Chapter 5 Samson #2
He cried out. Black spots danced in his eyes, and his knees buckled. Around him, Samson was faintly aware of the rushing and falling bodies, of the small fire hissing as the soldier wrapped his thick fingers around his throat.
Use us, the flames said.
But he remembered the last time he had wielded his Agni in a weakened state: the pain ripping up his arm, an electric sensation scorching through his body as the cold bit into his flesh.
It won’t be like last time, the inferno purred. You are stronger.
Samson backpedaled, slamming his arms onto the soldier’s forearm. Distance, he needed distance. But the man moved so quick, and his next blow connected with Samson’s chin.
The world spun. Samson tasted iron in his mouth, then dirt, and then he realized he was lying on the ground.
Climb so high, in filth you lie.
The soldier raised his boot, and Samson rolled over. He scrambled to his feet, clawing his waist for his urumi just as the soldier lunged for Samson’s weapon.
No one touched his urumi.
He roared, slamming his elbow into the soldier and kneeing him in the liver.
The Jantari gasped, coughing. Samson ripped out his urumi, and the sound of it unsheathing, like a chord being struck in a wide blue lake, filled him with such fierce relief, such calm, that all the fear melted away until he felt one thing only, one truth that encapsulated everything he knew, everything he was, that he laughed to think he had ever thought otherwise.
I am a god.
The blue flames screeched. They flared down his urumi like a torch, striking so suddenly that the Jantari soldier didn’t even know that his arm was burning until he raised his fist and saw it aflame.
He screamed.
Samson cut down, down, twins blades tearing through the soldier’s thick neck, through skin, tendon, down to the bone and then clean to the other side. His head sailed through the air.
Samson whipped around, momentum now.
The flames leapt and crashed over each other, momentum now.
The inferno laughed, shattering, biting, momentum now.
When Samson stopped his dance, when his twin blades finally floated down to the earth like wings come to rest, the fence was gone. The fleeing soldiers were too. Only black mounds, chipped bone.
The survivors were corralled at the back of the pen, hedged in by Black Scales with pulse guns.
Chandi ran to him. “Edmund, have you seen him?”
A sudden cry made them both turn as a Black Scale held up a ruined uniform. Even from here, Samson could see the glint of stars on the shoulders.
Chandi hissed. “We were supposed to use him as a bargaining chip.”
The realization, like a touch of cold steel against his skin, made Samson still amid his battle lust. He blinked at Chandi.
“The general was our prized hostage. We need some hostages for—”
“We have seven hundred others.” Samson swayed on his feet even as he belted his urumi. His bones buzzed. The pain, ever present, came back with relish.
Sulfur in his nose. Electricity in his blood. He needed to leave, now.
“Samson, are you—”
“We were supposed to execute their officers.” Samson turned, his boots trudging through the remains. “I just started it for you.”
She caught him before he fell, and he sagged into her shoulder. “You fool.”
He could barely hear her.
Pain crashed through him, fast and fierce.
Chandi shouted, and then he found himself in a cruiser, then on a cot.
Clarity returned, and he recognized his quarters, an old family home set behind the city center.
Shakily, he unbuttoned his shirt. His scar began to sting, and when he looked down, he saw that it had darkened too.
He had pushed hard today, perhaps too much. Heat prickled down his spine, and Samson felt sweat break on his forehead. He opened his palm. He tried to summon sparks, but his hand remained empty. Hollow.
He had spun his Agni so completely, so vehemently, that it had devoured him.
He couldn’t differentiate the inferno’s hunger from his own.
It frightened him, in a way that made his insides shrivel as if unearthing a dirty secret.
Even now, he could taste its hunger, like a morsel of food stuck stubbornly between his teeth.
It hooked into his spine and began to tug.
But then a wave of tiredness washed over Samson, sucking him down into a dark, black sea.
It was always this way. Sound seeped out.
The hammering in his chest slowed until he could hear nothing at all.
Familiar panic rushed through him, and Samson tried to fight, tried to claw his way back to the surface.
A distant part of his mind worried that Elena would call upon him and see him like this, weak and vulnerable, but then another wave crashed over him, and Samson was sinking.
The soundless black sea drowned everything out.
All he could hear was the quiet. So loud, it felt like a roar. And then a voice, so, so far away.
“It’s all right, Blue Star.” A gentle hand touched his forehead. “Rest now. It’s only me.”
And he slipped beneath the sea, unmoored.