelf, she reached behind her. Grasping a reliquary, she held it in front of her, stunned to find it empty.
Onskar paused.
Blinked.
With a growl, he hissed, “You can touch it?”
She chucked the vessel. The reliquary soared, end-over-end, right for his chest. It evaporated into white sand before it hit him, skittering to the floor in thousands of granules. His teeth clenched, upper lip curling back.
“Enough,” he growled. A crack resounded from a gathering thunderstorm. The tempestuous clouds churned over each other, outlined with inky threats. In the already dark Hall of the Sea, everything dimmed.
Lightning snapped around the shelves, slamming into Mila’s body. The power connected at the base of her neck, rocketed through her spine. A river of liquid metal flowed through her veins, blasting from her skin. The resulting crack left a resounding light-echo in the air.
In the second after the lightning slammed into her, she met Onskar’s mutinous stare. Would it bring her down?
Not even close.
As she hoped, the arcane turned to raw power within. Each morsel stayed, expanded. Though immortal, she should be a smoking husk. Should collapse on the ground, fried from the impact. Instead, her soul chambers electrified.
This had become a reckoning.
No, a filling.
Unlike the paltry sand, the shards that she took inside and experienced no damage from, this lightning bolt coiled inside of Mila like an awaiting whip. Nothing in all her centuries felt this powerful, this full.
More.
She desired more.
A soul-deep craving rushed from toes to crown, consuming her. She had an insatiable demand for the arcane—there would never be enough. Her siren unravelled, hissing, squealing, triumphant.
She cried, “You fool,” in the seconds after he recalled his attack, and Onskar wheeled away.
Water slipped across the black floor, rushing her.
It splashed between the unmoving reliquaries, flicking white foam through the gaps.
The smell of seawater and brine filled the air, a comforting reminder of Pedr.
In moments, a tsunami formed. The gigantic water swells blasted through the reliquaries to descend on her with an all mighty slap. Mila closed her eyes, lifted her arms. The sea water enveloped her like a maw.
She welcomed it.